Most newspapers are located in areas that don’t face regular or somewhat predictable meteorological or geological threats.

But for ones that do, like The Palm Beach  Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., reacting to Mother Nature can be almost a full-time job, as was the case during last year’s hurricane season.

During the three-week period between Sept. 4 and Sept. 24, 2004, the market served by The Post was slammed by hurricanes Frances and Jeanne, fueling a major initiative by the paper (daily, 181,626; Sunday, 217,634) to transform its Web site into a source of breaking weather information.

That effort won the paper a lot of grateful readers. It also won The Post a 2005 Digital Edge award for Most Innovative Use of Digital Media: News Event Coverage, Circulation 75,000 to 250,000.

Palmbeachpost.com launched in 1995, the same year the paper started offering hurricane updates on the Web as a service to its customers.  

Over the past decade, the paper covered storms as they occurred, but the paper’s staff and residents hadn’t seen anything like last year, when storm after storm charged ashore.

By the time Frances and Jeanne hit, all of PalmBeachPost.com was devoted to hurricane tracking and recovery, said Jon Glass, online editorial director.

“As our lives returned to ‘normal’ in October, we revamped the site’s entire design to what (readers) see today,” he said.

Small team

The Internet operations team is quite small, according to PalmBeachPost.com general manager Dan Shorter, who declined to disclose the number of staffers “for competitive reasons,” he said.

“We are not a separate division,” Shorter said, adding that online staffers are instead peppered throughout advertising, the newsroom and marketing. But the unit does have a separate P&L that Shorter oversees.

“We can’t share financial results, but every study we’ve ever seen places us far ahead of any other paper on revenue and profit in our circulation category,” Shorter said.

Online news staffers participate in major newsroom meetings every day and are constantly communicating with editors and reporters who deliver early-edition articles and reports for posting.

That can change depending upon circumstances. During last year’s hurricane coverage, for example, The Post dedicated a print editor whose task was to feed the Web team updates around the clock from the paper’s team of reporters.

Meshing software

The Cox Enterprises-owned Post uses software from CoxNet to update the site; the unit also supports other Cox papers such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Austin (Texas) American-Statesman and Dayton (Ohio) Daily News.

PalmBeachPost.com’s content management system, based on Interwoven’s TeamSite app, has been customized and further tweaked by CoxNet, which also developed the site’s multimedia database, polls, forums and utilities such as event calendars and restaurant listings.

The Post also customized some of its own software, developing a file transfer system that converts editorial content from the Digital Technology International front-end into XML code, where it then flows into TeamSite.

“The copy editors mark the same files that are being prepared for the print editions with the specific Web codes that are converted to XML after it’s been edited at night,” Glass said. “These end up in a Web queue where keywords and related content can be added and then published directly into TeamSite. We have a separate system where DTI files can be edited to include photos, video, audio or other enhancements and again published directly to TeamSite. As for breaking news, we have HTML templates already prepared that can be updated with the copy sent by editors or reporters.”

Self service

Like an increasing number of newspaper Web sites, The Post’s site allows customers to price, pay for and place classified ads online. DTI is again used as a back-end processing component, and Development Director Gina Wilcox put together the ad-placement workflow. Only six weeks into the program, Shorter said that a substantial amount of ads are being handled online, 24 hours a day. Customers are buying bigger, more expensive ads on their own timetable and are often purchasing photo inclusions as well, he said.

When Frances and Jeanne approached, the staff realized they had a daunting task ahead of them. Having the resources to inform their readers was only part of the equation; keeping The Post’s power, and its connection to the Web, was equally critical.

“We tried to cover our bases,” Glass said, of the days before the storms hit. “We split our staff in the event of losing power or Internet connectivity.”

Three staffers rode out each hurricane in The Post’s main building, one producer flew to Atlanta to work out of CoxNet’s offices, and others worked from home as long as they had power, he said.

When the storm roared ashore, the preparations proved prescient.

“Sure enough, power was lost at different homes,” Glass said. “With generator back-up at the main office, we were able to update the site with reports, photos, Flash graphics, e-mailed updates and video around the clock.”

Storm effects

Because of road damage and curfews, Glass said there were a couple of days where The Post’s print edition was available only as a PDF via the Web site.

Once the hurricanes hit and passed, staffers working at home reported in to relieve the staffers in the main office who had spent three straight days of 12-hour shifts.

“In their downtime, they’d attempt to reach family and friends by phone in between trying to catch a few hours sleep under their desks,” Glass said.

Expanded coverage

Going beyond the traditional way of presenting information, the interactive element of the site expanded the coverage in a significant way.

To that end, PalmBeach.com offered a special hurricane community message board for users to vent, console each other and provide comfort during the storms.

“They were able to share updated city-by-city scene reports on damage, debris, school and church closings, ask for help in finding missing or displaced loved ones and comment on the local utility’s response to power outages,” Glass said.

Residents were encouraged to submit their own damage photos that appeared side-by-side with the more than 1,000 photos produced by newspaper staffers.

Stories poured in by the hundreds of “hurricane heroes,” detailing the response of Good Samaritans who helped victims pick up the pieces of their neighborhoods.

Online marketing and donation efforts ultimately helped raise more than $100,000 from the community for the United to Help fund, created immediately after Frances in cooperation with the United Way and other media partners. That fundraising effort was promoted in the right-hand corner of the site home page.

Glass credits the online team with pulling through in amazing circumstances.

“For The Palm Beach Post Web team, which has tracked, covered and followed hurricanes for a decade, we were able not only to deliver the news, but also enable our users to help us tell the once-in-a-lifetime story of devastation, panic, heartache and heroes,” he said.

With the 2004 hurricane season a vivid memory, Glass said The Post is now preparing for this year’s storms. An online section dubbed Storm 2005 will give readers larger storm tracking maps, a blog forum hosted by experts, a weekly HTML newsletter, an XML feed containing the latest Post coverage and video from television partner WPEC.