Creating a loop: publish information, listen for what is still unclear, verify it and update the coverage accordingly Community-rooted newsrooms have an urgent role to play during moments of collective uncertainty. Often embedded in — and led by members of — the communities they serve, these newsrooms build deep trust and lasting relationships that become especially important when information is rapidly changing and access to timely, relevant updates can be critical. But too often, these newsrooms are staffed by only a handful of journalists, with even fewer resources to respond to a fast-moving crisis in real time. How can they provide timely, verified information to the people who need it most? It’s a question I’ve been trying to solve since 2024. At the time, I was leading El Tecolote, a small bilingual community newsroom serving Latino communities in San Francisco. With usually just two to four editorial staffers available at any given time, we knew we would soon need to respond to direct threats facing our communities. Working-class and immigrant Latino communities are often among those most affected by extreme weather, natural disasters and public health emergencies, while their information needs can be overlooked in mainstream crisis response. Meeting that need required us to develop a nimble strategy built around live updates, multiplatform distribution, community input and partnerships. After responding to several community crises, our team developed a basic playbook for delivering timely, useful and verified information in real time. Here are some of the practices that worked for us. ## Live blog — a quick explainer At the heart of live updates is timely, verified information. One useful format for organizing it is the tried-and-true live blog, which remains a powerful way to deliver critical information as it develops through short, mobile-friendly updates. The basic live blog format can be simple: * **Headline:** Continually update it with the biggest development while keeping important search terms near the top. _Example: Live updates: Major storm headed to San Francisco_ * **Lead photo:** Swap this as major developments change so the page visually reflects the latest news. * **Introduction:** In one to three short paragraphs at the top of the body content, give an overview of what is happening and key resources. Keep this short so it is easily scannable on a mobile phone. * **Individual updates:** Keep each news or resource update short and mobile-friendly. If an item requires several paragraphs of explanation, it may warrant a separate story. Use a basic format like: * [TIME] Short headline describing the development * One to three sentences explaining what changed, what has been verified, what resources are available and what is actionable. Depending on who you’re trying to reach, a traditional live blog may not be the best publishing format. But its structure — short, timely, verified updates — can still anchor your coverage. Behind the scenes, those updates can be organized in one shared Google Doc or Slack channel that acts as the newsroom’s source of facts when publishing across different platforms and communities. Editors can review and clear core information there, then staff can choose the updates most pertinent to the community they are serving and adapt them to the platform they are using. El Tecolote used WhatsApp Communities’ layered infrastructure to provide live updates during crises, using the Announcements channel for broad emergency alerts and pop-up group chats for smaller, more targeted information needs. ## Live updates on WhatsApp Communities For newsrooms trying to reach Spanish-speaking or immigrant audiences, that same live-update structure can be adapted to WhatsApp. I wrote more extensively about the platform in my previous column, but during a crisis, its layered infrastructure can be especially useful: * Broadcast updates: Deliver mass real-time alerts during major emergencies * Targeted groups: Create pop-up spaces for smaller-scale crisis needs That same live-blog logic can become a series of short broadcast posts, targeted group updates and direct responses to individual questions. Multimedia features like voice notes, video, maps and polls can also help make information more accessible and interactive. Regardless of whether live updates are published via a traditional live blog or directly on WhatsApp, the fundamentals are the same: stay brief, actionable, timely and clear about what has been verified. ## How to incorporate email and SMS Email and SMS are also critical ways to get information directly to communities without relying on an algorithm. They are usually better suited to lower-frequency communication than a live blog or WhatsApp feed. Email, in particular, can work well for summarizing major developments or directing people toward a live blog where they can follow updates in real time. SMS is especially useful for urgent, actionable information that people may need while they are on the go or have limited bandwidth. Rather than trying to reproduce every live update through these channels, reserve them for the most important developments and use them to point people toward whichever platform has the most complete and current information. While El Tecolote used WhatsApp to provide live Spanish-language updates for immigrant communities, the team also published videos, visuals and breaking-news updates on social media to reach younger, more digitally engaged audiences across the Bay Area. ## Define the communities you are best equipped to serve Because community newsrooms place so much focus on building and sustaining trusted relationships before a crisis, once a crisis hits, that pre-established trust can become a force multiplier: people are more likely to turn to your newsroom, share your reporting and bring you questions about what they need to know next. When deciding how to respond to a crisis, one of the most