TUESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2006
Hurricane Katrina: One Year Later
Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2006, marks the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's Gulf Coast landfall. To remember the date, Poynter Online will produce a weeklong series of articles, resources and remembrances from journalists who were there.
Yesterday, Al Tompkins has created a bank of resources and stories in his daily Al's Morning Meeting column: "
Prepping for Disaster: The Lessons of Katrina."
Today,
Keith Woods provided five lessons that journalists have learned from Hurricane Katrina -- lessons that can be taken to heart and applied to the next disaster they're sent to cover, as well as the stories they write on an everyday basis.
At the same time, Poynter's library director, David Shedden, compiled
a list of books that have been written about the disaster.
But that's not all. Updates will be added throughout the week, so keep checking back.
In the meantime, you can see how Poynter Online covered the 2005 hurricane season
below. (To add updates on local news organizations or to comment on our coverage so far,
click here.)
Posted at 1:23:18 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A109685
MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 2006
Reflections on Disaster
Mike Jacobs
Editor of the Grand Forks Herald
The best counsel I can give to journalists covering the aftermath of disaster is patience. The aftermath will last a long time. Here in Grand Forks, it seems like forever. That doesn’t mean that things don’t get better. They have gotten better. It means that things are not the same, and journalists need to be alert to the changes, both the great big ones and the smaller, more nuanced ones.
In Grand Forks, the flood brought a change in government. New personalities entered the community’s political life, and the mayor was defeated for re-election. Voters cut the size of the city council in half, changing the dynamics of city government.
In some ways, these institutional changes are only the surface. Fundamental change goes much deeper. Neighborhoods are re-aligned. Landmarks disappear. What once was familiar is altered, sometimes swept away. This is disorienting, and it has an impact on the community’s psyche.
Then there are personal changes. People who had power saw their power reduced. Sometimes this happened quietly. In some cases, it was the result of public anger.
Anger is a part of the grieving process, Anger is powerful. We found that disaster unleashes it in ways that are both unfamiliar and frightening. Anger has consequences for individuals, families and communities. Don’t be surprised as anger flares, and be alert to its impact on your communities.
Media have a large role to play not just in reporting the impacts of disaster but in explaining options and presenting viewpoints. Dispelling rumors and calming outbursts is as much a public service as reporting facts.
All of this requires patience. It requires open ears and fast pencils.
Have patience with the recovery process, too. Our disaster in Grand Forks was on a much smaller scale than what has befallen the Gulf Coast. Yet our flood control system is not done, even as we approach the ninth anniversary of the disaster that overwhelmed our community. Many other issues remain, and some of these anger individuals and have an impact on our civic life. The question of who will need flood insurance is one of these. The question of how to pay for the flood control system is another. Still another is how to rebuild the city’s center. Another is how to memorialize lost neighborhoods.
And these are only the public issues.
Reporting about these things still takes a lot of our available newshole.
You learned in the disaster that you can do great work professionally, and you feel pride and satisfaction. You learned that you have an enormous reservoir of personal strength and that you are capable of genuine goodness. Your communities are grateful to you.
This won’t last.
Media will become the target just as it was before the disaster. Be patient with this, too.
In disaster you and your communities learned the value of what we do as journalists. This will sustain you.
Posted at 10:22:56 AM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A95540
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2005
Year of Storms: Lessons Learned & Stories Yet to be Told
Several dozen Gulf coast journalists gathered in Biloxi and New
Orleans last week to reflect on the experience of covering the
catastrophic storms and to discuss where they -- and their newsrooms --
go from here. The conferences were sponsored by The Poynter Institute
and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
By Karen Brown Dunlap
Poynter President
|
Year of the Storms:
Stories Yet to be Told |
|
|
As the plane began its descent toward New Orleans
and the terrain came into view, the passenger next to me became
chatty. He offered to explain what we’d see of his home region,
pointing out the blue roof tarps that carpeted an area beneath us. He
talked about the slow recovery of the economy, the problems with
schools, the huge amount of work to be done, and doubts about the levee
system.
He’s thinking about moving away, he said, thinking of starting over in another state.
