Bits Blog: New York Start-Ups Become Officemates in Hurricane Sandy Aftermath

As the city of New York struggles to get back online in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, many companies and start-ups are trying to regain their footing and restart operations.

We’re taking over the Hearst cafeteria twitter.com/jonsteinberg/s…

— Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg) October 31, 2012

The problem is, much of Lower Manhattan, where many are located, is still without power and Internet. But entrepreneurs, engineers and developers aren’t letting that stop them. They are camping out in one another’s apartments and offices in an attempt to still get a day’s work done. Of course, any place with a humming Wi-Fi connection, whether a coffee shop or an Apple Store, seems to be drawing displaced workers eager to get back into the swing of things. But camaraderie spurred by the storm seemed to knit the New York start-up scene together a bit tighter.

A few Kickstarter employees spent the day esconced in the Chelsea offices of Boxee, an Internet TV start-up, taking advantage of a speedy wireless connection and an espresso machine. Some Foursquare employees relocated to a friend’s offices in midtown Manhattan, not far from the temporary offices that BuzzFeed, a social media news site, set up in the Hearst Tower building. Actual co-working spaces, including one called the Secret Clubhouse, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, were taking in stranded refugees from Gawker, Tumblr, SpokenLayer and other companies, who either could not get into the city for work or whose offices were still without power.

It’s not just technology companies who are becoming impromptu office buddies. Bill Werde, the editorial director of Billboard, posted a message on Twitter thanking QuadGraphics, a design firm, for letting his company work out of its offices for the day.

Bits Blog: What Cellphone Carriers Say About Hurricane Sandy Recovery

John Minchillo/Associated Press People waiting to use payphones in Brooklyn on Wednesday.

6:12 p.m. | Updated Adding the latest statement from Sprint.

Three days into the aftermath of Sandy, wireless service is still lacking in parts of New York City and other hard-hit areas, according to people living in those areas. The carriers have been struggling to keep their services running, mostly because of the loss of power. But they say they have been making progress. Here’s what they have to report.

Verizon Wireless said its network improved a bit. On Thursday, its corporate spokesman, Thomas Pica, said 96 percent of its network “from Maine to Virginia” was operating, up from 94 percent on Wednesday.

While that looks like a great number, Verizon is describing the whole Northeast, even the areas that didn’t have network problems to begin with. Another way to look at those numbers: 4 percent of Verizon’s cell sites are not operating in the Northeast, down from 6 percent Wednesday. From Wednesday to Thursday, Verizon shrank the portion of its network that was not operating by 33 percent. The company’s statement:

In terms of our network, we have seen continued improvement overnight with now more than 96 percent of our cell sites in service and serving our customers in the impacted area, including some of the hardest hit areas of the Northeast.

Verizon Wireless continues to deploy its mobile disaster recovery and emergency network assets, including cell sites on wheels and mobile generators, to fortify our network throughout the Northeast where telecommunications infrastructure, utility/power and/or flood damage are issues.

AT&T made a vague statement about its progress in troubled areas and declined to provide statistics. But it said it had made an agreement with Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, to roll out RVs where people can charge their phones. Mr. Bloomberg has said AT&T would also provide satellite hot spots to shore up its network, although the details on that are not yet clear. AT&T’s statement:

Disaster response teams from AT&T are fully engaged and making progress in restoring wireless and wireline services in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. The company is closely aligned with state and local officials and emergency response teams, monitoring service disruptions and coordinating our restoration efforts.

The vast majority of our cell sites in the Northeast are online and working. We are making progress in areas that were especially hard-hit, including New York City and New Jersey, where flooding, power loss, transportation and debris all pose challenges. We are working around the clock, including conducting ongoing damage assessment, rapid deployment of generators and equipment, and movement of key personnel from around the region and country, such as engineers and technicians, in order to restore service as quickly as possible.

Sprint was clearer about the status of its network, specifically in troubled areas, saying 20 percent of its network was still down in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It said on Thursday that it had made improvements but still faces challenges.

In New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, Sprint’s network is more than 80 percent operational, but challenges remain for the hardest hit areas of these states, including metropolitan New York City and portions of the New Jersey coast. In New York City, for example, approximately three-quarters of the network is operational, but challenges remain in obtaining commercial power, backhaul connections, and gaining safe access to cell sites.

T-Mobile USA, too, had some details. It said on Wednesday night that 15 percent of its network in New York City was down, and that in Staten Island 20 percent was still down.

T-Mobile reports good progress in restoring network service to areas in the path of devastation from Hurricane Sandy. Network technicians are working as quickly as possible to restore service by deploying generators to cell sites where power outages continue and to repair damage caused by high winds and flooding.

