‘Times-Pic’ online storm coverage hints at publication’s future

As the staff at The Times-Picayune applied their well-developed hurricane-reporting skills last week, it was not just flooded roads and power failures that they contended with, The New York Times reports. Hurricane Isaac struck the region a month before the paper is to cut back print publication to just three days a week, lose part of its newsroom staff, and merge into a new company with the website Nola.com. While the newspaper may be in the middle of its transition, the storm gave readers a glimpse of what coverage may look like in the coming months. The Times-Picayune still printed papers at plants in nearby Mobile, Ala., and Houma, but Nola.com became the destination for residents seeking updates about power failures, closed roads and where to buy ice. There were videos of a photographer driving through the storm, and aerial photographs that allowed evacuated residents to see the flooding in their neighborhoods. The paper and website’s owners say Nola.com had two to three times its usual traffic during the storm’s four-day sweep. For reporters who covered Hurricane Katrina just seven years ago, this hurricane brought entirely new social media demands. Mark Schleifstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning environment reporter involved in the paper’s coverage of the levees, posted updates on Twitter, appeared in videos on Nola.com, wrote storm updates for the site every three hours, and then contributed to the paper. Read the full story here.