Photo courtesy of Nokia Siemens Networks

Smart news agencies gear up for the worst every season – hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and fires.

But do you have a mobile plan?

Michelle McLellan over at the Knight Digital Media Center‘s News Leadership 3.0 blog makes a good argument for making mobile a key part of your emergency news strategy.

Servers will get slammed from a spike in Web traffic. People will be using smart phones big time for information. Telephonic communication will be unreliable, McLellan says.

Text messages and WAP sites require less bandwidth and power than voice calls, so they’re often the channels of choice in an emergency.

The post also suggests setting up a special Twitter account for occasional, high-priority alerts and resources. But even that is not a silver bullet because Twitter could go down.

Shoring up as many of these channels as possible before the big news breaks sounds like a good plan. Starting tomorrow …