The Must-Have When Reporting on Disasters: A Satellite Phone

As a comprehensive country reporter, you often find yourself caught in breaking news conditions. What tech do you use when masking mass shootings? How approximately when covering fires?

My previous job became Southeast Asia correspondent, and I might lug around a satellite tv for pc cellphone on trips to distant places like northern Myanmar. When I arrived in San Francisco 3 years ago, I didn’t think I might need it. But the California wildfires of the final two years knocked out cell coverage, mainly the wine country fires of 2017.

So the satellite cellphone became imperative for submitting on tight deadlines. I placed the smartphone, which is set to the dimensions of a computer, on the roof of the car, pointed it in the direction of the satellite TV for PC, and ran a cable via the window into the front seat, where I plugged it into my pc.

When I protected mass shootings, some of the people I interviewed were involved in approximate privacy. To talk securely, we used Signal, the encrypted telephone app. Do you need to have access while the Big One hits California?

When I arrived in California, I soon discovered that everybody here is conditioned to keep an emergency earthquake bag in an automobile or somewhere close to the door. In addition to my packed suitcase, I carry a satellite telephone in the trunk. I’m assuming that cellular networks may be badly disrupted by a large earthquake, which became undoubtedly the case once I experienced the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Finding electricity may also be a hassle right now, after a big quake, so I’m relying on the cigarette lighters in the automobile to serve as a generator.

We have satellite telephones within the San Francisco bureau, and we’ve distributed them to staff participants who stay in San Francisco and throughout the bay.

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What tech device do you dislike the most for reporting?

I used to rely upon Twitter closely after I blanketed Southeast Asia — it changed into the best way to observe occasions within the ten countries I was covering. But I locate it much less useful in Northern California for information coverage.

Twitter is very clannish and ideological, and it appears like a platform for self-promoting and distinctive feature trumpeting greater than anything else. The way people tweet jogs my memory of ways some humans speak when they step as much as a lectern at City Council meetings — seeking out applause more than conveying data. It’s the platform’s character, of direction, and I’m as responsible as the subsequent man — if this rant had been a tweet and it was given no retweets, I could feel a tinge of sorrow.

So Twitter stinks. What tech gear have reporters benefited from? I locate Dataminr beneficial. That’s the enterprise that scrapes the net for breaking news and then sends it to you in real-time. It’s a set of rules that does a good job of alerting you to shootings, crashes, scandals, big political news — the matters we want to realize approximately.

I also use a program that the veteran Times tech reporter John Markoff helped me with directly. It’s referred to as Audionote, and it’s a phrase processor and voice recorder melded into one. So in case you’re at a news conference or doing a sit-down interview, you can record it. Then you could go back to the textual content, click on the phrases, and listen to the recording from that second. It’s an excellent device for cut-off date writing.

What tech product are your kids currently enthusiastic about? What do they do with it? I’ve been trying to show all the household electronics into language learning gear, with limited achievement: TV at some point of the week is quality as lengthy because it’s in French or Thai. (The children had been born in Thailand, and we’re a Francophone circle of relatives.) That didn’t make certain paintings, because as quickly as we weren’t looking, they opened a display in English.

I switched our Alexa to French. However, we decided that she is a lot less entertaining than a French robot. We couldn’t get her to play 20 Questions in French. I gave up and switched her to English with a British accent.

But all of that could be a sideshow to the Daily Battle of the Screens. It never ceases to amaze me that outdoors, there can be a blue sky, bright California sunshine, and plenty of open areas to discover. However, the kids prefer to flip open a computer and surf YouTube.