DISASTERS GIVE NEWSPAPER BUDGETS FITS: Papers in Florida, North Carolina hit with extra costs during hurricanes Floyd and Irene.

When Hurricane Floyd headed toward the Florida coast in September, Mark DeCotis, on-line editor at Florida Today in Melbourne, had a disaster plan: He moved to the side of the newsroom away from the plate glass windows and proceeded to file updates to the web site every hour.

His print colleagues had their plan, too. For starters, the Gannett Co. Inc. paper went to press early, getting an edition out the door in time to beat the hurricane and be of use to readers. Although the paper posted a note on the web site saying it had little idea how or when subsequent papers would be delivered, reporters and photographers fanned out across the area, while others were told to take care of their homes and families and then take off, out of the way of the storm.

In the end, Floyd headed north before striking land, leaving most of Melbourne unscathed -- excluding Florida Today's budget.

Hurricanes and other disasters don't fit cleanly into the budgeting process. And though the process of crunching numbers can anticipate some costs, an exciting year for a newsroom often means headaches for those who need to keep budgets under some sense of control.

"We certainly spent more money than we counted on," says Bob Stover, managing editor at Florida Today, as the tail end of Hurricane Irene passes his city. "We haven't totaled it up yet."

In Wilmington, N.C., costs haven't been totaled either, but editors there expect them to be substantial.

"Dennis and Irene threatened us on a Sunday," says Charles Anderson, executive editor of the Morning Star and the Sunday Star-News, referring to two of this season's hurricanes. "All the work on Sunday and much on Saturday was on overtime. It was about $14,000 last month for Floyd and will be about $10,000 for Irene."

The costs don't stop with salaries, either. Anderson says his paper has dealt with six hurricanes in 40 months, or three hurricane seasons, and has learned -- and spent -- a lot in the process.

"We've probably spent around $12,000 in laptops and cell phones, we've bought rain gear for the staff and waders for the photographers, we've bought [car] adapters for the laptops and phones," Anderson says. "We even spend about $150 to $200 a year to laminate copies of the disaster plan."

As far as page count and staff expenses incurred in covering the story after Floyd came through, Anderson says, "We just ran wide open for the following week."

Hurricane Irene, the third storm to come past Melbourne in the last six weeks, was much smaller than the much-ballyhooed Floyd, but still generated extra costs for Florida Today.

"We went up four pages for Irene, devoting seven pages to coverage," Stover says. "And we've gone up a couple times to shoot aerials, too."

Though Stover downplays the costs involved, he does have a laundry list of out-of-the-ordinary expenses, ranging from the aforementioned aerial photographs, to pizza and other food for the staff, to a drawerful of rain ponchos.

SUVS AND MICKY D'S

The Orlando Sentinel had some unusual expenses, compliments of Hurricane Floyd.

Bill Phillips, director of photography at the Tribune Co. paper, says he rented sport utility vehicles (SUV) for his teams of photographers and reporters before Dennis turned north, sparing the area. "We spent $5000 on SUV rentals for two days and sent our teams to five places around the area," Phillips says.

Because Floyd changed course, it turned out to be unnecessary, something Phillips couldn't predict. "They drove their SUVs up to the hotels and out to McDonald's and had a grand old time," he says.

Along with the SUVs and the fine, fine McDonald's meals, the paper also had to pay for the hotels as well as the laptops and cell phones given to the reporters and photographers dispatched by the Sentinel. The paper also provided 200 cots, scattered around the building for employees, and bottled water -- and put the cafeteria on a 24-hour schedule.

The paper printed an eight-page special edition -- essentially a wrapper around the morning paper -- which was distributed at 10 a.m. on the day Hurricane Floyd was supposed to be the worst. The special required two teams and extra staff members -- one to work on the daily, the other on the special.

In Jacksonville, the Florida Times-Union racked up overtime costs, too, Managing Editor Mike Richey says: "Floyd blew our overtime budget. It was in meltdown."

CAMPING OUT AT THE PAPER

Jacksonville had some problems the people in Orlando didn't face, namely the city's position on the coast and at the mouth of a river.

"We're surrounded by bridges that get shut down when sustained winds exceed 45 mph," Richey says. "We also have a lot of reporters who live on the islands. We were in the position of having a lot of production people who wouldn't be able to get in, so they -- and their families -- camped out here. We had 35 or 40 families here. Except for sleep time, it was production time, so we paid."

Richey also had other, by-now-usual expenses.

"We rented six four-by-fours so reporters could get out and get the story, and we paid about $500 or $600 for food," he says. With a nod to enterprising reporters, he added, "In addition to the pizzas, they found a delivery sushi place. Don't ask me where, in a city that was shut down, but we had sushi delivered."

Richey also had a team of about nine people from production, design and editing ready to go elsewhere to produce the paper. The Times-Union had an agreement with the Orlando Sentinel as well as with a sister Morris Communications Corp. paper in Savannah, Ga., so they could get a paper out even if the home office was out of action.