“Will things get better here?” I asked.
He paused, and then answered, “Only if the news media keep covering it. Only if they don’t stop covering it.”
It didn’t occur to me to ask his name, but I wish I had. I’d like to
share with him what happened on the ground over the next couple of days.
That evening about 40 members of the region’s news media gathered in
New Orleans for a two day conference on covering the hurricanes and
their effects, sponsored by Poynter and the Dart Center for Journalism
and Trauma. Another group of journalists gathered near Biloxi for
a similar conference.
News directors and editors, reporters, photojournalists and others
told and retold stories of the storms: Katrina, Rita, and for at least
one Miami journalist, stories of Wilma.
They talked about the shocks. David Vincent, news director of
WLOX-TV Biloxi, told of his station’s work while Hurricane Katrina blew
off portions of the station’s roof. “We huddled in the hall and
kept reporting,” he said. “We had a table set up for the anchors.
It was really pretty dangerous.”
Earlier, Anzio Williams, news director at WDSU-TV, New Orleans, told
of sending out teams of journalists to the Superdome, an emergency
response headquarters in the Hyatt Regency hotel and other sites that
were supposed to be safe. As the hurricane hit and the levees
broke, all the locations failed. He and others went from
telephones to cell phones -- and then to text messaging – in efforts to
find staffers and report the news.
Stories abounded of living in offices or in the homes of colleagues
for weeks at a time. The pre-hurricane drill for staffers included
evacuating families. Like other residents, many members of news
staffs found that damage prevented them from returning home after the
storm had subsided.
“The station’s generator provided power so many of us stayed there,”
said Dan Gresham, morning anchor/producer at KFDM-TV Beaumont.
Vicki Zimmerman, news director of WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge, said her
house became a camp-out site for some, including journalists sent from
out of town by her corporate office. “There were about 11 there
at one point,” she said. “We worked long hours and they were a big
help.”
Much of the conversation during the conferences revealed pride in
the coverage. Zimmerman said one of her station’s goals was “to
minimize harm.” That caused the station to shy away from some
stories on weapons sales in Baton Rouge to avoid inflaming a city rife
with rumors of rapes and gunfire.
|
Photo by Kenny Irby/Poynter
Karen Brown Dunlap, president of The Poynter Institute, greets journalists who covered the storms of 2005 during the conference's opening dinner. |
Paul Cloos, assistant managing editor
of the Mobile Register, said his station sent a reporter to New Orleans
after readers in Mobile kept telling the newspaper stories of violence
in New Orleans. He said that the result was that the Register was
among the first to report that many of the claims of violence were
untrue.
As conversations continued, a deeper effect of the storm emerged.
Roger Simpson, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and
Trauma, led participants in the Biloxi/Gulfport group in talking about
how they have changed. They spoke of sleeplessness, irritability
and anxiety about next year’s hurricane season. Some spoke of
guilt at suffering only minor damage as they witnessed so much loss
around them.
The roads from New Orleans to Gulfport reveal the long-term
destruction from the storm that greets residents. Along I-10,
some shopping areas and housing complexes are quiet. Houses sit askew
and windows are missing. Highway billboards sag at odd angles,
some large metal poles bend in half.
Across from the beaches of Gulfport, trees dangle ghostly white and
colored objects: paper, clothes, shredded sheets and towels, pieces of
businesses and lives. Only the inner frames of hotels
remain. All that’s left of restaurants are signs, some saying
that they will return. The steeples of historic, stately churches
rise but missing windows and doors reveal that the insides are empty.
A car pulls over and two tourists jump out. One takes a
picture while the other smiles before a backdrop of what used to be.
Nearby, an older woman wanders through a yard, searching through what’s
left. Small signs crowd the ground near intersections advertising for
painters, haulers and roofers. For some poorer areas, the
devastation doesn’t look new. It’s a reminder that some folks
have lived in the middle of a storm much of their lives.
Traffic hassles add to the misery. A westbound bridge is out
along I-10 near Slidell, so the eastbound lanes divide to serve both
directions. That causes major back-ups for those leaving New
Orleans in the afternoon. Many intersections operate as four-way
stops in the absence of swept away traffic signals or
electricity.