T-Mobile is working closely with the NYC Department of Emergency Management and with FEMA to gain safe access to areas of the City where storm damage was extensive, including parts of Staten Island and lower Manhattan. We’re happy to report that network restoration in NYC is now at 85 percent and Staten Island has improved to 80 percent. The agreement between T-Mobile with AT&T to share networks in N.Y. and N.J. is already providing customers of both AT&T and T-Mobile improved experiences in the hardest-hit areas.

Bits Blog: Hurricane Sandy Knocks Out Gawker and Other News Sites

A screenshot from Gawker’s Web site on Tuesday morning.

The power failures that swept through the East Coast, including large swaths of Manhattan, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, darkened millions of homes, as well as several major Web sites, including the hive of sites in the Gawker Media network, including Jezebel and Gizmodo. The Huffington Post and social media news site Buzzfeed also went dark.

The sites appeared to go off around 7 p.m., not long after Hurricane Sandy made its first contact with land. The sites seemed to share a common Internet service provider, Datagram. It is housed in the financial district in Lower Manhattan, which lost power on Monday evening. Although Datagram uses backup electricity generators in the event of a storm, its offices were flooded, knocking those machines out as well.

Buzzfeed alerted its readers to the outages on its blog and said it was able to get portions of the site back online with the help of Akamai, a site that hosts its content at various servers distributed around the globe. The company also encouraged readers to follow the site’s Tumblr and Twitter feeds for updates.

Gawker went dark Monday night after its servers were knocked out by flooding. The company has been updating its readers using Twitter and is encouraging people to follow the site on Tumblr for news and updates.

On a message posted to Twitter, the company promised it was “continuing to work on our servers and will be back online as soon as is possible. We miss you already. Stay dry.”

Media Decoder Blog: How Hurricane Sandy Slapped the Sarcasm Out of Twitter

Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters People congregate on Tuesday in front of a building in Manhattan that still has wireless Internet access.

Twitter is often a caldron of sarcasm, much of it funny, little of it useful. But as a social medium based on short-burst communication, Twitter can change during large events — users talk about “watching” the spectacle unfold across their screens. It is, after all, a real-time service, which means that you can “see” what is happening as it happens.

As a media reporter, my Twitter feed has a strong Manhattan bias, serving as a sandbox for media and technology types that I follow. Under normal circumstances, we show up on Twitter to preen, self-promote and crack wise about the latest celebrity scene. If that New York cohort has a soul — insert your own joke here — you could see into it on Twitter.

And then along came Hurricane Sandy. For most of Monday, people on Twitter were watching an endless loop of hurricane coverage on television and having some fun with it, which is the same thing that happens when the Grammys or the Super Bowl is on. But as the storm bore down, Twitter got busy and very, very serious.

It is hard to data-mine the torrent – some estimates suggested there were three and a half million tweets with the hashtag #Sandy — but my feed quickly moved from the prankish to the practical in a matter of hours as landfall approached. I asked Simon Dumenco, who writes the Media Guy column for Advertising Age and is well versed in the dark arts of Twitter analytics, about the tonal shift via e-mail.

“I kept a close eye on the Top 10 Trends chart as Sandy was bearing down on the East Coast, and there was no shortage of gravitas on Twitter,” he wrote. “The last time I checked before losing power in my Manhattan apartment, seven of the 10 trends were Sandy-related — New Jersey, ConEd, Hudson River, Lower Manhattan, FEMA, Queens and #SandyRI. Clicking on each of them yielded plenty of information.”

At my home in suburban New Jersey, a 30-foot limb dropped down at 4 p.m., so the illusion that this was an event happening to someone else quickly dissipated. And at 8 p.m., just when we hunkered down in front of the big screen, the house went dark. This very large event would not be televised. We built a fire and sat around a hand-cranked radio, but I was diverted over and over by the little campfire of Twitter posts on my smartphone.

It was hard to resist. Twitter not only keeps you in the data stream, but because you can contribute and re-tweet, you feel as if you are adding something even though Mother Nature clearly has the upper hand. The activity of it, the sharing aspect, the feeling that everyone is in the boat and rowing, is far different from consuming mass media.

Because my Internet connection was poor, so much of the rich media — amazing videos and pictures documenting the devastation — was lost to me. In true media throwback fashion, Hurricane Sandy was something I experienced as a text event, but I don’t feel as if I missed much. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel inundation, the swamping of the Lower East Side, the huge problems at New York hospitals, the stranding of the holdouts in Atlantic City, all became apparent on Twitter in vivid detail.

