Columbian Reporter William Seekamp, right — shoe size 11 — interviews division supervisor Tyler Arbogast of Pendleton, Ore., while out on the fire line for the Nakia Creek Fire on Wednesday. (Courtesy of CRESA)
Even in the news business, we like to plan ahead. Metro Editor Mark Bowder likes to plan our daily centerpieces a week in advance, and our Sunday A1 centerpieces at least a month out. When big news breaks, we have to throw away the plans.
That’s what we did for most of this week after the Nakia Creek Fire blew up on Sunday. Evacuation orders, air pollution, threats to people, animals and property — there was a lot of urgent, unexpected news to cover.
It was time for what we call a “swarm story.” That’s where we take a big story, split it into small, manageable angles, and call on a bunch of reporters, photographers and editors to work together.
We don’t use this technique very often. But when we do, we can report and disseminate a lot of information in a hurry.
Here’s what our initial swarm plan looked like at 6:45 a.m. Monday, before we knew whether the fire was going to burn into populated areas:
The fire, plus fire weather (assigned to Becca Robbins, our breaking news reporter).
Larch Corrections Center evacuated; where did the prisoners go; any problems? (Jessica Prokop, assistant metro editor.)
Air quality for sensitive groups; effect on people living outdoors (Nika Bartoo-Smith, health reporter, and Kelsey Turner, homelessness and affordable housing reporter).
School closures (Griffin Reilly, education reporter). Later, the Sports team contributed items about outdoor practices and games being canceled.
Tales of the evacuees. (Kelly Moyer, editor of our sister paper, the Camas-Washougal Post-Record.)
Animals, both domestic and wild. (Lauren Ellenbecker, Vancouver city government reporter.)
We made the assignments at 9 a.m. and agreed upon an 11 a.m. deadline for posting an early report on nearly all of the subjects. Photographer Taylor Balkom split his time going to the fire briefing, the livestock relocation site at the fairgrounds, and the Red Cross shelter for people and pets in Camas. Web Editor Amy Libby triggered our rarely used “home page takeover” feature, which alters the look of our home page, www.columbian.com, to allow a bunch of related stories to be grouped together at the top.
Normally we ask people to pay for our journalism, just as we pay for cellphones and cable TV. But since authorities were asking people to take action, we made all the stories free.
I’m pleased to say we beat the 11 a.m. deadline, and continued to update stories online throughout the day as reports came in.
By 2 p.m., when we meet to plan the next day’s print newspaper, the situation was much clearer. The fire was dangerous but not growing exponentially. There were no reports of injuries or structural damage. So we combined several of the angles.
Our lead print story talked about the fire, school closures and poor air quality. A second story, what we call a sidebar, talked about people displaced by the fire and how smoke affects those who live on the streets. A third front-page story talked about the evacuation of the prison. On our local cover, we talked about the animals which had to be evacuated from the danger zone.
News Editor Merridee Hanson designed the pages, using red lines to delineate our special coverage.
We repeated our swarm strategy, but with fewer reporters, on Tuesday and Wednesday. We even looped transportation reporter William Seekamp into the coverage. The firefighters offered to give us a tour of the fire line Wednesday, provided our reporter wore tall leather boots with good soles. I had the boots, but I wear size 13, which is way too big for most of our staff. I was afraid I was going to have to go until William admitted he wears size 11. Close enough, with thick socks!
It may have been the first time in Columbian history that a reporter was assigned to a story because of his shoe size.
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