PHUKET: I am starting a small publishing business on Phuket and my new marketing manager is due to fly in from Bangkok with her poodle.
She calls and asks me what the weather is like because her flight has been cancelled at the last minute. Another aircraft, already in the air, is turning back.
I tell her the sky is blue and the weather is paradise-perfect as always. It is 11.20am and along the island's holiday coast, unbeknown to me, hundreds of people are in the water, fighting for their lives.
Many are already drowning or being bludgeoned to death.
About an hour later, I leave the office and stroll down the street for lunch. A car pulls up and a friend says, "Have you heard about the earthquake and the tsunami?"
I go along with the joke until it becomes a bit boring and I realise that he is serious. He drives on.
The marketing manager sends a text message to my mobile: "Tidal wave 5-6 dead in Phuket." I try calling some contacts, but the mobile network seems to have fallen over.
Text is the best way to communicate. I head for the office of the local english-language weekly, The Phuket Gazette.
Sunday is usually a day off but most of the staff are there except for the editor, who is on leave. The deputy editor, Chris Husted, 34, from Brisbane, says the death toll is already 22.
Ambulances wail constantly and I head for a local hospital.
Beyond the glass doors, I see battered and bandaged people sitting in the foyer. More injured are being unloaded and a crowd mills about.
I am 57 years old and a bit long in the tooth for this. Do I really want to put my small business plans aside and swing back decades to when I was a reporter?
I push open the door and interview the first bandaged person I encounter. Apparently I do.
Having got a story, the next issue becomes what to do with it. I haven't been in touch with newspapers in Australia for years.
Although the landline telephones are now almost as dodgy as the mobiles, cutting out every two or three minutes, the dial-up Internet connection still works perfectly.
I email the news-desk addresses on The Age and Sydney Morning Herald sites. The SMH sends back an automated response and I hear no more but someone from The Age calls, a former colleague. They're keen to take a story.
This turns out to be an important basic rule. If a media organisation doesn't know you, they are unlikely to employ you, even in a crisis.
On many online media sites, the Contact Us link is among the hardest to find. Often, the best newspapers are the most difficult to contact.
I offer my material to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph in London.
You can get in touch with them eventually, but will they get back to you? The answer turns out to be No.
In the days and weeks that follow, I file for CNN.com, The Age, the Herald Sun and the South China Morning Post, all places where people know me.
Meanwhile, changes are taking place inside my head and in my demeanor. I am usually a taciturn, easy-going bloke. Not any more. Adrenalin takes control and I am unable to sleep for more than a couple of hours.
I must be at the keyboard or on the telephone. I get up and go to work at 1am, 3am or 5am. I feel wired, high, buzzing, manic, unbelievably alert.
My head is filled with strange images. I am wading through bodies and being showered with dollar notes.
It's plain that the issue in my head concerns the balance between the journalistic high of working on the biggest story of a lifetime and the massive scale of the death and destruction, which is becoming more horrible by the hour in reports from Sri Lanka and especially Aceh.
The story literally washes up on my favorite beach, destroying many buildings, including the seaside restaurant where I enjoyed a pleasant lunch on Christmas Day.
Paradoxically, my professional good fortune comes at the cost of many thousands of lives. I am being paid to explain a tragedy of immense proportions.
Resolving that issue in my mind will take plenty of time, possibly more time than I've got.
Forty-eight hours after the tsunami, I head off Phuket and drive 120 kilometers north to a small resort strip on the mainland around the township of Khao Lak.
Bodies wrapped badly in white cloth lie in open trucks or are still scattered among the rubble.
Through an interpreter, I ask one volunteer at a resort how many bodies he has found. "Two hundred," he says.
I find this staggering because Phuket is much larger and not that many more have died there. I ask him if he is sure.
"Yes," he says, "Two hundred." The Khao Lak death toll eventually rises into the thousands.
A large Thai Navy patrol boat is washed up into the trees more than a kilometer from the sea, and a prince of the Thai royal family dies while out jetskiing on a perfect Sunday morning.
The centre of town is Ground Zero. Nothing remains standing for hectare after hectare, just the concrete floors.
We are driven out of Khao Lak prematurely in a stampede sparked by fear of a second tsunami. As my brain works overtime, I find myself playing with words: scale, magnitude, catastrophe, calamity, cataclysm.
There has to be a right word or phrase.
The word many survivors are using is surreal. Even a man who raced for his life up Patong beach in front of the wave couldn't help thinking, "This is surreal."
Another journalist describes her work as being a crossing between parallel universes, where people are either in torment along the coast or leading normal lives across the rest of the large island.
Some friends never skip a beat. They keep working at their normal jobs, unaffected and uninvolved.
Meanwhile, journalists on the local paper have been working until 3am, maintaining a production schedule that calls for next Saturday's newspaper to be sent off to the printer on a Tuesday.
They deal with a deluge of telephone calls and emails from journalists all over the world and provide community information on the newspaper's website, where traffic spirals rapidly from 10,000 page views in a normal 24-hour period to more than a million page views.