At the same time, much of the seen-it-all and isn’t-it-dumb seemed to leak out of my Twitter stream. (The message that earnestness was nascent and irony was on the run seemed widespread — the servers of Gawker, the hilarious and ill-mannered Manhattan snark machine, were drowned and the site went down. Still is, as a matter of fact.)

Many local television stations did an amazing job and the big cable news outlets played large, but the template of the rain-and-wind-lashed correspondent shouting to a blow-dried anchor back in the studio has its limits. The local radio stations were nimble and careful, including WCBS, WNYC and WINS, but they were part of the story on occasion, with transformers going down and hurricane-induced malfunctions along the way.

Manhattan is the epicenter of a number of big blogs, including Gawker, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, but each had to pivot to Twitter, among other platforms, as their servers succumbed to encroaching waters. (At a conference last year, Andrew Fitzgerald of Twitter wondered about the utility of the platform if the end of the world arrived in the form of an alien attack. The people participating in the discussion pointed out that the lightweight infrastructure of Twitter and its durability would probably make it very practical should end times draw nigh.)

In the early days of Twitter, there was a very big debate about whether reporters should break news on Twitter. That debate now seems quaint. Plenty of short-burst nuggets of news went out from reporters on Twitter on Monday night and they were quickly followed by more developed reports on-air or on the Web. There were abundant news posts from @antderosa of Reuters, @acarvin of NPR and @brianstelter of The New York Times, among many others, but there were also tweets from ordinary people relaying very important information about their blocks, their neighborhoods, their boroughs. I knew what was happening to many of my friends as far away as the District of Columbia and as close as the guy up the block. There is no more important news than that.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, wrote in a note: “To me the most basic act of journalism there can be is: ‘I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.’ Or: ‘I heard it, you didn’t, let me tell you what Bloomberg said.’ And the fact is Twitter is rife with such. That is why it is basic in a sprawling emergency.”

Twitter is a global platform, but it can be relentlessly and remarkably local should the occasion — or crisis — arise, as Choire Sicha, the founder of The Awl, pointed out.

“Twitter was phenomenally useful microscopically — I was literally finding out information about how much flooding the Zone A block next to me was having, hour by hour — and macroscopically, too — I didn’t even have to turn on the TV once the whole storm,” he wrote. He pointed out, as have many others, that there was abundant misinformation rendered in 140 characters as well, which reminded @kbalfe of another rapid-fire medium, actually. “Was a lot like cable news: indispensable … yet full of errors.”

In fact, some people used the friction-free, democratic nature of the medium to intentionally stir panic. On Tuesday, BuzzFeed identified — “doxed” in the nomenclature of the Web — a person they said they said was the guy behind @comfortablysmug, an account that suggested that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had been trapped by rising waters, that Con Edison was shutting down all of Manhattan and that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded.

BuzzFeed identified the person behind those tweets as Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund analyst and the campaign manager of Christopher R. Wight, this year’s Republican candidate to represent New York’s 12th Congressional District. (Mr. Tripathi has since apologized and resigned from the campaign.) Because his Twitter feed was followed by a number of New York-based reporters, the misinformation spread quickly, although John Herrman, also writing in BuzzFeed, suggested that “Twitter is a Truth Machine,” writing that “during Sandy, the Internet spread — then crushed — rumors at breakneck speed.”

Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of The New York Times, said in a message on Twitter that whatever the quality of the feed at any given moment, it was riveting: “Impossible to tear one’s eyes from, with occasional nuggets of helpfulness amid constant stream of flotsam and jetsam.”

The day after the storm, Twitter shook off much of the earnestness and reverted back to its snippy self, although the storm’s death toll and the quest for resources made it a more serious village common than usual. In an e-mail, Peter Kafka of AllThings D, considered the value of Twitter in a big news event by running it through the way-back machine.

“Would it have been better during 9/11 if we had Twitter?” he wrote. “Plenty of bad and good info spread that day, by mouth, web and TV. My hunch is Twitter would do the same. The difference? Twitter allows my friends/like-minded people/people I like to feel a bit more connected. And that’s a lot better than less connected.”

Calling it a “pop-up town square” for the affected area, @editorialiste said in a message on Twitter, it was “a great place to laugh, cry, argue, sympathize together.”

Kurt Andersen, radio host and writer, said that the combination of utility and sociability made Twitter a remarkable informative shelter during the storm.

“I’ve never liked or used the word ‘community’ about people communicating online, but the Sandy conversations seemed worthy of the word, actually communal,” he wrote. “And given the circumstances, it really could’ve only happened online.”