Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age

A screenshot of the Washington Post's

interactive map

of where this morning's earthquake was felt.

Recent natural and human-inflicted disasters, such as the Haiti earthquake and the BP oil spill, have emphasized the importance of up-to-the-minute information when catastrophic situations can change at a moment’s notice. In the Washington, D.C. area, there were none of the brutal consequences suffered in Haiti and the Gulf when a 3.6 magnitude earthquake hit at 5:04 a.m. today.

Yet there is much of the same urgent need to find and share information, and digital media tools have played a key part in providing the answers to area residents’ questions this morning.

Twitter traffic in Washington was trending toward quake-talk within hours of the seismic event centered in Montgomery County, M.D., with mentions of “Earthquakes,” “#dcquake,” and quake centers “Germantown” and “Gaithersburg” among the most popular topics. In News Channel 8’s coverage of the quake in this morning’s broadcast, bystanders were even asked if they went on Twitter or Facebook for information after the event, and there were accounts of residents going to their online communities immediately. In this way, social media are not only used to break the news; they are the news.

It is clear that social media have played a key role in the aftermath and coverage of this event, perhaps best represented by the almost immediate creation of the Facebook page, I survived the DC Earthquake of 2010! Just as groups formed during the D.C. area’s big snowstorm earlier this year, like the 575-member DC Snowpocalypse 2.0 / Snowmageddon 2010, this is continued evidence of a community being formed around a local event, urged on by area news outlets as many are employing a more interactive style of reporting on this issue.

The Washington Post’s reliance on interactive media in its coverage of the earthquake is particularly telling, as the Post website had several tools up and running within hours of the quake. A user-created map shows places where area residents felt the shock—with locations added by readers themselves—and a forum has been open since a little before 8 a.m. for residents to react and discuss. (The map was closed to editing by the afternoon because the hundreds of placemarks were overloading the map, according to the Post website.) News Channel 8, among other news outlets, is also reporting on the quake and aftershocks using iWitness accounts sent in electronically from viewers. Here, traditional news outlets are relying on D.C. area citizen journalists for reports on the ground.

Using these social networks and interactive tools—tapping into the collective intelligence available on the Internet—local media outlets are likely to get detailed information out faster to area residents about an unexpected events like this morning's earthquake that could easily have implications for travel and infrastructure in the area.

If D.C. could have an earthquake, then it could happen anywhere, so local media everywhere should take note.