Journalists live with their own stresses while reporting on those of
others. At last week’s meetings, they spoke quietly of friends
who avoid church because they don’t want to see others, of loved ones
who had white collar jobs but now spend their days as laborers in the
clean-up and repair.
|
Photo by Kenny Irby/Poynter
Karen Brown Dunlap |
Roger Simpson of the
Dart Center explained
that post-traumatic stress was once believed to be caused by unexpected
events, but doctors are beginning to agree that it also results from
the cumulative effect of listening to others’ distress.
Journalists in the gulf would qualify for both causes.
Simpson reminded them that the symptoms they described, including
headaches and forgetfulness, were typical of stress. He led them
through a process aimed at helping them understand it and deal with it.
“We need to look at stress in individuals, in the newsroom and in the community,” he said.
Most organizations have stories of staffers who left their jobs
after the storm. Some took early retirement, jobs elsewhere or
simply decided to leave.
In the long post-hurricane phase, journalists continue to inform and
lead their communities. As the groups met Friday, the New Orleans
Times Picayune front page announced federal plans for a $3.1 billion
outlay to rebuild levees. The page featured a picture of Mayor
Ray Nagin and President George Bush shaking hands. There was also
news about phone service and a feature on the reunion of two Canadian
tourists and the New Orleans family that helped them escape flooding.
On the day before the conference the Biloxi Sun Herald carried an editorial
saying attention is turning away from destruction in
Mississippi. It said the devastation of the storm,
particularly in Mississippi, cannot be forgotten.
The weekend gave journalists a chance to repair and compare.
To hear from others who have covered communities after devastation and
to rethink their craft skills and their approaches to the news.
After guests fly away, these journalists continue on. If things
are to change in the battered coast, the news media will have to bind
its wounds and keep covering the storm.
Posted at 11:49:58 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A94088
The Katrina Beat: Covering the Intersection of Once Was and Will Be.
|
Listen to Audio |
Click to listen to Keith Woods reading this story.
Download this story as an audio file to your MP3 player by right clicking this link and saving file to your computer or device. Ipod users should be able to drag this link into iTunes.
| |
Opening remarks by Poynter Dean
Keith Woods at the recent conference on Covering Hurricanes co-sponsored by Poynter and the
Dart Center:
I’m happy to be back home in Louisiana, but I haven’t been away for long since the storm. I was here when the wound opened by Katrina was still fresh and gushing, days old and immediate. The unimaginable present. I’ve been back to sift through moldy, washed out memories, and then I came once more to put the past to rest. I’m here now with my colleagues to talk with you about the future.
I’ve been captivated by the stories you’ve told and the stories told about you these past 100 days or so. But more than that, I feel an insatiable urge to know what will happen next and a profound need to tell stories of my own. That’s what we do, after all, and the task at hand will never be any clearer than that, never any more crucial than now, no matter how bleak the state’s picture; no matter how the many industry buyouts and sell-offs and layoffs cast a pall over the printed word. You’re still driven to do what you do. Tell stories.
|
Photo by Kenny Irby/Poynter
Keith Woods gives his opening remarks at the Poynter / Dart Center conference. |
Our communities have undergone irrevocable change from a hurricane’s flood or the human flood that came later. How do they rebuild the neighborhoods in Lake Charles? How do they absorb the people or solve the traffic in Baton Rouge and Houston? How do they make a critical decision about elections in New Orleans when the city’s people are holding angry meetings and marches … in Atlanta?
You are the best hope to link them together through your storytelling. Like you, I’m hearing the stories every day from family and friends. And at times, these last 100 days or so, I’ve lived the story too.
Driving through the region since August 29th has been an exercise in bringing past and present together over and over for the most miserable of reunions. This child of Hurricane Betsy saw the images of bobbing heads in house-deep water and remembered that my father’s first trip to our brand new house on Bartholomew Street was by boat.
