The next time you find yourself complaining about the source who didn’t call back or did but then droned on and on when all you needed was one pithy quote, thank your lucky stars that’s all you have to whine about.

National Public Radio reporters covering the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake are sleeping in sleeping bags outside and bringing in their own food and water so they have enough to eat and drink.

You can read the story behind the story of NPR’s Haiti coverage in NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard’s Jan. 15 post on the radio network’s Website.

One of the staffers Shepard interviewed was NPR deputy managing editor Stu Seidel who told her:

“This is a terrible, terrible story. Even though all of us have a lot of experience, we are still making this up as we go along. What’s in my head right now is who will be in the next group that I send in this weekend. This story is going to take a toll on the people we send there if we have them reporting constantly in a relentless way.”

NPR isn’t the only media outlet sharing a behind-the-scenes look at their Haiti coverage. Here are are few other accounts, plus one that questions whether news agencies are doing the right thing by sending so many people into an area with massive travel bottlenecks and limited supplies:

The Miami Herald – In the latest installment of its weekly “Inside the Newsroom” video, Miami Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhall talks about the paper’s quake coverage and “how to do justice to a tragedy of such enormous proportions.” According to Gyllenhall, 10 Herald staffers are covering the tragedy for the paper and its website, Spanish language and mobile editions, focusing on two main themes: how to explain what’s happening, and how the rest of the world can help with the recovery.

The New York Times – The paper used its Lens blog to showcase photos taken by Tequila Minsky, a Manhattan-based freelance photographer who happened to be in Haiti at the time of the quake. According to a post written by David W. Dunlap, Minksy phoned a friend who’d previously been a copyeditor at the Times, who in turn called the paper on Minksy’s behalf offering photos of the scene. Since this post went up on Jan. 13, it’s been updated four times with more images from other Times’ photographers of the earthquake’s aftermath.

The Washington Post – In a Jan. 16 piece, the Post’s Philip Kennicott opines that images coming out of Haiti are more graphic than those of other recent natural disasters. Whether it’s because of the magnitude of the disaster, proximity to U.S. shores, or willingness of news media to present “the full horror” of the situation, media organizations have lifted the veil they once held over especially gruesome photographs of death and devastation, running images so ghastly some require warning labels. He writes:

After years of hinting at horror, the scales have fallen, the camera is unsheathed as a seemingly transparent window on misery, and journalists are allowed to show the worst, and say with the blunt, desperate urgency of the best journalism: Look.

MedPage – The amount of news media personnel who rushed into the country to report on the aftermath of the quake led bloggers such as MedPage’s Dr. Bjoern Kils to speculate on the advisability of letting news anchors, reporters and videographers take seats that could be going to doctors and aid workers. Particularly disturbing to Kils was an attempt to dig an 11-year-old girl out of the rubble reported live by CNN’s Ivan Watson. Wrote Kils: “I do wonder if this type of reporting is really necessary or if perhaps two more arms – or four or six more, depending on the number in Watson’s crew – could have made a difference in freeing her…”

If you’ve seen other items on the story behind the story of the Haiti earthquake, leave them in the comments and I’ll update this piece in coming days.

The current financial crisis has been tricky for even veteran business writers. How do you explain difficult concepts like collateralized debt obligations or the London interbank lending rate in language that the now-famous Joe the Plumber will understand?

It’s not easy. But it is possible, as a handful of writers have shown, including some with no previous business reporting experience.

I’ve written before about not needing to be serious to write about serious topics, like the hip hop YouTube video that humorously but succinctly explained the Large Hadron Collider.

Lately, the piece on the financial crisis that I keep hearing people talk about for its elegantly simple take on the whole mess is one that first aired last May on the radio show This American Life called The Giant Pool of Money. Alex Blumberg, a producer at This American Life, and Adam Davidson, a National Public Radio business reporter, got together to explain the connection between fancy new forms of debt like collateralized debt obligations and people losing their homes because they couldn’t pay their mortgages.

It was an instant, and timely, hit. The New York Times has written about the story and the pair, who now have a blog and podcast devoted to writing about the crisis called Planet Money.

Making it easy for readers to understand hard stuff is the kind of thing that’s taught in Journalism 101. But after spending years on a beat you sometimes lose sight of who your readers are and what their grasp of the information is, or isn’t. Roy Peter Clark, a writing instructor with the Poynter Institute, reminded writers of that point in his Writing Tools column this week. He also referred to a column he penned back in 2001 explaining how to make stories on even the driest or most complex subjects “engaging and comprehensive.” Some of his advice:

Tell it to a friend. When you tell your story to a single person, your voice changes and your language becomes more simple and direct.