The question was, where should the team go?

"If Floyd hit north of us, we'd send them to Orlando. If it hit south of us, they would go to Savannah," he says. "At eight that night, we sent them to Orlando. They took some Macs with them, checked into a hotel, had a good night's sleep and drove back the next day. And it was all on overtime."

Producing a newspaper under any circumstances is a juggling act that puts the old standbys on the Ed Sullivan show to shame. Throw in a flood, failed phone lines, power outages and a staff scattered to the four winds, and it is nigh onto impossible.

In order to minimize those problems and cut waste, most newspapers have prepared disaster plans. Some papers actually go so far as to test them out, holding dry runs

and hunting for problems. In the '70s and '80s, though, these plans often involved only production and circulation departments, with little input from newsrooms.

The widespread reliance on computers, combined with a rising awareness of their fallibility, has prompted a wider involvement in disaster planning. But this planning often doesn't include budgeting.

"You can't budget for it," says John Meyer, managing editor at the Wilmington paper, which is owned by the New York Times Co. "You can go in and say we're going to have one hurricane or snowstorm or whatever a year, and then you usually don't. These things go over and above the budget."

Anderson, Meyer's boss, echoed that sentiment: "When we have a hurricane, we cover it. It's up to the publisher to explain it."

Newspapers across the country have had ample opportunity to dust off their plans and see if they actually work. On the West Coast, there have been mudslides, forest fires and earthquakes. In the Midwest and Northeast, it's been blizzards and floods. In the Southeast, tropical storms and hurricanes have tested many a newspaper.

Places without disaster plans were forced to come up with one. Papers with plans fine-tuned them. And though costs are not at the head of the list, most disaster plans pay some heed to them.

"If people are on the schedule, they are expected to work," Meyer says. "Otherwise, they don't get paid."

Richey, too, is looking over his disaster plan with an eye on overtime costs. "If we can keep better track of our reporters, maybe we can have one stick his head out of his door for an hour or two instead of having him come in, sleep on the floor here and get paid overtime for the whole thing," he says.

At the Tampa Tribune, Larry Fletcher has prepared an elaborate disaster plan.

"We have lists of equipment we want people to have, and plans for where we want them to be," says Fletcher, the hurricane preparedness guru at the Media General Inc. paper. "We have plans and scenarios for everything, the 'do this if that happens, and that if this' sort of planning. A difference of a few miles or high tide, and the scenario changes."

Like Meyer, Fletcher spends the money to have the plans laminated so they will withstand the wind and water of a hurricane. Since a disaster brings out all hands, even those not normally involved in spot news coverage, Fletcher's list includes a range of normally mundane items that might get lost in the excitement, things that also have an eye on efficiency and holding down waste.

Rule No. Two on Fletcher's list is that "reporters should talk to their editors EVERY TWO HOURS" (his emphasis). Rule No. Three reads, "Go to where you're assigned. If what we thought would be going on there isn't, call an editor for directions. DO NOT take off on another track without checking in because you hear something on the radio and think there might be news there. We may already have the situation staffed. You'd be wasting precious time."

What's Fletcher's Rule No. One? "Take pens that don't run in the rain."

TUNING THE PLAN

Adjusting to changing scenarios is key to disaster coverage, according to Wilmington's Meyer.

"Our plans focused on things like coastal damage, storm surge and high winds," he says. "But one of the big stories (with Floyd) has been inland flooding."

Hurricane Floyd dumped torrential rains not just on Wilmington, but for hundreds of miles inland, flooding rivers, roads and farms, and cutting off power for days in areas that thought themselves immune. The mammoth inland flooding prompted Meyer to redeploy his forces.

Anderson's house was flooded, giving the paper an edge on keeping the human side in its coverage. "I can remind people that it's not just numbers or a headline or a story," he says. "It's people we're writing about."

The Tampa Tribune, on Florida's west coast, has been tuning its plan for years. With a physical plant located at the juncture of the Hillsborough River and Hillsborough Bay that's just spitting distance from Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, the paper has always put a lot of work into its disaster plan, then coming back and seeing what worked and what didn't.

"Last year we took a really big look at it," says Fletcher, a senior editor at the Tribune. "Georges was coming up the [Gulf] coast, and we were looking at a very large storm coming up Tampa Bay at high tide. That's when we ended up taking a companywide look at it."

Like the other papers, Fletcher says a hurricane or other disaster was something that had to be covered, even if it was outside his normal coverage area.

"If a hurricane is about to hit outside our area, we send a team of reporters," he says. "We send them with a four-wheel drive, laptops and cell phones. We chased one to New Orleans last year, and in other years into the Carolinas."

There isn't necessarily a direct payback from this expense. As Florida Today's Stover put it, "People expect it of us. There is a confidence in our readers that we will tell them in advance what to expect and how to deal with it, and afterward, what happened, and chronicle what's going on in their lives."