I saw the pulverized foundations left behind by Katrina in Biloxi and remembered a Sunday’s drive along Highway 90 in Mississippi almost 40 years ago during which my father retold the stories of the Hurricane Camille parties that were underway in the houses where only stairs remained.
|
Year of the Storms:
Stories Yet to be Told |
|
|
The first time I drove into the city after Katrina, I turned off Claiborne Avenue toward the river to visit the corner of Touro and Urquhart streets, where I grew up and where, across the street, I got my first and most exquisite kiss from Gwendolyn Buckhalter. There, I found my old best friend Herbert Woodard, sitting on his porch like nothing had happened to cause the whole neighborhood to empty out except for him and drug dealers across the street. He was talking on the cell phone to his cousin, Gwendolyn Buckhalter. She and her son had lost their home and everything else in Gulfport, Miss. They were living in a FEMA trailer on the beach while a storm named Wilma churned in the Caribbean.
I went to my father’s 9th Ward house in mid-October for the ritual wading through of destroyed things, an experience that links people across this region to a single narrative. I’d taken my stepmother back so she could get a few things. But I’d gone there hoping to feel. I wanted to be overcome by the scope of it all, because driving through neighborhoods and seeing the city turned upside down had only left me in awe.
We’d stumbled, slid and climbed through the redecorated living room, the bedroom defiled by what rose up from the toilet in the bathroom; over the refrigerator toppled and spun around in the tiny kitchen, oozing now with maggots; and into the den that was always too hot, too stuffy, too crowded with things whose meanings only the two of them knew – a place I didn’t like to go even when it didn’t have that cutting scent of mold now wafting from the walls.
It was only the pictures I wanted, just the old slides; just the videotapes that captured the older grandchildren before their younger uncles and aunts got enough money to buy camcorders of their own. I wanted to touch them and remember and cry, finally, for home.
But so little was recognizable – even the layout of the room was lost to memory – that it was hard to know what I’d cry over. The contents of the house had been swallowed whole by a monster, left to swim in its corrosive digestive juices, then vomited back to fall in no place in particular. What of this would I grieve?
The videotapes had dissolved in the salt water. I found one slide where once hundreds sat in trays, lying like a threat for the next son or daughter who dared bring a new boyfriend, finance or spouse to 3150 North Roman Street to be set upon by my father and his sentimental slideshow.
My eight siblings and I alternately coveted and reviled the collection, and now only one slide was intact. I held it up to catch the sunlight coming through the bars on the back screen door. It showed nothing. Whatever had once been there, the water had washed clean.
|
Photo by Kenny Irby/Poynter
Keith Woods looks through the remains of his father's house. |
In October, the stories were in the pictures found and lost, and those stories were being told at kitchen tables in Lafayette and Baton Rouge as people passed around the new slide shows – pictures of what it looks like when your life is swallowed whole and rudely spit up.
As October ended my father died, and a new story revealed itself to me. It’s the story of a whole generation of people in this region who might have lived longer – months, years, maybe a decade here or there – if they hadn’t lost everything, including the hope that at the very least they could be home when it was time to die.
Their stories are woven into a narrative of the hundreds of elderly people who perished while waiting for help, or drowned in the storms or while fleeing them, or from the stress of trying to do anything that needed urgency or limber joints. What does it do to a place, to a community, to a people, when so much memory and wisdom and rootedness is wiped out like that?
My father died in a hospital in Baton Rouge. In the days that came before, we’d taken a whirlwind tour of end-of-life decisions and had shifted numbly to wondering how you bury someone in an empty, flooded city. The Catholic diocese was burying only three people a day in the city’s cemeteries so that the grave workers could spend the rest of their time working on their wrecked homes. So many funerals were needed, the lady in charge of burials told me on the Saturday before my father died, that the next week was already booked, save for one possible opening on Thursday. I argued with my oldest sister when she insisted that I call back to see if we could reserve the date.
It was over by 9 a.m. on the morning of October 31st, and as November began my family got a glimpse into another experience of so many of your readers, finding our way to a funeral home recommended by the people who used to bury our people, making sure the undertaker understood the peculiar challenge of getting a casket made somewhere else to fit into the shifting holes of a New Orleans crypt.
