This email came in this morning from former class member and station internet director at Channel 7 in Lake Charles, La., Meagan Kelleher. She has, in the short time she has been there, done some pretty amazing things with blogs on the station's web site. Her note makes for riveting reading for blogophiles. Read on:
Thought I'd drop you a note to let you know how things are in Lake Charles with Rita and all. Right now we are just watching and waiting to see how the storm is going to affect us. One of our meteorologists here thinks it still might make a little bit more of a northern turn, sending Rita back our way. Even if it does stay on track right for Galveston we will likely feel 60+ mph winds, some rain and some tornadoes. If by tomorrow afternoon/evening we decide that the storm is going to affect us even more than that, we move into the 911 building (where FEMA is located here) and do our broadcasts from there, because the tower that sits on top of our building could collapse if there is a strong enough wind gust. We have the building wired to do live broadcasts there and I'll have a laptop to keep the site updated. We are anticipating that if for any reason that we lose our TV signal that the website will be our main focus. We set up live streaming capabilities too, so if we decide to go wall to wall coverage, we can pop that up on the site. You wouldn't believe the response to the weather blog. People turn to that more often than they do the actual newscasts. Today alone it got probably 30 comments with people asking questions and conversing about the storm. I'm really proud of that lil' blog! If Rita stays on track to Galveston, that still puts Southwest Louisiana on the right side of the storm, which was where Biloxi was with Katrina, and they are 200 miles away from New Orleans. We are about 150 miles away from Galveston. People are concerned, naturally. I went to WalMart and Target today to buy a battery powered lantern and they were all sold out, and all the batteries in town were sold out as well (I eventually found one. My hurricane kit is complete). People are buying massive amounts of food and water, and the home improvement stores have been selling a lot of boards. Schools and colleges are closed here for the rest of the week, and half of Calacasieu Parish (where Lake Charles is) has an evacuation order, but that is only for the southern part of the parish, not where I am. Gov. Blanco was here today as well. Tomorrow morning I am going on the Sunrise show to guide people through the website, and I'll be doing that again on our noon show. I snatched a block of HTML from a sister station's website and created our hurricane center on the homepage. If the worst happens we are dropping the entire current homepage and replacing it with a blog style update format, similar to WWL-TV in New Orleans. As much as a hit to Lake Charles would be terrible, I would like to see how I'd be able to handle a complete re-design like that on the fly. If nothing else, Katrina has definitely prepared me more than anything for this situation. I know exactly what worked and didn't work for other websites, and other people are starting to see the importance of an updated website as a source for information in addition to the television, not just an after thought. I'll keep you guys updated, I'm sure I'll have more tales once the storm passes through. Meagan
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