Oklahoman teams up against tornado

By: David Noack When massive tornadoes struck the Oklahoma City area Monday evening, tearing up neighborhoods and leaving miles of destruction and death, The Daily Oklahoman had been through this kind of disaster before with the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building.
This time it was nature and not man that was the culprit, but the state's largest newspaper took a page from what it learned and how it covered the bombing incident and applied it to tornado coverage.
"Right after the bombing we went to a team concept," says Ed Kelley, managing editor. "Instead of trying to funnel every single story, cutline, and photograph through a city desk, we went to teams to divide it up into areas of coverage."
Applying the team concept to the tornado coverage has worked well, Kelley says. The coverage was divided by geography and along topics and issues.
"There is one team that handles the building and property damage," says Kelly. "There's a senior reporter who does that. He did that in 1995 after the Murrah Building bombing, and that will be a story that will be ongoing for several weeks.
"There is one person, a senior reporter, to handle the casualty list of both the dead and the injured," adds Kelley. So far, 41 deaths have been reported, with more than 700 people injured. He says an important part of the story, which the paper started during its coverage of the federal building bombing, is to tell about the lives of those who have died.
"We're interested in going back and writing a story, even a short story, on every single person who died. We did a profile on each one of the 168 who died in the Murrah Building bombing," says Kelley. "We had photographs probably for about 120 of them. And some of the stories were real short, a couple of paragraphs, and others were 15 or 20 paragraphs, depending on what we can get from friends, relatives, the pastor, the coach of the softball team. We started that again."
When the storms struck Monday evening, reporters who had gone home came back to the office. He says that one reporter whose home was destroyed, Nolan Clay, was able to write a Page One story for Tuesday's paper.
"There were people who were off that day, on vacation, people who just came back from vacation, people, like me, who had gone home, [thinking] this is just going to be one of those false alarms. I got a call ? I put my tie back on and came back," says Kelley.
In order for reporters and other staffers to express their feelings about the tragedy or to air problems they were having, counseling sessions have been scheduled. "We are strongly encouraging, in fact, we are going to gently nudge as many people as we can into [meeting] with licensed counselors," he says.
Tuesday's paper included four extra pages of storm coverage, followed on Wednesday with a special eight-page pull-out section. The extra pages are in addition to stories running throughout the paper, in the main section, business, and even sports. Press runs were increased by 35,000 on Tuesday and 32,000 copies on Wednesday.
The Web site also played a key role in getting information to a public beyond the state's borders.
"We posted an incredible amount on the Web site. What we tried to do what we couldn't do in 1995, which was try to reach people, particularly online users outside of Oklahoma who were trying to get information about what was going on, running stories and photographs of the damage throughout the day. We did not have that advantage in 1995," says Kelley.
Technology also was important in getting stories and pictures back to the newspaper.
"There was even some old-fashioned dictation. The technology cell phones, pagers, digital cameras ? we had a little bit of that in 1995. We have a lot of that now. We knew after 1995 you can never have enough of these tools because you never know," says Kelley.
Business editor James Stafford, who is the business damage team leader, was in the office editing copy and taking calls from reporters in the field.
He got a call about 10:15 Monday night from Bryan Painter, who was at a police command center in Midwest City. While they were trying to figure out where Painter should go next, he happened to overhear a man talking on the pay phone next to him about his experience.
"It turned out the guy was a cook at the local Cracker Barrel restaurant, which had taken a direct hit," says Stafford. "He had helped herd about 30 people from the main dining room to the back kitchen of the restaurant, and they all survived there without injuries. However, a Penske rental truck was blown through the front wall of the restaurant and landed on its side in the dining area, where the guy Painter was talking to had been just seconds before."
He said that while Painter was interviewing the man, he was feeding him the quotes.
Assistant features editor Beverly Byrant had been at home when the tornadoes hit. She immediately headed back to the paper Monday night.
"Most notable, Monday night was the smell of natural gas which filled the air across Oklahoma City. Ruptured gas lines in the damaged areas spread gas across a wide area," recalls Bryant, who is in charge of the team reporting on how people can offer assistance and where to turn for help.
She worked until 1 a.m. Tuesday morning and was back on the office at 8:30, preparing coverage plans for the day.
"I helped funnel information to "Connect Oklahoma" [the online version of the paper] as it became available to me," says Bryant.
Circulation director Gerald Beattie says that one distribution center had been heavily damaged ? the paper has eight ? and that another was slightly damaged but still usable.
"We are still trying to get into our most heavily damaged distribution center. The landlord is trying to have it totaled, and we have yet to receive word on that," says Beattie. More than 9,000 papers could not be delivered during the first couple of days following the storm. About 4,000 papers were delivered on Tuesday and Wednesday free to various shelters.

?(Editor & Publisher Web Site:http:www.mediainfo.com) [Caption]
?(copyright: Editor & Publisher May 8, 1999) [Caption & Photo]