My father got into funerals and their details and their traditions. He was an obituary-reader and attended family funerals no matter how thin the blood. He was a faithful Catholic, a patriot, and, owing to both, a stickler of detail. So he wouldn’t have appreciated the off-the-wall funeral sermon of the whacky priest from St. Francis Xavier church in Baton Rouge, and he wouldn’t have approved of being driven at breakneck speed down I-10, presumably so the funeral directors wouldn’t get caught in the noon rush-hour traffic now a daily reality in Baton Rouge. My dad would have watched, as I did, as the soldiers creased the folds of the flag they took from his coffin. He would have stood solemnly, as I did, to hear the soldier standing 30 yards away play taps.
And he would have noticed the sign that his city was sick with an unfamiliar disease; so sick that, here, two days removed from All Saints Day, when old people left their sick beds to clean up family graves, weeds and garbage were everywhere. My father would have known that his city was suffering with something so powerful it could knock the tradition out of a culture.
The story you are working to cover is no smaller than that and no bigger.
It’s at every intersection of once was and will be; at every meeting between who we thought we were and who is now staring back in the mirror. It’s the story of my brother, who had a FEMA trailer delivered and strapped down on his property the same day his Lacombe house was ready to be reoccupied, and the story of my stepmother, who was trying to decide yesterday whether to make her annual homeowners insurance payment to Allstate, which had yet to contact her about the house on North Roman Street that the city says she won’t be able to occupy for a year.
It’s all the stories of politics and government and contractors and developers and elections and whether the Saints go or come and traffic and crime and racial suspicion; all of that in service of the people, wherever they may now call home, trying to decide what they can do. Maybe even what they should do. Those are your people. And they are you. We hope that our visit with you these next two days will help you to serve both with distinction.
Thank you.
Posted at 11:38:32 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A93932
What Kind of Journalism is Needed When... Your City is Gone?
|
Listen to Audio |
Click to listen to Gregory Favre reading this story.
Download this story as an audio file to your MP3 player by right clicking this link and saving file to your computer or device. Ipod users should be able to drag this link into iTunes.
| |
Poynter's
Gregory Favre returned home to Mississippi's Gulf Coast to help Poynter colleagues lead a conference on Covering Hurricanes with the
Dart Center. His opening remarks at the conference:
"Your city is gone."
Four words spoken by a free lance photographer to Sun Herald reporter Anita Lee.
"Your city is gone."
Four words that rang out across the Gulf Coast, from my hometown of Bay St. Louis to Pass Christian to Long Beach to Gulfport to Biloxi to Bayou LaBatre to Mobile and beyond.
"Your city is gone."
Four words that will remain housed in our memories--- memories of a nightmare named Katrina who put hundreds of thousands of men, women and children through 24 hours of hell. Twenty-four hours of destruction. Twenty-four hours that changed the face of tomorrow.
And what about tomorrow? What was normal is no longer. The town I knew as a youngster where I learned of the joy of childhood innocence, the joy of discovery, the joy of what would be life-long relationships, that town no longer exists. Just as so many of your towns, and the towns of your readers and your viewers and listeners, no longer exist. Now, there is only a new normal to build together.
"No one’s story is unique," Ryan LaFontaine wrote in the Sun Herald. "All of us have been left with shattered hearts. My hometown is mangled and my neighbors are in pain. My house can be rebuilt, but my home may never again be the same."
"Your city is gone."
This was the kind of story you pray you never have to chronicle. But from all I have read and heard, you did it honorably and courageously, in the finest tradition of journalism, and made us proud. People desperately needed to read and hear your words and view your pictures, on all the platforms available. They needed places where they could come together with others to share their grief and their fears and their tears, places where they could join in a communion of feeling, places that were islands of news and information in the middle of a sea of rumors.
