Disaster Improv
by David M. Cole
In the Silicon Valley, they tell an anecdote to illustrate the concept of commitment. In the project that is a bacon-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is “involved” in the preparation of the meal. The pig, on the other hand, is “committed.”
Until recently, I was “involved” in disaster preparedness. As a consultant and a writer, I have made a lot of hay about how newspapers aren’t prepared to publish during a disaster. My dirty little secret? Although I worked for a San Francisco newspaper in 1989, on the day of the Loma Preita earthquake, I was 30 minutes out of Honolulu, at 35,000 feet, trying to charm my seatmate—a person of the female persuasion who had been recently divorced. Ergo, I had never been involved in attempting to publish during a major disaster (though I did help the paper survive a couple of minor ones).
As I’ve often said, disasters come in all shapes and sizes. My personal baptism to disaster was a burglary.
I walked into the office early one spring morning to find gaping holes where my computers once sat. Six of them, to be precise—the desktop machine, the laptop, the World Wide Web server, and three mail-and-list servers.
The burglars also took my disk drives, modems, a fax machine, a credit-card machine, a CD player and my ancient but beloved Nikkormat 35mm camera. None of those really mattered, though.
All my business records—the very tools I use to make my living—were gone. The disaster wasn’t the loss of the equipment; the disaster was the loss of my data.
Fortunately, I had backed everything up. Not recently—I was 13 days behind on one set of machines, 12 days on another—but there were backups, and they were stored offsite. But how was I going to restore those tapes? The tape drive had been stolen, too—where was I going to get another? Had I ever even run the restoration segment of the backup program? What computer would I use for the restoration? What would I use to write with? What about that column that TechNews wanted?
I was about to start improvising.
When I talk to newspaper executives about publishing during a disaster, the phrase I hear most often is something like, “We’re good at improvising—we’ll just improvise our way out of the disaster.”
The consultant in me said that was the wrong attitude—but the newspaperman in me understood. You’re just sitting there one night and a jetliner falls out of the sky and, all of a sudden, you’re figuring out how to cover an airplane crash. In fact, they give prizes to the newspaper that improvises the best—it’s called the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.
Improvisation in the theater world is a skill that is learned and practiced. Newspapers attempting to publish during a disaster would be well served by following the theatrical example.
Some papers believe they need to have a good disaster plan—those in Florida and the Gulf states are all hit hard with hurricanes year after year, and after a while it becomes evident that having a plan is a good idea. Others—like my colleagues in San Francisco or Seattle or Los Angeles—are more sanguine because they have less predictable disasters. Hurricanes may happen every year; earthquakes happen when they feel like it (and sometimes not at all).
And so, while I can sympathize with the notion that a paper can improvise its way out of a disaster, my real-life situation has given me significant pause.
Once I get myself back on my feet—probably by the time you read this—I will have a good handle on what I did wrong and what I’ll do to be better prepared in the future.
Again, the most significant pieces missing were not the computers themselves, but the data therein. Much I can recreate, but some were purely inventive. I can write a new report, but will it have the insight of the original?
The burglary caused me to miss a couple of issues of my e-mail newsletters, but it came 24 hours after the start of the one week a month I don’t have to publish a print newsletter. I had some wiggle room to recover.
And though I’ll be busy as hell in the next couple of weeks—after all, NEXPO® is on the near horizon—I will also devote a couple of hours to jotting down some procedures about how to publish again in the event another disaster strikes, whether it be earthquake, fire, flood, landslide or even burglary.
Like that pig in the breakfast project, I’m now committed to disaster preparedness.
Cole is a San Francisco-based newspaper consultant and editor of The Cole Papers, a monthly newsletter on technology, journalism and publishing. E-mail, dmc@colegroup.com; phone, (650) 994-2100; fax, (650) 994-2108. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily TechNews or NAA.