Author Personal Manuscript Copy – uncorrected pre-print 1 Addressing the information needs of crisis-affected communities: The interplay of legacy media and social media in a rural disaster. By Dharma Dailey and Kate Starbird, University of Washington Chapter Eighteen in The Communications Crisis in America, and How to Fix It. Mark Lloyd and Lewis A. I. Friedland, (Eds.) Palgrave McMillan, 2016. Introduction To make informed decisions about the future of our communications infrastructure in the United States, it is important to have a clear, evidence-based understanding of how the information needs of crisis-affected communities are being addressed. For this chapter, we examine the interplay between traditional “legacy” media and network-enabled Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as “social media,” to explore how they together, and separately, meet the information needs of disaster-affected communities. Our analyses are based upon our empirical research looking at how information was created, shaped, and shared in several recent disasters. We give an extended example of how a specific information need was addressed in 2011 in rural upstate New York, when Hurricane Irene devastated several local communities. In the last week of August 2011, Hurricane Irene struck New York state, followed a week later by Tropical Storm Lee. The combined damage of the two storms became the state’s largest natural disaster and the second most-costly. Of sixty- two New York counties, thirty-eight were declared disaster areas (NY Office of the Governor 2012). We describe several key resources that were important to surfacing and sharing useful, actionable information in the New York’s Catskills region, an area hard-hit by these storms. We find that the interplay between traditional legacy media organizations and a crowd empowered to act through social media is not a simple one. Rather, useful, actionable information comes to light through the complex and not entirely new interplay between these media and the public. Likewise, while the trend among organizations (including regional legacy media) appears to be an increasing reliance on ICTs, evidence suggests that legacy technologies continue to play an important role in the diffusion of information. Further, different communities addressed the same information needs in somewhat different ways, highlighting the importance of fostering infrastructures that enable dynamic and flexible information-sharing structures in disaster- affected communities. This empirical account of how people get actionable information during a disaster illustrates how networked ICTs enable people to produce and share critical information. It highlights the diversity of approaches to meeting an information need that are extant even within the same disaster. This example of successful, yet diverse, problem-solving in rural areas affected by Hurricane Irene raises the question of how policy can support the plurality of approaches enacted by those working within a disaster affected region. The increasing reliance of networked ICTs also raises some questions. As information work within disaster-affected communities becomes increasingly reliant on third-party networked services, the role that those services have in shaping information, as well as practical matters such as remuneration for increased network traffic and the quality of networked infrastructures, become increasingly important considerations.