By Roy Peter Clark
Vice President, Senior Scholar and Reporting, Writing & Editing Faculty

Year of the Storms: Stories Yet to be Told

Year of the Storms: Lessons Learned & Stories Yet to be Told By Karen Dunlap The Katrina Beat: Covering the Intersection of Once Was and Will Be Listen to audio version By Keith Woods What Kind of Journalism is Needed When... Your City is Gone? Listen to audio version By Gregory Favre Leading After the Storms By Butch Ward A Journalist-Guided Tour of Mississippi’s Coast By Scott Libin Journalism in Service to Community: A Checklist of Trials and Triumphs By Aly Colón Images of Devastation, Feelings of Hope By Roy Peter Clark Respect and Restraint: Traits to Remember in Disaster Coverage By Bob Steele A Different Kind of New Orleans Vacation By Fanua J. Borodzicz A photo slideshow from the Poynter / Dart Center Conference By Kenny Irby Lessons from Katrina Comments from the conference A photo slideshow of Hurricane Katrina damage By Kenny Irby Sense Memories: Recalling the Stories They Told in the Storms By Jill Geisler After Katrina, Seeing Still is not Understanding By Kenny Irby

I’ve seen photos of D-Day, and they came to mind as I toured the devastation along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. We drove slowly along Route 90 – re-opened that morning –from Biloxi through Gulfport, toward Pass Christian, toward the ground zero of Hurricane Katrina. The shoreline and shallow waters of the Gulf looked like the beaches of Normandy, sprouting hellish obstacles, jutting shards of metal and wood dragged by the flooding from the land back to the sea. Not far away stood the shell of a casino ballroom, the sole surviving relic a pristine disco ball hanging from the metal rafters.

Scattered inland is the destruction of a nuclear holocaust, so complete and expansive it defies metaphor. Single images stand out: the Golden Arches of McDonald’s collapsed like a melted Dali watch; an American flag more tattered than the Star Spangled Banner; a stand of ancient oak trees snapped and splintered; graffiti painted on an abandoned seaside mansion: You Loot, We Shoot; a flight of concrete steps leading to nowhere.

We stopped at what is left of St. Paul’s Catholic Church and School in Pass Christian. My Poynter colleague Kelly McBride and I belong to a St. Paul’s Parish in St. Petersburg. The pastor of our church, Fr. Robert Gibbons, had extended a helping hand to his counterpart in Mississippi. I walked into the skeleton of the old church, peered through the surviving stained glass, rested my hand atop the altar stones. Outside I found a small yellow stuffed bear, face down in the mud, beside what had been a makeshift shrine. Did a child leave it here? I picked up the bear, brushed the dirt out of its fur, and put it in my pocket. I named him Buddy after my companion Buddy Martin, the editor of the Charlotte Sun, the newspaper in Punta Gorda, Fl. the town torn apart by the buzzsaw of Hurricane Charley. Buddy the Bear will be delivered to our pastor to share with the children in St. Petersburg.

The poorest state in the Union suddenly looks poorer, but not in spirit. That’s my impression from spending the weekend working with more than a dozen journalists whose personal and professional lives have been torn asunder by the effects of the hurricane. Here’s what I think I learned from them:

Finally, I learned that the citizens in and around Biloxi are lucky to have Stan Tiner as editor of the Sun Herald. The paper is owned by Knight Ridder, whose own future lies under a storm cloud. Stan is a big Southern boy, who admits that everyone in Mississippi owns two things: "a chain saw and a gun." I saw tears roll down the cheeks of this bear of a man as he remembered the events of the past and helped his staff imagine a more hopeful future.