Think graphics. Informational graphics are reaching new levels of excellence in American newspapers. Our ability to explain complex issues in words and then illustrate them in pictures provides valuable reinforcement for the reader.

Read the entire column here.

I love looking at real estate listings. I started five years ago when I was moving and looking for houses. Now I browse the local multiple listing service Website for fun. OK, secretly I want to buy a house in the mountains, but who knows if that will ever happen.

So I was online looking at properties in a local mountain community recently and came across one realtor’s Website that really stood out. In addition to a detailed fact sheet on each listing she had for sale, the realtor had created a Google map of the area with each property pinpointed on it. If you scrolled over the virtual pin, it opened a little bubble with the house’s price and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. If you clicked on the pin, it took you right to the listing. A prospective buyer could also zoom in and out on the map to see exactly where in town all of the listing agent’s properties were located. You can see it for yourself here. In all my years looking at houses online I’ve never seen anything so well packaged and handy.

It’s also exactly the kind of interactive information that freelance writers should think about including in story pitches. Adding audio, video, maps and other digital information to pitches:

• Makes story packages more interesting, upping the chances that an assigning editor will bite.
• Makes full use of the interactive nature of the online media
• Establishes you as a writer who gets Web 2.0 technology

Some publications are already starting to request that writers include multimedia components in their pitches. Just yesterday, a freelance acquaintance shared this letter from a regional publication that’s asking freelancers to include audio or video in their pitches:

“Beginning with the March 2009 issue of XXX, we will begin enhancing our Website with article-related content. The content will include photos and audio and video recordings — anything that helps to tell a story or bring it to life.

For example, if you’re pitching a restaurant, let us know if you’d be able/willing to provide a short video of the chef preparing a dish or offering some kitchen tips. Have a great music group you’d like to write about? In your pitch, tell us if an audio recording could be available for the web.

As you research your stories or even when making a pitch, let us know if you see or think of an opportunity to help showcase an article online.”

It’s not an isolated case. This Associated Press story from Sept. 29, explains how National Public Radio is boosting its already significant efforts to build an online presence by revamping its Website, making it easier to share podcasts of NPR radio shows and creating an online social network for listeners.

Scary? Maybe. Should you do something about it? Probably. If your freelance practice doesn’t include audio and video yet, there are plenty of places to get training, as I’ve explained in previous posts here and here, here.

While newspapers and magazines continue to lose some of their best writers to downsizing and other cutbacks, one news organization has been building up staff with the hope of becoming the preeminent investigative news source online.

The organization is ProPublica, a privately-funded public-interest news Website that opened for business earlier this summer.

ProPublica aims to provide readers with the type of hard-hitting investigative reporting that’s most commonly associated with big-city dailies. So far the site is achieving this by mixing stories produced by its own 27-person investigative staff with links to the best public-service journalism being produced elsewhere.

ProPublica’s lofty goals aren’t the only thing setting it apart from other online-only news operations. The New York City organization has hired a who’s who of nationally ranked editors and reporters, starting with Editor in Chief Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Stephen Engelberg, former managing editor of The Oregonian and former investigative editor of The New York Times, is managing editor. Two of the most recent additions are Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, investigative reporters who won a Pulitzer for the Los Angeles Times in 2005 for their coverage of deaths at the city’s King-Drew Medical Center. Read about other reporters who’ve recently joined the staff in this story from Editor & Publisher, and in ProPublica’s own staff page.

Another thing that sets ProPublica apart: money. The non-profit is totally funded by philanthropic contributions from The Sandler Foundation, started by the former owners of Golden West Financial Corp., a savings and loan, and other organizations. Read more about how Herb and Marion Sandler got into the public-interest news business in this New York Times Magazine article on them from March 2008.

Such deep pocketed-connections will allow ProPublica to pursue its goal of running “the largest, best-led and best-funded investigative journalism operation in the United States” without having to worry about the two things that haunt newspaper editors and publishers these days, advertising and circulation. In that respect, the organization sounds a lot like National Public Radio, another ad-free news enterprise known for its ace reporting from around the globe. Whether ProPublica can duplicate NPR’s success remains to be seen – but I for one will be rooting for them.