Jim Carroll, one of the country's most savvy Internet gurus, took me to task the other day.
I had written a news story on how technology had fared during the power failure, which I said had "knocked tens of-millions of people back to the pre-digital age."
Tapping on his laptop while sitting poolside in Phoenix, where he and his family were stranded temporarily by Air Canada until the lights came on again in the East, he said that outside of the blackout area, "news and information servers from throughout Ontario are functioning, useful and stunningly full of good information."
He cited globeandmail.com, CBC.ca, canada.com, Flyertalk.com, 680news.com and CFRB.com, all of which were working "flawlessly."
He concluded that "I probably know more about what is going on in Ontario that most citizens. The Internet infrastructure is there and it is working in terms of serving up info. Indeed, we've been sitting here in our hotel room, listening to CFRB streaming for the past few hours to try to get a handle on what is going on."
I'm glad Mr. Carroll mentioned globeandmail.com. Like everyone else here, I was playing my little part in keeping the Web site up and running, and I know what we had to go through to keep us on-line.
When the power failed, our first thought was that it was just the building; a few phone calls later and we determined that it was not only us, but the entire city. Then we found out it had reached Ottawa, and all over the northeastern United States.
We had to find this out by phone. Our Reuters, Associated Press, Canadian Press and other news feeds flickered out along with half-written stories on the computer screens. All our TV sets had gone south as well. And being high tech, our radios are all streamed through the Internet.
Kenny Yum, our business editor, dashed downstairs to where globeandmail.com's servers are housed; they were running on auxiliary power, as many major computer systems are. But only the servers; when he commandeered a laptop, he was updating the site in pitch-blackness. He kept an open phone line to the newsroom, where the rest of us were furiously phoning around to get information, and feeding him the raw bits from our scribbled interviews.
Early on, I called a colleague, Marijane Shufro, who runs a small PR business from her mountaintop home in New Hampshire, and asked her to read some on-line news stories to me, from CNN.com and others. That was my first confirmation that the blackout reached as far as New York and Cleveland.
It felt odd for me, as a technology writer, to return to this old style of journalism. I felt a little silly asking people to read news stories to me over the phone.
It was then that the irony began to sink in: The Internet may have been wondrously conceived as being able to route around problems — especially outages like the one on Thursday — but what if there is no way to connect to it?
With no TV, radio, news feeds or Internet, we were right back where we were 10 or more years ago. Well, at least we still had e-mail in 1993, rough as it was.
It wasn't hard to keep our Web site going, just awkward. And we had to scramble. It's not hard — in fact, crises like this are the stuff journalists feed on.
But it was a slow process. We managed to keep Jim Carroll informed at his Phoenix poolside, but I don't know how many others we reached. Although I suspect he was right when he said he probably knew more about what was happening in Ontario than most citizens.
But the odd truth is that none of us creating the website knew how the page looked like, except for Kenny Yum, hunched over his laptop in the dark.
Meanwhile, IT technicians were busily patching computers in globeandmail.com's offices to auxiliary power from an ROB-TV news studio, which happens to be right next to our offices. In a separate makeshift newsroom, news editors put out the paper version of The Globe and Mail, which was delivered, heroically, to subscribers scant hours later.
The situation was rectified soon enough, without too much damage.
But it did suggest an answer to an updating of the old Zen question: If the Internet keeps working during a blackout but we're unable to read it, does it still make us informed?
Find Jack Kapica's previous columns.
