Citizen journalists tackle coverage of the 2008 Iowa floods

Citizen journalists tackle coverage of the 2008 Iowa floods

June 11th, 2008 / Posted by Nathan T. Wright

As the flood waters rise here in Des Moines, I am keeping a close watch on IowaFlood.com, a website that aggregates content from various citizen journalists and mainstream media outlets.

The site was created by Andy Brudtkuhl (of 48Web) within just a few hours, built with Yahoo! Pipes and Wordpress. Content is pulled automatically from various sources — alerts from NOAA and the National Weather Service, tagged photos on Flickr, YouTube videos, hashtagged chatter on Twitter, blog posts, articles from outlets like WHO-TV and the Des Moines Register — and all woven together into an incredibly robust, informative news experience.

The cool thing is how seamlessly old media and new media are working together. IowaFlood.com pulls in RSS feeds from the Register, meanwhile, a Register employee on Twitter is hashtagging his tweets with #iowaflood to ensure that his newspaper’s updates are correctly pushed to IowaFlood’s front page.

This creates a nice blend of reporting from authoritative media sources and human, block-by-block coverage that armies of citizen journalists can easily pull off. Thus far, IowaFlood.com has received over 16,000 visitors, generated over 1,000 posts, and survived one database crash — mostly due to word-of-mouth.

If only we had the internet back in 1993…

UPDATE 6/13: On Friday afternoon I went out and grabbed some video of the Des Moines river nearing it’s highest levels since 1993.

UPDATE 6/21: At Thursday’s Des Moines TweetUp, I asked Andy a few questions about the logistics behind building IowaFlood.com on the fly.

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Filed under: Des Moines, Hyperlocal, Social Media, Video
Tagged as: Citizen Journalism, IowaFlood.com

John Pemble

I was describing Andy's site to fellow radio folks today. This is a portion of an email I sent out and perhaps it helps describe a potential of the site like iowaflood.com

- - - -

The Iowa Flood site is a collection of blogs, discussions, pictures mostly submitted by Iowas. It’s a neat resource simply to observe what is happening in Iowa with the floods. It’s also an opportunity to witness and participate with a form of news reporting and social dialogues in a non media traditional environment. When you hear about “Web 2.0” or social media, this is one such example. Of course an event like the floods in many Iowa communities is an easy way to bring individuals together on a number of community levels and media platforms. We’ve all heard the stories about how the NPR audience went up five million and stayed there in large part due to their role in coverage 2001’s national events. Now with some of these social media outlets covering stories that connect communities will these new outlets maintain a level of participation on other items as time goes on or not? It’s a process worth attention of us in the traditional media and it’s a process that certainly some of us can be a participant. I can tell you now that there are people from the Des Moines Radio Group submitting information to this site, largely because like me they also participate with Andy on social media websites.

Jocelyn

I moved to Des Moines from Key West, FL last year. We went through some serious weather emergencies in 2004 & 2005, and was just thinking today how useful it would have been to have this interface with 5 branch offices and hundreds of properties to deal with hurricane preparedness, like a portable intranet. It's been an invaluable tool for me today as we have properties in distress in Cedar Rapids and Waterloo. Thanks for all your work in tweetup which makes this sort of thing professionally and personally valuable.