Media coverage of the recent Haitian earthquake illustrates how quickly and effectively digital outlets can disseminate content. The web offers an opportunity to provide greater news depth than ever, while new digital technologies facilitate traditional broadcast coverage.

As reported last issue, Toronto’s PTV Productions went to Haiti immediately following the Jan. 12 earthquake to shoot material for its three-part TVO doc Inside Disaster and companion website insidedisaster.com. The doc will trace how the Red Cross responds to such a calamity.

PTV had a crew led by Nadine Pequeneza, the director, embedded with the humanitarian organization while another tracked the plight of victims who had yet to receive any assistance. The latter group, led by photographer/videographer/blogger Nico Jolliet, came up with amazing content that was uploaded daily to the website.

Jolliet would sit atop the Canadian Embassy with his MacBook Pro assembling fresh content, including highly compressed QuickTime videos, which he would then send via satellite modem. A rotating team of three back home at PTV would pick up the files and distribute the content not only on its own site, which is supported by the Bell Fund and the CTF, but also through top social-networking sites YouTube, Facebook and Flickr.

PTV is not only willing to share its content with other organizations – it’s asking them to take it. The prodco posts photos and videos online under a Creative Commons licence, meaning that, except for commercial purposes, anyone can repurpose the content as they see fit. Among those that have taken advantage are CTV and the online Real News Network.

Similarly, CBC News is using the web to add context and perspective to stories it airs on The National. The pubcaster’s first reporters in the earthquake zone, Paul Hunter and Susan Ormiston, filed ongoing ‘Haiti Report’ blog entries in which they discuss not only news stories but also the decisions journalists make, such as what to show on air and what not to show.

‘It’s a behind-the-scenes look at what’s going on, and it helps to foster engagement with the audience,’ explains Rachel Nixon, CBC News’ director of digital media. ‘It’s a good opportunity to provide a bit more transparency into the process.’

Journalists in the digital age are by necessity multi-taskers. Filing for TV is not enough. Hunter also joined Ormiston in an online Q&A and contributed pictures to galleries. Meanwhile, producer Angela Naus has been active on Twitter and was asked by followers if she had information about specific families.

For a crisis of this magnitude, news organizations step outside of their usual professional detachment to provide a public service. One of CBC’s initiatives has been to ask Canadians with missing family and friends in Haiti to send photos along with the names of those individuals and where they were last seen. This information formed an open online missing-persons gallery, which the pubcaster has promoted via Twitter, Facebook, CBC News Network, and CBC Radio. Hundreds of submissions were collected.

‘It was a very effective method of getting the word out about people who are missing,’ Nixon says. ‘We made contact with everyone who submitted photos, and we’ve heard some success stories – people who have been found alive, others who have unfortunately died.’

A byproduct of this project is that the CBC has become aware of many compelling human stories, some of which it could then pursue for the TV outlet.

CTV’s online offering has included the expected news coverage as well as Tweets from TV/broadband producer Mike McKenna, a list of missing Canadians, on-demand availability of the Canada for Haiti special produced with Global and CBC, and links to charitable organizations. The video news clips, repurposed from CTV News Channel and CP24, could not have been produced with such immediacy if not for recent digital technology advancements.

Gone are the days of TV reporting as a ‘two-ton pencil,’ so called for the weight of equipment once needed to be mobilized. CTV and other news agencies use INMARSAT’s Broadband Global Area Network, which enables reporters in remote areas – including places where Internet connections don’t exist or have been compromised – to send audio-video feeds via satellite and a portable terminal that fits in a suitcase. In the days immediately following the quake, CTV News’ Tom Walters spoke live on camera from Port-au-Prince using the BGAN system.

The technology is not perfect and, quality-wise it seems on par with Skype. The video occasionally breaks down or is out of sync, but it’s an option that wasn’t available five years ago. ‘It’s very acceptable as a first response reporter live on the ground,’ says Robert Hurst, president of CTV News.

Where Internet access has been available, CTV has also used Streambox, which allows live on-location content to be compressed and sent over Internet Protocol.

‘We found a facility and a hotel that was between the Port-au-Prince airport and the downtown area that had not been damaged and was running electricity through a diesel generator and still had Internet connectivity to the telephone system,’ Hurst explains.

For the first couple of days of its coverage, CTV was able to share a satellite uplink with Radio-Canada, which had flown in one of its systems. CTV has its own portable uplinks, which require about three suitcases, but they had already been deployed in Afghanistan and in Vancouver for the upcoming Olympics.

‘The exciting thing for CTV News and other worldwide news agencies is that we don’t need the two-ton pencil anymore,’ Hurst says. ‘We are using stuff that we can carry in one suitcase to get first response out.’