Breaking News in a Hurricane: How the Tampa Bay Times Keeps Reporting When it Matters Most

It’s fall 2024 in Tampa, Florida. Two record-breaking, “once-in-a-century” hurricanes have just hit back to back. There’s flooding and damage across the region — including the Tampa Bay Times office, which was destroyed when a crane crashed into their building during Hurricane Milton.

And as all that is happening, the Tampa Bay Times is experiencing their highest website traffic of all time: a 540% spike in visitors.

Although most people in Tampa would agree the 2024 hurricane season was particularly brutal, storms like these are also just a part of life — and work — for the Tampa Bay Times. And as hurricanes become more frequent and more powerful each year, the newsroom sees their reporting during these disasters as a key public service to their community.

“People count on us and we’re there for them,” said Editor and Vice President Mark Katches. “We take that responsibility extremely seriously.”

Building the foundation for natural disaster reporting

In the Times newsroom, hurricane season is all hands on deck.

“When a hurricane happens, everyone is a hurricane reporter,” said Katches.

In reality, that can look very scrappy. Reporters have had to resort to charging a laptop with a car’s cigarette lighter adapter in order to keep publishing when the power is out. But behind that is an organization with an exceptionally strong foundation — both from a training and technology perspective — that allows the newsroom to stay prepared, flexible, and safe during hurricane reporting.

Training staff for hurricane coverage

Months before hurricane season begins, the Times starts preparing its 80-person newsroom for storm coverage. They train reporters regularly with battle-tested strategies and workflows to make sure they’re prepared to continue reporting, while staying safe.

While all staff is encouraged to contribute first-person updates, the Times will typically designate a few “go-teams,” which includes groups of reporters and visual journalists. These groups are each assigned a car (equipped with Starlink for communication) so they can get as close to the damage as they possibly can, while staying safe.

Meanwhile, a core group of reporters and editors will usually gather in a safe, inland hotel, where they can receive updates from the field and manage the site experience — without having to worry about power or internet going out.

“Arc XP plays a very important role in our ability to post live updates before, during, and after storms,” said Katches. “During Hurricane Milton, our live update post was well over 10,000 words and we were posting something every 8 minutes. Arc was vital in serving that information to our readers.”

Technology that powers flexibility

Hurricanes are inherently unpredictable, and creating a more flexible tech stack was key in powering live reporting during storms.

Katches and Development Manager Justinian Hatfield said that the Times’ previous CMS was a “horror story.” The newsroom found it cumbersome and clunky, and it was slow — taking up to 15 minutes for stories to go live after publishing. Their old CMS also relied on on-premise servers — a major liability when storms threaten power and infrastructure.

When the team transitioned from their previous CMS to Arc XP, the newsroom found it much easier to use and appreciated the centralized publishing workflow.

“Stories, photos, everything you need to do to publish is in Arc XP,” said Katches. “We write all of our stories there. It’s made us a lot faster and more nimble. And it integrates really well with our other systems.”

On the technical side, Hatfield uses Arc XP’s PageBuilder to power the Times’ front-end experience.

“We love the flexibility of PageBuilder,” said Hatfield. “We can create a new version of the homepage, just click a button and we have a whole new experience for users. And it’s templated, so we can make a change in one file and it shows up pretty much everywhere.”

These changes helped the Times deliver critical information to their readers quickly, even during storm season.

Natural disaster reporting as a public service

During Hurricane Milton, the Times experienced a major spike in visitors. They saw 2.7 million visitors in one day, with over half of their traffic going to the post with live storm updates. It was a 540% increase over the day before.

Of course, dealing with record traffic is the last thing anyone wants to be thinking about during a hurricane. Hatfield credits Arc XP’s infrastructure — powered by AWS — in helping their site scale to handle the traffic.

“We didn’t have to allocate any other resources or servers,” said Hatfield. “Arc just handled the traffic without us doing a single thing, which was really nice because you have so many other things to worry about during a hurricane. So the fact that the site stayed up and handled that amount of traffic in that short amount of time was just amazing.”

According to Katches and Hatfield, hurricanes are typically when the Times sees the highest traffic. The Times is the go-to news source in the area for updates on the storms, and their audience trusts them to deliver.

During storms, the Times will remove its paywall to ensure all readers have access to the information they need.

“We see our job as public servants in a storm, and people rely on us to stay informed when hurricanes hit,” said Katches. “We’re making sure people are prepared before, as well as providing resources for putting your life back together in the aftermath.”

The calm before the (next) storm

With this year’s hurricane season fast approaching, the Times is starting to prepare. This year, they plan to use Arc XP’s IFX Integration Framework to create a more robust live blogging solution, rather than updating a single post throughout the storm.

And on the newsroom side, the team will start training and preparing for the inevitable.

“We know that this is going to happen, it’s the reality,” said Katches. “We have to really plan our summers and early fall knowing that we’re not going to be scheduling vacations or anything during this time. We have to be ready at any moment.”