We’ll be putting FluPortal to bed on March 31st. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting funded the project to help pubmedia stations report on H1N1, so with this wave of swine flu winding up, it’s time for FluPortal to wrap up, too. You’ll still be able to visit the site, but we won’t be updating it any longer; it will stand as an archive. (Rekha will provide more details shortly.)
In tying up the project, we’ve tried to extract lessons that could be useful for future crisis websites modelled on FluPortal. Find out what we learned in our final report: “Crisis Coverage by Public Media: A Review of FluPortal and Recommendations for the Future.”
Each of us on the FluPortal team wrote up what we worked on day-to-day — and what we could recommend for future “crisis portals”: Rekha gives a detailed overview of the project. Josh explains how he built the site and shares tech tips any station webmaster could use. Ken lays out how he spread the word about FluPortal and solicited feedback. And I describe how we collected H1N1 information and blogged about it.
Many of the “lessons learned” will be useful primarily to teams building other “crisis portals.” But some of what we figured out at FluPortal could be directly useful to you: pubmedia reporters, news directors, and webmasters. In the next few days, we’ll be posting some condensed tips from the report that might help you cover future crises.
