SHUTTLE BREAKUP

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jul/Aug 2004 by Kelly, John

DISASTER PLAN HELPS TEAM TO KEEP FOCUS IN YEARLONG PROBE

Columbia, com check," came the call from mission control on a Saturday morning last February. The response: silence broken by pangs of static. "Columbia, com check."

That silence was my cue to grab the disaster plan.

No one would say for another 15 minutes that Columbia was gone, but we knew. A space shuttle drops from orbit like a brick. The behemoth space plane only gets one shot at slowing from 17,500 miles per hour, to a jarring stop at the end of a runway surrounded by a gator-infested Florida swamp.

It's an unpowered glide. There is no circling around for a second chance. A shuttle is never late to land.

Commander Rick Husband is not answering a radio call. Tracking stations indicate Columbia is not moving eastward.

It's going to be a very bad day.

Before NASA or newscasters made it official, and before wreckage started plopping down in eastern Texas, Florida Today reporters were racing into positions spelled out in a disaster plan.

The plan detailed what to do that Saturday. It did not say: "Start the investigation." But that is exactly what we did. Within hours, my space team embarked on a yearlong probe into a disaster that threatened the future of space exploration. Our investigation continues today.

We learned a great deal about how to react to a disaster in your back yard. The lessons apply no matter the size, or type, of newsroom you work in. I thought 1 would share five of those lessons:

1.The vision thing.

You need a vision to dig into a disaster. Get one. Make sure top editors buy in. Stick to it no matter what the competition does.

A monster disaster scatters your staff everywhere. Ours splintered for a couple weeks to Houston, Washington, Florida and points between.

About two weeks after the Feb. 1, 2003 accident, we assembled key worker bees and decision-makers at one table. We spent three hours haggling over goals. We weighed what readers would want versus what we needed to give them (whether they wanted it or not). We set a mission that everyone - from the beat reporters to the publisher - shook hands on.

We decided to tell people what happened to Columbia, why and what that meant for the future of space exploration. We vowed not to divert from our mission by reacting to every incremental "scoop" that cropped up along the way.

To reporters, including me, the whole process seemed like another meeting to waste time. In hindsight, it proved priceless. Stories change. You must adapt, but having a mission kept us moving toward high-impact targets.

2. Don't be afraid to say "no."

In a big disaster story, the national media is going to converge. With so many reporters and outlets on the scene, an endless string of "scoops" will keep cropping up. Many times, you're going to find yourself in discussions with editors who want to match what someone else reported.

Sometimes you have to react. Other times, it is critical to say "no." One good reason to say no is when some other news outlet overblows some "revelation" that you as a beat reporter know is either not true, misleading or irrelevant.

For us, the key was to stay focused on making progress toward high-impact stories while not wasting time on minor, incremental "scoops" that were irrelevant to the bigger picture.

3. Build a team with diverse styles and skills.

We put a diverse team on the Columbia story and it paid off.

An assistant managing with a knack for story-telling and seeing the big picture left behind many of his daily duties to guide our investigation.

As our space team leader, I brought years of using public records' research, computer-assisted reporting tools and shoe-leather reporting to study big, broken government systems.

We had two space and science reporters who assisted in covering daily goings-on in the accident investigation, but also everything else that was happening. While no shuttles launched, NASA did blast two robolic rovers toward Mars in 2003, among other newsy activities.

Within weeks of the accident, we brought back to Florida Today a former aerospace reporter with more than 10 years experience in covering NASA for us and space.com. His knowledge, source list and crucial documents that were boxed up in his garage proved priceless.

The bottom line: You can't pull this off by loading up the investigative team with a bunch of people who are typically labeled "investigative reporters" or "projects reporters." You need a group with differing skills and styles.

4. Records, records and more records.

Know the Freedom of Information Act and your state open records law and use it. On the Saturday night of the accident, I filed first-day stories from Cape Canaveral and flew to Houston. I started writing FOIA letters on the airplane. By 3 a.m., I e-mailed the first barrage of what ended up being almost 100 FOI requests to NASA.

We tapped other sources for public records, too. Human sources. Government depository libraries. Trade associations that had saved NASA engineers' proposals from past conventions and journals. And, in support of those veteran beat reporters who say never to throw anything away, the most priceless documents in our investigation were those that NASA couldn't seem to produce, but that reporter Todd Halvorson found gathering dust in the many boxes stacked in his garage.