At its peak during initial coverage of Hurricane Katrina, NOLA.com served 30 million page views — close enough to Mardi Gras numbers not to be a complete surprise but particularly massive when your own newsroom is part of the disaster zone. (The Mardi Gras numbers include a lot of webcam visits; the webcams went down during the storm.) The Advance.net companion to the Times-Picayune became a virtual hub for any and all things Katrina, even before the print edition had to be put on hold while the newsroom was evacuated. One example: people stranded in their homes used text messages to contact family and friends outside New Orleans — who then posted emergency rescue messages in NOLA’s forums.
My OJR colleague Mark Glaser has the latest look at NOLA.com via an interview with veteran editor Jon Donley. The site had more than 200 million page views in the first two weeks and now gets 10-12 million a day; the pre-hurricane average was 6 million page views a week.
Donley: “We do know that this Lt. Gen. Honore who oversees the military operation, one of his aides who has a group of people who have been monitoring the forum continually and taking notes and sending out rescue missions based on that information. In fact, one time we had some server issues, and he wrote us frantically saying, ‘Get this up as soon as you can, people’s lives depend on it. We’ve already saved a number of lives because of it.'”
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