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Fire and Brimstone

While there have been plenty of things going on around the Minot Daily News office lately, obviously the fire at Earth Recycling was the dramatic story of the week. That’s pretty typical; fires are the quintessential newspaper spot reporting occasion. When they teach a lot of essential elements in the reporting world, that is, fire is frequently the example.

Let me also add that firefighting has some personal interest to me. A lifetime or two ago, the first books I wrote for a Simon & Schuster imprint were about firefighting and arson investigation. In the research phase, I had the pleasure of spending months working alongside paramedics and firefighters, experiencing their amazing work side-by-side (and experiencing some amazing cooking, for which firefighters are legendary.)

So when the first calls came in, it put the office into motion. It usually doesn’t take long for us to find out about something as important as a fire. Two reporters were dispatched to find the scene, see what they could find out and get photographs. In-house, another reporter or two fielded incoming phone calls with information and made calls to authorities. Outside the Editorial Department, other Minot Daily News employees received and passed on information from their friends and relatives in town. This kind of thing takes a team to cover and in crisis situations, that team encompasses our entire building and everyone responded.

Over the next several hours, reporters were back and forth from different sites at or near the fire, countless phone calls with officials were made and we received a steady stream of information from residents. There was plenty of time going over the history of the the property and there was conjecture over cause and eventual impact.

There was also plenty of wrong information about the fire out there, which gets to the point I want to make today.

Covering something like a fire is exciting, exhausting and worrisome to the degree that we certainly don’t want to have to report something truly tragic such as a loss of life. Part of the excitement is about acquiring and sharing facts with our readers via our website and social media, as soon as possible. But to do so requires sorting through information and filtering out the misinformation.

Sure enough, there was plenty of wrong information out there over the course of Thursday afternoon – everything from a report about exploding stored combustibles, a trapped victim, fire suppression from the air and the refusal of one local department to contribute to the firefighting. Sources shared things like these as either fact or something overheard, but the proof was flimsy and there was no confirmation. The biggest challenge when covering something like this is to resist the urge to post something alarming without being able to confirm it.

Misinformation is pretty typical in covering huge stories about disasters of one kind or another. The worst example I remember was some 25 years ago. I’d ridden out Hurricane Andrew in Miami, Florida and a whole chunk of the city was pretty much erased from the map. The day after the storm, bogus stories spread like wildfire, causing concern if not outright panic. One I remember was about monkeys. Not your everyday monkeys. No, think experiment monkeys from a research lab, infected with the HIV virus. And the storm set them free, the story said.

One could see this might have worried people, even though it was fiction.

By the end of Thursday, we had sorted through fact and fiction and the team had done a good job. Regional Editor Eloise Ogden, supported by the entire staff, had the story. We were also helped by some of the entities involved who did a particularly good job communicating details. Minot Rural Fire, Sheriff Bob Barnard, First District Health and our colleagues in communications for the City of Minot were extraordinary. Hey, that’s no small thing. It isn’t every day our safety folks tackle a fire at a site as potentially hazardous as Earth Recycling. My first book, about firefighters, was called The Last American Heroes, which tells you how I personally perceive first responders. But beyond the front lines, there are plenty of support staff and communicators who do exceptional work as well. If this fire was a test of how local authorities can respond, address, communicate – then everyone gets an ‘A.’

A major fire is a test of a news team as well. One person can’t cover something like a fire from every angle. It takes a team, my team pulled it out, and we managed sober, factual reporting as best as possible, without crying wolf… or crying monkey.

Still, getting a story like a big fire out to the public is exhausting. It isn’t like we get to focus exclusively on it. There is the whole rest of the newspaper to put together too. This explains why, as you read this on Sunday morning, a few of your committed Minot Daily News staff members might just be sleeping in a little. Tomorrow, we start all over from scratch. You never know where the day will take us… but I promise we will tell you.

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