Interview with NOLA.com editor 

Staci D Kramer refers us to Mark Glaser's inside look at how the website for the Times-Picayune helped guide rescuers and provided in-depth news for evacuees. Its being seen as a watershed in online news. It includes a fascinating interview with the NOLA.com editor, Jon Donley.

- As far back as 1998 they were using the potential of the web for providing news to people displaced by weather in their area.

- They took good note of the warnings that others should have: We had a lot of the tools in place, and this past July on Independence Day weekend, we heard that the forecasts for this hurricane season were that it would be a bad season. We started thinking that instead of evacuating once this year, we might be evacuating three or four or five times. And one of them may actually hit us badly.

- Texting: "We'd get e-mails from Idaho, there's a guy at this address and he's in the upstairs bedroom of his place in New Orleans. And then we figured out that even in the poorest part of town, people have a cell phone. And it's a text-enabled cell phone. And they were sending out text messages to friends or family, and they were putting it in our forums or sending it in e-mails to us." Mobile phones were really valuable here, too, during our bushfire disaster.

- How a local group rose to the occasion and became a central part of the emergency response, doing things on the fly and on their own initiative also resonates with our bushfire experience. The local ABC station, 666, who usually targets an older retired audience pulled out all the stops, and became the central voice you trusted. There was a cartoon by Geoff Pryor in which some joker was saying 666 was the devil's number, and the response was 'Not around here it isn't!'

- Donley talks about the possibility that all the sections of the paper might have their own blogs. The other day Amy talked of how kids who have grown up with dedicated channels for different audiences on TV find the idea of the old '3 channel TV and different times slots during the day' quite strange. Maybe online newpapers will follow the same path as TV.