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.

CJR on NY Times’ online holdings – The cover story of the July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger at the Barricades: Can Arthur Sulzberger Jr. transform The New York Times for the digital age? reveals the paper’s digital business is gaining traction despite continuing financial woes on the print side. According to author Douglas McCollam, the Times’ digital-only properties, including About.com, the search service the paper purchased in 2005, still account for only 3 percent of its annual revenue. However, revenue from all digital media operations grew 10 percent in 2007, to $330 million, topping an 8 percent jump the previous year, according to McCollam. Still, McCollam asks:

“When will gains online realistically make up for losses on the print side? “We don’t know when digital revenues will offset the decline in print,” (Publisher Arthur) Sulzberger wrote in an email, adding that “this is a question we often ask ourselves.”

Ironically, the article isn’t available on CJR’s Website yet, so if you’re not a subscriber you’ll have to find a copy or wait until it appears online. 7/16 UPDATE: The story is now online, and I added the link above.

Glaser on the demise of OJR – As I previously discussed on these pages, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications recently shut down the Online Journalism Review, which had been charting the course of online news for more than a decade. This week, Mark Glaser used his MediaShift column at PBS to “dig deeper” into the story, revealing that with a new dean and director of the journalism program, the school is in transition and rethinking where OJR fits in. Glaser raises a couple excellent points: can a school without faculty devoted to teaching online news support a Website devoted to the subject, and when all news is moving online, is the idea of an academic journal devoted to online news outdated? Read more here.

PaidContent purchased for $30 million – It’s not every day a single blogger turns a passion for reporting on the online news business into a sustainable enterprise and then gets bought out for a reported $30 million. But that’s what happened to Rafat Ali, founder of PaidContent, a six-year-old news site covering all types of paid-content business models, which he sold last week to Guardian News and Media, a British newspaper publisher. By Ali’s account, Guardian will run ContentNext, the parent company Ali started to run PaidContent and several related blogs, as a stand-alone business. Read all the details here.

For the past year or so, Stanton’s been the paper’s Innovations editor, charged with overseeing the paper’s Web site and more generally, bringing it into the digital age. For Sam Zell, the paper’s new owner, and the David Hiller, the current publisher, to tap a Web guy for the top job over the other finalist, a veteran Times editor whose rise through the ranks was took a more traditional trajectory, says a lot about the direction they want the paper to take. If they use this opportunity to continue beefing up their online news presence – and make money and save newsroom jobs doing it – they could create a template for newsroom innovation other papers would eagerly follow.

But none of this is happening in a vacuum. In the past three years, the Times has seen three editors come and go, all of them quitting to protest budget cuts that lowered newsroom headcount and morale. Revenue from advertising continues to drop at the Times and throughout the newspaper industry. On Feb. 14, the New York Times said it was cutting 100 newsroom jobs due to declining ad revenue. Nice Valentine.

Stanton will have his work cut out for him. For starters, he has to deal with the 100 news job cuts across the entire Los Angeles Times Media Group announced Feb. 13. In addition to the daily paper, the group includes community papers, a Spanish-language paper and an entertainment guide. But he appears up to the challenge. In a newsroom speech after his promotion, Stanton said: “”I have grown tired and am now hopping mad over this seemingly endless ‘Groundhog Day’ nightmare.” He also said The Times would have “to figure out how to break this self-defeating cycle before it does indeed result in our defeat.”

Newspapers see the future, and it’s digital. The latest evidence: earlier this week the New York Times Co. and three other investors sank $29.5 million into Automattic, the company that makes WordPress blogging software runs the WordPress.com free blogging Website. (Disclaimer: I use WordPress.com to create and host this blog.)

According to a news report, the Times was the smallest of the four investors – the others were venture capital firms. But the deal solidifies the paper’s existing relationship with Automattic, which the Times uses to host about 50 blogs, as well as About.com, the Internet information service it acquired in 2005.

As the Times investments illustrate, newspapers’ embrace of digital media has moved beyond erecting Web sites and asking reporters to write blogs. Consider:

• E.W. Scripps, the Cincinnati media conglomerate, is so jazzed about the prospects of its TV and online ventures the company is set to spin them off into a separate public company later this year.
• Ruport Murdoch, new owner of the Wall Street Journal, told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday that he will keep subscriptions for the paper’s online version, though prices will be higher and some “commodity” financial information will be free.
• I’ve already written about how the Los Angeles Times’ Innovations (read Web site) editor, Russ Stanton, is being mentioned as a front runner for the now vacant editor-in-chief gig.

At the same time, newspapers’ economic prospects are looking dim. The latest on that front: the Orange County Register, my old stomping grounds and the place I got started as a tech reporter, is killing its stand-alone Business section and folding it into the News section in one of several cost-cutting measures. When it does, it’ll be the only major daily in the country without a separate Business section. Ouch.

What does it mean for freelancers? Bone up on your coding skills. Seriously, as newspapers go through this transition to digital, it’s more important than ever to keep up with the times, and the Times. Maintaining a blog is one way. Seeking out Web-based work is another. If you don’t believe me, this blog post from Publishing 2.0 called The Only Way for Journalists to Understand the Web is Use It says it a lot more eloquently than I can.

That leads me back to Automattic. The investment is great news for the two-year-old start up, whose major competition includes Blogger, which Google bought in 2003. Other blogging software makers don’t have such deep pockets, but there are a lot of them, including Six Apart, which makes Movable Type and TypePad, plus a host of smaller proprietary and open-source blogging software makers. Automattic said it will use the investment to beef up projects like Akismet, a blog comment spam blocker.

 Updated on February 27, 2008: Thanks to the sharp-eyed reader who pointed out that WordPress is open source software. Automattic uses it to run the WordPress.com blogging Website.