important questions is: Who are you uniquely equipped to serve that may not already be well served? At El Tecolote, we served a broad bilingual Latino audience, much of which preferred to consume news and information in English. But we knew our crisis-response strategy could have the greatest impact by focusing more intentionally on monolingual Spanish speakers, who are often left out of mainstream information distribution efforts. That focus led us to launch a WhatsApp Community, a platform our community already used, and provide real-time information in Spanish. At our smallest scale, a single person could scan, verify and publish live updates in Spanish on WhatsApp. With more people available, we could expand the response to additional audiences. For example, another audience we uniquely served was younger, English-dominant Latinos, who we reached primarily through video and visual-first news on Instagram, where we had already built a growing following of more than 10,000 people. With enough capacity, that could become a secondary audience during a crisis, with one person focused on Spanish-language WhatsApp updates and another adapting the same reporting and visuals for social. Being this specific also means letting go of trying to serve every audience during a breaking-news event, especially when other newsrooms, organizations and trusted messengers are already equipped to do that well. Language and ethnicity are only two ways to think about defining your audience. A newsroom could make similar decisions based on neighborhood, income, age or other factors that shape how specific communities access timely information during a crisis. The more specific you can be about who you are trying to reach, the easier it becomes to decide what information to prioritize, where to publish it and what not to spend your limited resources doing. While larger newsrooms may have the resources to capture broad audiences, small newsrooms have an opportunity to find the communities who are most likely to fall through the cracks — and build their response around them. WhatsApp Communities allowed El Tecolote to receive public replies on individual updates, giving the team a way to quickly answer questions, clarify information and respond to misinformation in real time. ## Loop in community questions throughout the process Especially for small newsrooms serving specific communities, being intentional about inviting participation and questions from impacted people is key to making sure coverage stays responsive to what they actually need to know. If you’re using a traditional live blog, consider turning on and actively monitoring the comments section. If you’re using WhatsApp Communities, consider opening the space for group participation or providing a clear way for people to message the newsroom directly. Moderation can sound like one more burden for an already stretched newsroom. But in my experience crisis conversations often brought more earnest questions, firsthand observations and requests for clarification than trolling or abusive commentary. That does not eliminate the need for moderation, but it can make audience participation especially valuable during fast-moving coverage. For SMS and email, soliciting input can be more straightforward because responses come back through private, one-to-one channels. Ask people directly what they are seeing, what they are confused about and what information they still need. Then use those questions to shape the coverage itself. If several people are asking the same thing, that is a signal that the answer may belong in your next live update. The goal is to create a loop: publish information, listen for what is still unclear, verify it and update the coverage accordingly. Mission Local and El Tecolote partnered on live updates during an October 2025 immigration-enforcement scare in the Bay Area. Mission Local published an English-language live blog, while El Tecolote shared Spanish-language updates and responded to community questions through its WhatsApp Community. ## Partnerships, partnerships, partnerships! There is only so much a small newsroom can do, even though many punch far above their weight during moments of crisis. To really scale the work, look for partnerships with other newsrooms, nonprofits, community leaders and trusted messengers that can help meet the information needs of more communities without duplicating efforts. Newsrooms are traditionally siloed from one another and competition is often the norm, but especially during a crisis, collaboration can help limited staff cover more ground. During the October 2025 immigration-enforcement scare, El Tecolote partnered with Mission Local on a shared response. Mission Local led an English-language live blog, while our newsroom focused on translating, adapting and distributing verified information in Spanish through WhatsApp. That division of labor allowed each newsroom to focus on the audience it was best positioned to serve rather than replicating the same work. During those tense 48 hours, our WhatsApp Community grew from a few hundred members to nearly 1,000 as people shared the updates with friends and family. The same principle can and should extend beyond newsrooms, since service providers, grassroots organizations and trusted community leaders often have information, expertise or distribution networks that journalists do not. Of course, this takes relationship-building before a crisis hits. But when resources are limited and information needs are high, those relationships can become a critical part of a newsroom’s ability to help the communities that need it most.

Repairability means making it possible—and ideally easy—to repair a product. A repairable product is designed with disassembly in mind.

Repairability means making it possible—and ideally easy—to repair a product. A repairable product is designed with disassembly in mind.

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.