to devise the workflow and communication plan for you and your colleagues to work together. Some key questions to consider and answer include: • How you will communicate what you’re doing with the rest of your organization? • Who is in charge of making the final call on what gets shared/published/broadcast? • Is there a paywall that needs to come down in an emergency? • Will you have a dedicated section on your website? • What does your technical support team need to know/do? What about your website producers? Those handling social media? • Are your transmitters and other critical infrastructure safe? At the ABC we’ve developed a Situation Report that is distributed widely through our email system when there is a significant emergency. This ensures that everyone has an idea of the threat and the ABC’s response and who is managing the emergency internally. The “Sitrep” is a useful tool not just to communicate internally but also as a checklist for managers when there is a danger of paralysis from information overload.aa Email distribution groups of key personnel in each state have been set up and are regularly maintained for ease of distribution. You can also consider SMS distribution lists and other ways to pushing information to your people. (We use Whispir, an internal email/text tool that can deliver emergency alerts for breaking news.) During a major emergency, such as the recent New South Wales bushfires, we ask the rest of the network to not call the team dealing with the emergency for interviews about the emergency. We also ask that teams outside of the affected area not call emergency authorities so that they are not overloaded. Sometimes we allocate someone to deal with outside requests specifically so that our team can get on with delivering emergency information to the people under threat. When it comes to verification, the key piece to communicate is the workflow for how content and information will be gathered, checked and then approved or denied for publication. Who does the checking and who reviews that work? How do you ensure that each piece of content an benefit from many eyes, while still enabling you to move quickly and get important information out? Recovery broadcasting Organizations always want to cover and respond to an emergency during the height of the disas- aa For more on this, see “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande « 90