Web site coverage

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What was your very first instinct concerning what you had to do -- your first thought?

My first thought was, "What is our duty to our readers?" And the two over-riding things flooding my mind were just how huge this event could turn out to be, and if I can't get to CNN.com, then that means my readers can't get to CNN.com.

The editorial staff from our Web site quickly got together -- including calling in our online managing editor who had already been here until very early in the morning to do a site update -- to determine how aggressive we would be with updates, how we would use our own online reporters, and what sort of multimedia packages we wanted to develop.

What was the best single thing you and your team did in organizing the online coverage?

We had two editors on the wire updates, one focused on gathering multimedia to go with the local stories that were going to come out in the special print edition, one focused solely on photo galleries, and another just editing/encoding video. I took care of monitoring our message boards and coming up with opinion polls to be used on our site.

I guess that really didn't answer your question ... but then again, maybe it did. The single best thing we may have done was to be calm and organized and have a general strategy. We knew we wanted to accomplish a lot. Though we are totally integrated with our print edition, the relationship can still be strained, even adversarial. But things went well between both staffs, maybe because for one of the first times (because of the extra edition), they got to see what it's like to produce something so quickly, just on the spur of the moment -- the way we end up operating a lot of the time.

What was the best single thing you did to make the package useful to your readers/viewers?

This is a toughie. I think the thing that we did the best was keep things very updated and very interactive. All of our stories had special pull-put boxes embedded into them after the third paragraph to send our readers to lots of other relevant content, multimedia and message boards. But our log files showed that almost half of our traffic went to the photo galleries. We didn't expect it to be that high, but we did know that our readers love photo galleries. (We do at least three local galleries a week on our site.)

We always do lots of multimedia on our site, and the multimedia we had on the site was being accessed a lot. Of course, we had lots of video, but we also had a lot of expanded audio interviews with local sources. We also streamed Bush's address live that night and archived it. Not including photo galleries, our multimedia pages accounted for about 6 percent of our page views.

In a related note, our traffic was up almost 60 percent on Sept. 11.

We tried to change out the lead graphic on our home page about every hour so that our home page would always feel fresh to those looking for the latest news.

What were the chief barriers you faced, if any, in trying to do your best work?

Time was our biggest barrier. We weren't having many bandwidth problems. And the staff was working very hard. We really didn't run into a lot of problems other than not having lots of time to do all that we wanted to do.

Most organizations have a set way of doing things. Did you break any rules?

We broke our biggest internal rule.

Our site is extremely local. In fact, when some of our online employees are asked to speak at local schools and universities, they are very proud to talk about how our Web site in many ways has a much more local focus than our newspaper's print edition.

That's what made Sept. 11 a little strange for our staff because we have a very adamant rule about not putting any wire copy on our home page. We always go with a "local-only" home page. We did not follow that rule for a couple of reasons: 1) it was such a huge and important story; and 2) so many of the national sites were not coming up that morning that we decided it was a disservice to our readers not to try to get them this information.

Another thing that was strange for us was that we are used to building these big multimedia packages for local events. Building a Flash timeline for a national event is just not something we normally do.

chad@mediacenter.org