The local expat journalists, mostly teachers, soldiers and bakers in previous careers, cope well without much sleep. But an alarming editorial concludes: "Anyone found looting should, perhaps, be given the courtesy of a warning shot. But those who persist in this vulture-like pursuit should be shot. Dead."
Just what Phuket and Khao Lak need, more violence and more bodies. Across the region, the toll keeps rising and eventually it tops 100,000 and grows on.
Much attention in the Australian media is focused on a missing AFL footballer. Thousands of people have perished and yet, according to one journalist from Australia, a large, respected print outlet is telling staff that the footballer is "the face of our coverage."
I wonder how the marketing genius who invented that phrase would explain it to the footballer's loved ones? Perhaps some media managers are so cynical that they do not believe Australians will react to this story unless attention is focused on a young white sportsman.
In an unprecedented display of generosity, Australians prove the cynics wrong. They give and then give some more. Color, race and creed do not seem to matter.
It is a massive human tragedy and Australians realise that as
mainly coastal-dwellers, it could so easily have been them.
Television reports bring it all home so cleary. Yet the people of Phuket pick an argument with the most trusted brands in television news, CNN and the BBC.
The international news twins, Phuket expats and Thais alike say, are exaggerating reports of the damage on the island and confusing viewers by mixing Phuket footage with the much greater devastation in Sri Lanka and Aceh.
Has the scale of the disaster caused CNN and the BBC to lose their sense of proportion, and to fail to distinguish the difference between a disaster on Phuket and a calamity in Sri Lanka and Aceh?
I didn't see the BBC and CNN coverage so I cannot offer an opinion, except to say that the scale of death and destruction across the region did seem to make it difficult for the majority of journalists to report the good news: that 99 per cent of Phuket escaped, and that life on the island returned to normal for most within a matter of days.
It was as though many reporters thought generous people in Australia and elsewhere would be confused and less generous if they stopped using the word "devastated" for a minute and found something positive amid the gloom.
Many thousands of Thais in the tourism industry now face the loss of their jobs not because of the tsunami, but because of the unbalanced coverage, combined with exaggerated government travel warnings.
The extra pain inflicted on the survivors, including heroes who saved lives and the families of victims, is undeserved and unnecessary.
Readers and viewers, it seems, can cope with paradoxes and contradictions more easily than many journalists. I will continue to have sleepless nights, and so should many other guilty reporters and media managers.
Alan Morison is a freelance who runs a small business on Phuket. He once worked for CNN and can be contacted at alanmorison@gmail.com
A version of this article was first published in 2005 in the Walkley magazine for Australian journalists. Five years on from learning what the word ''tsunami'' meant, the author learned a new word, ''Rohingya.'' Ten years on, tweets and social media would revolutionise coverage.
She calls and asks me what the weather is like because her flight has been cancelled at the last minute. Another aircraft, already in the air, is turning back.
I tell her the sky is blue and the weather is paradise-perfect as always. It is 11.20am and along the island's holiday coast, unbeknown to me, hundreds of people are in the water, fighting for their lives.
Many are already drowning or being bludgeoned to death.
About an hour later, I leave the office and stroll down the street for lunch. A car pulls up and a friend says, "Have you heard about the earthquake and the tsunami?"
I go along with the joke until it becomes a bit boring and I realise that he is serious. He drives on.
The marketing manager sends a text message to my mobile: "Tidal wave 5-6 dead in Phuket." I try calling some contacts, but the mobile network seems to have fallen over.
Text is the best way to communicate. I head for the office of the local english-language weekly, The Phuket Gazette.
Sunday is usually a day off but most of the staff are there except for the editor, who is on leave. The deputy editor, Chris Husted, 34, from Brisbane, says the death toll is already 22.
Ambulances wail constantly and I head for a local hospital.
Beyond the glass doors, I see battered and bandaged people sitting in the foyer. More injured are being unloaded and a crowd mills about.
I am 57 years old and a bit long in the tooth for this. Do I really want to put my small business plans aside and swing back decades to when I was a reporter?
I push open the door and interview the first bandaged person I encounter. Apparently I do.
Having got a story, the next issue becomes what to do with it. I haven't been in touch with newspapers in Australia for years.
Although the landline telephones are now almost as dodgy as the mobiles, cutting out every two or three minutes, the dial-up Internet connection still works perfectly.
I email the news-desk addresses on The Age and Sydney Morning Herald sites. The SMH sends back an automated response and I hear no more but someone from The Age calls, a former colleague. They're keen to take a story.
This turns out to be an important basic rule. If a media organisation doesn't know you, they are unlikely to employ you, even in a crisis.
On many online media sites, the Contact Us link is among the hardest to find. Often, the best newspapers are the most difficult to contact.
I offer my material to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph in London.
You can get in touch with them eventually, but will they get back to you? The answer turns out to be No.
In the days and weeks that follow, I file for CNN.com, The Age, the Herald Sun and the South China Morning Post, all places where people know me.
Meanwhile, changes are taking place inside my head and in my demeanor. I am usually a taciturn, easy-going bloke. Not any more. Adrenalin takes control and I am unable to sleep for more than a couple of hours.
I must be at the keyboard or on the telephone. I get up and go to work at 1am, 3am or 5am. I feel wired, high, buzzing, manic, unbelievably alert.
