As the water rises… hyperlocal reporting

The last time there was flooding on this scale in Iowa and the midwest – 1993 – we didn’t have the Internet. Or at least *this* Internet. But this time, we do, and there are a variety of ways for us Iowa expatriates to follow the flooding back home.

The most interesting site I’ve come across: IowaFlood.com.

This is one of those moments where you see the powerful results of some relatively simple aggregation. Use Yahoo! Pipes to pull in the pictures people are taking, aggregate all the #IowaFlood tagged content from twitter, add feeds from the weather service, news sites, plus original posts.

I’ve been following the “desmoines flood” tags on Flickr for a few days, but I’m seeing many more pictures here, and the content is more relevant to me than the mainstream news reporting.

Let me be very clear about what I mean by that: the mainstream news from the Des Moines Register and other sources give me the authoritative reporting that I need to gain a broad perspective of what’s going on. But IowaFlood.com gets right to heart of what I want to know: what’s it like in my old neighborhood in downtown Des Moines? What’s flooded? What do the streets and bridges I walked on every day look like right now? Well, this is my old neighborhood.

This is what really matters to me, and this is something that mainstream media can’t do for me and every other person who wants to see their neighborhood. But other people can do it, will do it, are doing it. That’s powerful.

There’s no “blurring of the lines of journalism” in this instance. Any intelligent human being understands the difference between the work of veteran reporters and editors… and the eyewitnesses with their cameras on the streets of Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, recording what they’re seeing. And any intelligent person knows both are invaluable.

When mainstream media teams up with these people or with aggregators like IowaFloods.com, it can be powerful and rich… just as sound married to text created the powerful medium of radio, and video married to text created television, or when human stories married to news created powerful public radio journalism.

I’ll stop getting all crazy ass on you. Summary: this is a good thing, and everybody wins.

Andy Brudtkuhl of 48Web Consulting set up the site.

UPDATE: after catching my spell-check turning “expatriates” into “ex-patriots,” I came back here to see if the same thing had happened. Yes, indeed… now corrected.