I was very impressed with the coverage on NWI.com of the recent flooding in the area. With no truly local TV station able to provide round the clock coverage, The Times stepped in and provided that coverage.
Their site was continually updated all throughout the recent crisis with the latest information. You could tell their writers were putting in overtime. They literally filled the site with content about the flooding, all the while continuing regular news coverage. It became a place to find out about the latest road and school closings. The kind of invaluable resource we need in this area.
One thing I and many others wanted to see was pictures. NWI.com became a central place where people could submit and view photos of the destruction in the area. It was fantastic. I literally went through hundreds of pictures and personal accounts.
NWI.com is truly becoming an online portal for Northwest Indiana. The design of their site is clean and efficient, it’s easy to navigate around and it loads quickly. Kudos goes out the the team managing the The Time web operations, they’re doing a fantastic job. I’ve managed content myself, but not on this scale, so I know the kind of work these guys do.
As someone who works doing SEO and Social Media, their site is doing a fantastic job taking advantage of these new technologies. The site has video, RSS Feeds, user comments (though I don’t recommend reading them, your I.Q. will go down) and ways to share content on other social networking sites.
I was surprised to see them stream the Gubernatorial debate live last night. This was an awesome thing to do since there really isn’t a way to air that stuff locally on TV (though I don’t know if the local PBS aired it, probably not).
NWI is undeserved by the major media networks because we are crammed between South Bend and Chicago and thus get the TV networks in both cities. Because of this, coverage on the Chicago and South Bend Networks about Northwest Indiana is sparse, to say the least. The Times is filling that void by using the internet to create a portal for NWI as well as it’s own de facto media network, as we’ve seen with them streaming live events.
Let’s hope they keep it up. I’d like to see a web based video network dedicated to NWI and maybe radio feeds or podcasts. I would also like to see them embrace blogs more and maybe create a directory/agrigator of local blogs.
Speaking of blogs. I was disappointed with NWI Bloggers during the flooding. This is probably the worst disaster to hit the area in a long time and many local blogs were silent (though a couple did blog). Keeping in mind that these blogs are run by people and they were probably dealing with the affects of the disaster. But Blogging provides a unique way to citizens to share their experiences and pictures. Granted, I didn’t write much about it myself because Valpo was spared the worst of the floods and I pretty much stayed in to avoid the chaos.
If you wrote about the floods, please send me links to your entries. I’d like to aggregate the links onto one page so that people can see what other people had to say about this terrible disaster.