They needed to be able to grasp the magnitude of what happened and to see the faces and to hear the stories of those heroes who saved lives, and later those heroes from across the land who came to simply help in any way they could. They needed to read and hear of 13-year-old Phillip Bullard who saved his family. Of the 102-year-old woman who wouldn’t leave her home because she said no one else is 102 and they would never understand why she stayed. Or the words of Catholic Bishop Thomas Rodi: "The difficult thing about suffering is that it comes at a time we didn’t choose. But we can choose whether we let it burden our hearts, or expand them."
You gave them that place to come together. You gave it to them, even though many of you had no homes to return to, no clothes to change into, no time to shed your own tears.
You know the script. It has been written before: Reporters and visual journalists get there first. They witness it all. They show no emotion, make jokes, never cry. They get the story and then move on to the next assignment. And for the most part, they do not deal with the aftermath, with the trauma of having looked into the mouth of hell, or with having been up close and personal with the largest natural disaster in the history of our country.
If you haven’t taken that time to cry, to grieve, perhaps this is the weekend to pause for a moment and to look deep inside yourself, especially since the nightmarish images are still around like billboards, advertising grief and reminding us every moment, every hour, every day that our city is gone.
"I mean, I mean…" Gov. Haley Barbour was searching for words to describe what he was seeing. " I mean there’s nothing there in many places. Nothing left. It’s destroyed. That’s what I mean."
I know what he meant. As I drove and walked the streets of Bay St. Louis several weeks after Katrina all I could say was, "Oh, my God." Slabs of concrete, stairs to nowhere, the remains of houses scattered across the landscape as if they were millions of Lego pieces ready to be assembled into what would be once again loving homes.
This was the place where nine generations of Favres have lived, where my seven older brothers and sisters were born in our home on Main Street before mom decided to go to a hospital for my birth and those of my younger brother and sister, where I made my first communion and was confirmed and graduated from St. Stanislaus. This is the place where at 16 I helped my brothers carry my dad’s coffin while the beautiful voices of the St. Augustine Seminary’s choir sang in the background, where I delivered the eulogies for my mother and two sisters and where we buried two brothers, where I wrote my first newspaper story for my dad’s weekly, the Sea Coast Echo.
This was the place of a boyhood that shaped the years that have followed, a place back then of 10-cent sodas at the drug store and 25-cent Saturday movie matinees and 50-cent haircuts , a place where practically everyone knew everyone else and you never passed anyone on the streets without greeting them by name.
This was the place where I experienced my first hurricane in 1947, before they named them, a day when more than 100 people, washed out of their Cedar Point houses, ended up in our farm house which the water didn’t reach. It was the place where I came home to once before after another hurricane, Camille in 1969, to witness what was left of Bay St. Louis after what most believed to be the worst storm in our history. And this was the place I came back to after Katrina, a hurricane whose deadly fury was far greater than that of Camille.
Two brothers and a sister still live there, as do dozens of nieces, nephews and cousins. Most, like many of you, have lost their homes. All will return to build again.
As a Sun Herald editorial proclaimed, "It’s up to us restore the way of life that we have always appreciated. It is up to us. We dare not stay either in shock or in mourning forever."
"Your city is gone."
Now, you will have to help readers and viewers and listeners decide what normal will be from this time on. Will it be the postcard scenes we have seen so often of people walking hand-in-hand on the beach just minutes before nightfall? Will it be the casinos and motels and hotels jammed again with people who have left their own burdens behind?
Will the new homes and businesses that will be built create a new architectural vision for the coast? Will most people stay or return, or will there be a whole new roster of names in the next phone book? And, as Sun Herald editor Stan Tiner wrote, will our common coda be that we are still standing together? Or will we be looking out only for ourselves?
"Our people have great spirit," my nephew Edward Favre, mayor of Bay St. Louis, told me after we had hugged and chatted for a while. "We will rebuild together. It will take years, but we will be back." And that’s what I have heard over and over again. And it’s what you see on the handmade signs in the now vacant lots where homes once stood.
Isn’t this one of the reasons we came to journalism in the first place? To help people find their way in a time of crisis? To assist as best we can to calm fears and promote a civil dialogue? To let everyone know what they can expect next and to provide a forum for all voices to be heard in that discussion?
