When disaster strikes, newsrooms scramble. A new website aims to help tame the chaos.

On the day Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina in September 2024, Laura Lee was thousands of miles away on vacation in Peru.

“I feel guilty about not being on the ground with everybody when it actually went down, but it kind of was a blessing in disguise,” Lee, who was the news director of Asheville-based Blue Ridge Public Radio (BPR) at the time, said. “I was in a place that had stable internet, so I could make calls and run point on some things that I don’t know I would have been able to do otherwise.”

Lee had created an emergency plan for the station long before the storm hit, but it was primarily geared around mass shootings. Helene, however, was an all-encompassing disaster: alongside more than 230 deaths and billions of dollars’ worth of physical damage, it knocked out water, power, and cellular services, in some places for weeks. When Lee made it back to Asheville with a car full of supplies she’d picked up in Charlotte, she had to put together a plan on the fly: The station would move to 12-hour coverage, rather than its usual cadence of two live shifts a day, and they’d air every single one of the county’s twice-daily updates, followed by a recap and debrief by the station’s reporters.

But first, she had to take care of some of the station’s most basic needs.

“One of my first tasks was just cleaning out the toilets and setting up a camp toilet, because we didn’t have running water,” Lee, who’s now the editorial director of the nonprofit news organization NC Local, told me. “When we think about emergency planning, sometimes we think just about the news and how we’re going to get the information out, which is obviously a huge part of it. But there’s also just this basic hierarchy of needs: People have to have a place to go to the bathroom. They have to have water. They have to have food. I didn’t worry if my reporters were fed on a daily basis prior to [Hurricane Helene].”

For the most part, Lee and her colleagues had to figure out how to respond to and cover the storm on their own. But a new service, built out of the lessons Lee and other editors around the country learned from covering disasters themselves, aims to change that. It’s called Emergency Mode for News.

“Having the time or the funding to create emergency plans for your newsroom is a luxury,” said Jessica Morrison, co-director of OpenNews, one of the three organizations — along with NC Local and Newspack — behind the initiative, which was started using a three-year, $1.2 million grant from Press Forward. That’s why Emergency Mode’s website has pre-made checklists for various kinds of extreme weather disasters, like hurricanes, wildfires, or extreme heat, written by journalists who have experience covering those types of disasters. The website also links to Grist’s disaster toolkit and has a module to help create an “action pack” with resources that change depending on whether the journalists coming to the site are preparing for a threat ahead of time, in the midst of an emergency, or recovering from a disaster.

“This isn’t about teaching you how to cover breaking news or emergencies or disasters,” Morrison said. “We know that journalists know how to do that. It’s about shoring up your operations.”

When Hurricane Helene knocked out cell service in Western North Carolina, Lee and her colleagues heard from audience members who couldn’t load the BPR website because cell service was too spotty. So they worked with Newspack and NC Local to create a text-only, low-data version of the website, which could be loaded quickly even when cell signal was scarce. (As Josh wrote in October of that year, NPR enabled a similar feature for its local stations as Hurricane Milton bore down on Florida.) Newspack used its experience with Helene to create a WordPress-based “lite-site” plugin that newsrooms could easily incorporate into their own websites, as well as a second plugin to quickly enable liveblogging so journalists can post updates to developing stories as they come in.

Open News is also distributing $30,000 in microgrants to help newsrooms pay for things like specialized training, and hosting workshops to bring together journalists from across multiple newsrooms to share knowledge and create a sort of Emergency Mode community. “There’s a lot of knowledge in the field already, and we’re hoping to bring it together,” Morrison said. “A lot of what we have found in this first year was that what people actually wanted to do was just talk to each other about their experiences.”

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Lee received emails from editors around the country offering help and support, including one from an editor in Lahaina, Hawaii, which had dealt with devastating wildfires in 2023, who wrote to say that “even if it feels like this is endless, it’s not,” she told me. Another editor helped set up a network of freelancers who helped triage Lee’s inbox, which was filling up with press requests from national outlets, updates from her newsroom, and messages from BPR’s audience.

“There’s so much that you can draw from what other people have experienced,” Lee said. “There’s no reason to have people reinventing the wheel every single time and feeling isolated while doing so.”

Emergency Mode also offers a variety of mental health resources, which Lee learned firsthand are essential during and after a disaster. “Our Slack just turned into a channel of horrors,” Lee told me. She instituted a practice of checking in with her reporters about what they’d do to help their mental health each day. “In those scenarios your brain is cooked,” Lee said. “You’ve been riding adrenaline, and you’re sleeping two or three hours a night, and you’re just adapting as best as you can.”

Disasters can take many forms, but for now Emergency Mode is focused on extreme weather and climate disasters. It’s on its second year of the Press Forward grant; the first year was spent building the resources that went on the site, including reaching out to contributors to write the checklists, and the second year, which is ongoing, will be focused on getting feedback from newsrooms and adjusting the site accordingly. (Morrison told me that one of the early points of feedback from newsrooms was that they needed the information to be broken up into smaller chunks than currently exist.) Those conversations will help shape what Emergency Mode becomes in its third year, and if it might exist beyond that.

“What is emergency preparedness for?” Morrison asked. “It’s to reduce the number of decisions that you need to make during a disaster. Journalism is hard. People are experiencing burnout, and to add to that, you’re a person living through an emergency or a disaster that you’re also covering. Is there something that we could do to make emergency preparedness a shared infrastructure effort for newsrooms? That’s the main project.”