Web producers raced to meet demand for online news, resources Originally published in Current, Oct. 8, 2001 By Karen Everhart Bedford On Sept. 11 and the earliest days of the national terrorism crisis, public broadcasting's online services stretched to meet an unprecedented demand for news and information. NPR Online dealt with an "immediate and overwhelming" volley of hits to its site by scaling back its home page to text and firing up more servers, recalled Chris Mandra, acting v.p. of NPR Online. Capacity wasn't an issue for PBS Interactive, but its staff raced to pull together relevant content for the America Responds site, which launched at 5 p.m. on Sept. 12, the day after the attack. "We're not breaking news, but we're going to be current" is the Online NewsHour's standard operating principle, but it was pretty rough going to meet that standard on Sept.11, said Lee Banville, editor. "Our mission was to report what was really known, but initial reports were that everything in D.C. was exploding." The NewsHour site relied on source material, such as real audio of President Bush's statements, rewritten wire copy and background reports already on hand. "We reported something when it was backed up by officials who gave their name." There was a surge in traffic to the site, especially from users downloading streamed video. Usage doubled the Online NewsHour's traffic record from the week of the 2000 presidential election. KQED.org created a special site called Sept11 that included links to PBS and NPR's content, and to local community resources. Most users listened to NPR live or looked for community resources, said Richard Dean, director of new media. "On any one day we were serving the amount of people we deal with in a month," said Dean. "Our cost for streaming is up substantially." KQED hires an outside company to serve its pages to the Web, expanding its capacity to meet great demand. On Sept. 11, 15,000 users called up the site. But last month's streaming bill came to $12,000, four times normal cost. "People came from all over the world--people who used to live in San Francisco and listened to KQED--it was exciting how many came and responded and we were able to serve," added Dean. "The downside is the financial impact--this is not the best economy to have unexpected costs like this." NPR serves up its data in-house, which put its online team under huge pressure to expand capacity as the site was getting "hammered," as Mandra put it. "Luckily, we had machines that we could re-purpose to help balance the load." To serve as many users as possible, producers withdrew the usual NPR home-page and created a bare-bones page with terrorism coverage--paragraphs of texts with some links. They improvised a system to deliver modules of NPR Online content to stations via e-mails, rather than the handy Java script code that normally updates material on station sites. "On a blah day news-wise, we handle between 300-400 constant requests for information," which translates to about 70,000 users per day, estimated Mandra. "When the news broke and everybody was scrambling, there were 20,000 simultaneous connections to the news site." About 300,000 users hit NPR Online that day, "which is actually more traffic than we got on election night." "The Internet has grown into this medium where people are expecting satisfaction," commented Mandra. "When news is happening and it's a big deal, they come to NPR and expect to be rewarded." NPR is buying 10 new servers, so that it can better accommodate that demand in the next hot news cycle. The Online NewsHour has been "much more aggressive" in the last few weeks about updating its site, and has made contingency plans to "swing into action to do what we did on the 11th," as events unfold. Producers have also requested CPB funding to develop a local/national interface that would bring in news content from PBS stations. PBS Interactive created and launched the America Responds site within 24 hours. Cindy Johanson, senior v.p. of PBS Interactive, estimated that 50 stations created local extensions to the PBS site. "We've never had so much participation with local stations creating unique extensions." "This was a time when being decentralized enabled us to move much quicker to provider a richer, deeper resource," she added. PBS.org traffic is averaging about 27 million page views per week, about 2 million more than before the attacks, according to Johanson. PBS sites got major plugs from Yahoo and Google, and AOL and Netscape featured PBS.org prominently in the first weeks of the crisis. Frontline's site on Osama bin Laden broke usage records, and there was a "tremendous response" from kids to the Zoom site, said Johanson. Educators were among the users making heavy use of the site, especially online lesson plans. "If there's a bright light coming out of this dark period, it's really showed us that with a strong local presence and talented national producers from Frontline and the NewsHour, we had all of these pieces together where users could go," commented Johanson. "We're not a breaking news service, but we really are the place that allows people to take the step back and put what's happened in context and understand how to move forward through analysis and community events."

 

	.	To Current's home page
	.	Related news: PBS and NPR expand coverage after Sept. 11 attacks.

Web page posted Oct. 10, 2001
Current
The newspaper about public television and radio
in the United States
A service of Current Publishing Committee, Takoma Park, Md.
E-mail: webcurrent.org
301-270-7240
Copyright 2001