My head is filled with strange images. I am wading through bodies and being showered with dollar notes.
It's plain that the issue in my head concerns the balance between the journalistic high of working on the biggest story of a lifetime and the massive scale of the death and destruction, which is becoming more horrible by the hour in reports from Sri Lanka and especially Aceh.
The story literally washes up on my favorite beach, destroying many buildings, including the seaside restaurant where I enjoyed a pleasant lunch on Christmas Day.
Paradoxically, my professional good fortune comes at the cost of many thousands of lives. I am being paid to explain a tragedy of immense proportions.
Resolving that issue in my mind will take plenty of time, possibly more time than I've got.
Forty-eight hours after the tsunami, I head off Phuket and drive 120 kilometers north to a small resort strip on the mainland around the township of Khao Lak.
Bodies wrapped badly in white cloth lie in open trucks or are still scattered among the rubble.
Through an interpreter, I ask one volunteer at a resort how many bodies he has found. "Two hundred," he says.
I find this staggering because Phuket is much larger and not that many more have died there. I ask him if he is sure.
"Yes," he says, "Two hundred." The Khao Lak death toll eventually rises into the thousands.
A large Thai Navy patrol boat is washed up into the trees more than a kilometer from the sea, and a prince of the Thai royal family dies while out jetskiing on a perfect Sunday morning.
The centre of town is Ground Zero. Nothing remains standing for hectare after hectare, just the concrete floors.
We are driven out of Khao Lak prematurely in a stampede sparked by fear of a second tsunami. As my brain works overtime, I find myself playing with words: scale, magnitude, catastrophe, calamity, cataclysm.
There has to be a right word or phrase.
The word many survivors are using is surreal. Even a man who raced for his life up Patong beach in front of the wave couldn't help thinking, "This is surreal."
Another journalist describes her work as being a crossing between parallel universes, where people are either in torment along the coast or leading normal lives across the rest of the large island.
Some friends never skip a beat. They keep working at their normal jobs, unaffected and uninvolved.
Meanwhile, journalists on the local paper have been working until 3am, maintaining a production schedule that calls for next Saturday's newspaper to be sent off to the printer on a Tuesday.
They deal with a deluge of telephone calls and emails from journalists all over the world and provide community information on the newspaper's website, where traffic spirals rapidly from 10,000 page views in a normal 24-hour period to more than a million page views.
The local expat journalists, mostly teachers, soldiers and bakers in previous careers, cope well without much sleep. But an alarming editorial concludes: "Anyone found looting should, perhaps, be given the courtesy of a warning shot. But those who persist in this vulture-like pursuit should be shot. Dead."
Just what Phuket and Khao Lak need, more violence and more bodies. Across the region, the toll keeps rising and eventually it tops 100,000 and grows on.
Much attention in the Australian media is focused on a missing AFL footballer. Thousands of people have perished and yet, according to one journalist from Australia, a large, respected print outlet is telling staff that the footballer is "the face of our coverage."
I wonder how the marketing genius who invented that phrase would explain it to the footballer's loved ones? Perhaps some media managers are so cynical that they do not believe Australians will react to this story unless attention is focused on a young white sportsman.
In an unprecedented display of generosity, Australians prove the cynics wrong. They give and then give some more. Color, race and creed do not seem to matter.
It is a massive human tragedy and Australians realise that as
mainly coastal-dwellers, it could so easily have been them.
Television reports bring it all home so cleary. Yet the people of Phuket pick an argument with the most trusted brands in television news, CNN and the BBC.
The international news twins, Phuket expats and Thais alike say, are exaggerating reports of the damage on the island and confusing viewers by mixing Phuket footage with the much greater devastation in Sri Lanka and Aceh.
Has the scale of the disaster caused CNN and the BBC to lose their sense of proportion, and to fail to distinguish the difference between a disaster on Phuket and a calamity in Sri Lanka and Aceh?
I didn't see the BBC and CNN coverage so I cannot offer an opinion, except to say that the scale of death and destruction across the region did seem to make it difficult for the majority of journalists to report the good news: that 99 per cent of Phuket escaped, and that life on the island returned to normal for most within a matter of days.
It was as though many reporters thought generous people in Australia and elsewhere would be confused and less generous if they stopped using the word "devastated" for a minute and found something positive amid the gloom.
Many thousands of Thais in the tourism industry now face the loss of their jobs not because of the tsunami, but because of the unbalanced coverage, combined with exaggerated government travel warnings.
The extra pain inflicted on the survivors, including heroes who saved lives and the families of victims, is undeserved and unnecessary.
Readers and viewers, it seems, can cope with paradoxes and contradictions more easily than many journalists. I will continue to have sleepless nights, and so should many other guilty reporters and media managers.
Alan Morison is a freelance who runs a small business on Phuket. He once worked for CNN and can be contacted at alanmorison@gmail.com
A version of this article was first published in 2005 in the Walkley magazine for Australian journalists. Five years on from learning what the word ''tsunami'' meant, the author learned a new word, ''Rohingya.'' Ten years on, tweets and social media would revolutionise coverage.
