How product thinking helped us support communities in the wake of disaster
It’s been a few weeks now since Hurricane Helene caused unprecedented devastation in the beloved mountain communities of my state. Significant flooding, deadly landslides, and damage to roads and infrastructure were severe enough to change parts of Western North Carolina for a long time, if not forever. Communication and information sharing has also been challenging due to the destruction of infrastructure for cell reception, internet, and electricity.
The journalists and information providers in Western NC, however, have gone beyond their call of duty. Despite navigating their own personal losses and changes to their hometowns, they haven’t stopped covering the aftermath of the storm and the critical information people need to know.
My job is to let them know they aren’t alone—and provide direct support. As the leader of the NC Local News Workshop, I support journalists and information providers across North Carolina by fostering a strong collaborative network and by offering coaching, training, programs, and even a statewide news summit. Leaning into our capacity-building mission, I’ve also spent the past year developing a strategic plan for a statewide news hub that localizes statewide issues so communities have a strong grasp on how decisions impact them.
It’s this strategy that helped us launch a rapid response effort to support our Western NC newsrooms and their communities during the hardest of times. And it’s product discipline that helped us operationalize it without any predetermined resources. Here’s how we did it.
Our strategy and approach
Identify problems to solve. I live on the coast of North Carolina and have experienced many episodes of tropical weather, as well as covered storms as a reporter in the earlier part of my career. When I learned about the potential severity of Hurricane Helene for our mountain region, I first reached out to news and information colleagues in Western NC to check on their safety, express my support, and—during the days following the storm—ask them what they needed most to get information out to their communities about recovery and relief efforts. Local residents, once connected to internet or cell service, also informed us about critical information needs and the best ways to reach them. We knew there were multiple problems to solve, which we sorted into two categories: the capacity needs of newsrooms and the information needs of community members.
Set our strategy. Armed with this information, we identified two objectives: 1. Connect communities with critical information that is supplemental and not duplicative of what’s already being done. And 2. Support our local journalists, information providers, newsrooms, and community leaders by building their capacity, providing resources, and supporting their work in the most important ways. Fortunately, we had a solid sense of what a hub of resources and support could look like. We’d already been working over the past year to develop our plan for the future statewide news hub that we’re calling NC Local. Drawing on this plan, we knew we could launch a collaborative effort to provide critical information to our Western NC communities by building capacity for our news partners and filling gaps in coverage.
Brainstorm ideas. The day the hurricane hit, I sent a note to dozens of contacts in our statewide news and information network asking them a simple question: Will you help our efforts to support our Western NC colleagues? An email thread launched over the weekend after the storm turned into a Slack channel into which people poured creative ideas to lend support, offer content that could be republished, and create new products and initiatives that met community information needs. It felt a bit chaotic at first, but my experience leading product brainstorms has taught me to embrace big ideas, then use criteria to narrow down the list to align those ideas with the identified strategy. After synthesizing these ideas into themes, three clear work streams emerged around content operations, product and tech, and capacity-building.
Find resources. Here’s the tricky part: The NC Local News Workshop is currently a team of two people: me as the executive director, and my colleague Catherine Komp, who leads our ecosystem engagement efforts and authors our weekly NC Local newsletter. Her work serves as the glue for our statewide network. She is also based in Asheville, which was severely impacted by the storm, and was unable to be reached by cell or internet for a few days. (She and her household are safe!) We wouldn’t have been able to act on the list of ideas without key leaders raising their hands to offer support. Melody Kramer, a librarian and journalist who runs a civic news collective in NC, sent me a note saying she was available for contract work. I quickly signed her on as our program lead for the growing operation. Daniel Williams, who leads the publisher audience support organization BlueLena, offered his support early on to connect our efforts with partners like Kinsey Wilson and Newspack. And many others raised their hands to take on various parts of the work streams we identified.
We also needed funding to support these efforts. We encouraged funders to support newsrooms directly, but we also knew newsrooms needed certain initiatives funded quicker than their budget processes would allow. With the support of a Knight Foundation grant that was executed in less than 24 hours from the time of the request, we were able to quickly support freelancers, tools, and other services that support newsrooms and the information needs of Western NC residents.
Prioritize, produce, and pivot. As with any product road map, we had to ruthlessly prioritize. So many ideas surfaced from the dozens of people who joined our Slack channel, but we couldn’t do them all at once. Our clear strategy and objectives helped us decide which items were most important. For example, early on we prioritized creating text-only sites for newsrooms, because we heard from community members that news sites with ads and images were difficult to load and prevented them from accessing critical and potentially lifesaving information. We started with a text-only site for Blue Ridge Public Radio, and grew our offerings from there. NPR later launched text-only site options for its member stations, inspired by our early effort.
As our work continued in the first couple of weeks, we started hearing more about concerns of misinformation and the capacity constraints on journalists to cover the storm’s aftermath while ramping up coverage of the upcoming election. We are now executing a plan to provide more support around election coverage for our Western NC newsrooms, and focusing on content formats that meet people where they’re searching for information.
Learn and apply lessons. We’re learning a lot from this rapid response effort. Melody will create a playbook and tool kit based on the lessons we’ve learned that we hope will be helpful to other newsrooms. I’m also studying the operational needs of hubs like this and applying insights to the plan for our future statewide news hub, which we plan to launch in early 2025. We also continue to learn about new information needs of Western NC residents, as well as the growing capacity needs of our newsrooms and information providers. As any product leader knows, new problems to solve and priorities assigned to the solutions will change the course of the road map—and we’re prepared to adjust our plan as needed.
You can learn more about the work we’re doing in Poynter's Local Edition newsletter, in the NC Local newsletter, and on the WNC Local News site. If you’d like to learn more about how to support Western NC communities and journalists or access our future playbook for rapid response efforts, send me a note or find me in the NPA Slack community!