It hasn’t been a good year for many of our colleagues around the country. We have lost hundreds upon hundreds of newsroom jobs in 2005, space and resources have been cut, morale has been damaged. But what you have done, and what our colleagues in Louisiana and in neighboring states have done, not just for Katrina but for all of the deadly storms, speaks so loudly and so clearly about the contract and the scared trust we share with those who look to us for the news and information they need to live in the present and prepare for the future. You have honored that trust.
This story will continue to be written for years. And it needs to continue to be written, as it has been, in the language of the heart, the language of hope, and, yes, the language of love---love for our communities, love for our heritage, love for what was and what can be.
"Your city is gone."
There is a lot of healing yet to be done, outside in the streets and inside your own buildings, for those who stay and those who don’t, for those who have lost so much and for those of us, such as me, who share the pain of the losses felt by those we love so dearly. There are a lot of memories of the past and the ugly images of Katrina’s wrath to deal with. So many dead to remember in our thoughts and prayers.
And so many voices we heard that will echo in our heads for years and years.
"It’s over. They are with the Lord."
"Baby, don’t die. If you die, I will die."
"Has anyone seen…or have they found…"
"I haven’t had a chance to cry. I have to find my mother and put her to rest."
"I don’t know how we survived. I guess it is all in the praying I did."
Or the words of Phillip Bullard’s mother: "I am living because of the grace of God and the courage of my son."
Or the fireman searching homes: "I am hoping and praying I don’t find anyone."
Or the voice of a niece, appropriately named Angel: " I can only thank God that, although homes have been destroyed and mementoes lost forever, my family endures. Pictures can be copied, furniture can be replaced, and homes can be rebuilt, but lives cannot be reclaimed."
"Your city is gone."
But as you take the measure of your own hearts and souls, of your own work, your own contributions, give yourselves a report card filled with the highest grades. You have served with grace and class and caring, and we thank you.
There is so much left to be done. There are more sacrifices needed, more waves of fears left to be calmed, more bridges of agreement to be built across the many gulfs of different opinions about what needs to be done. And we cannot allow anyone, especially the men and women in Washington, to forget what you have witnessed. If Mississippi is forgotten, then the land, filled with the remains of what was everyday life, will be soaked again and again with our tears.
We will carry those 24 hours of hell with us for years to come---the headlines, the descriptions of the destruction, the pictures, the voices, the cries for help are all indelible marks burned into our memory banks. The water is long gone, the wind is a mere whisper of what was, and there are as many hopes and dreams and ambitions for the future as there are dreamers.
There is much left to be done. A new normal to create. A new tomorrow. New cities.
"Your city is gone."
Please help her to be reborn again.
Posted at 11:37:35 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A93959
Leading After the Storms
By Butch Ward
Distinguished Fellow
The nine editors sitting at desks in the Community College classroom were quiet. The question posed by my colleague, Gregory Favre, had paused the conversation about leadership and its importance to the journalists covering the worst natural disaster in American history.
"In the months ahead," Gregory had asked the editors, "as you continue to cover the aftermath of this hurricane, what will your staffs need from you in terms of leadership?"
My feet were cold. The bare concrete floor, like so many others in this world that Katrina ravaged, had been stripped of its flood-ruined carpet. I wondered how long the waiting list is for new carpet in southern Mississippi.
Stan Tiner, editor of the Biloxi Sun Herald, broke the silence.
"The answer is," he said, pausing: ‘We don’t know." He paused again. "I mean, we’ve never been through anything like this before. This is a no-man’s land. We don’t know exactly what our staffs will need."
He was right, of course. None of us in that room had led our staffs through anything like this hurricane that laid waste to the Gulf Coast four months ago. But Gregory knew that Stan wasn’t giving himself enough credit. So he challenged him.
"You might not know exactly what your staff will need," Gregory said, "but you won’t just deal with things as they come each day. You will rely on certain principles of leadership – like you’ve been doing ever since this began."
Indeed, beginning in the days leading up to Katrina’s onslaught, Stan Tiner and the other newsroom leaders we met last weekend have worked mightily to lead their newsrooms through the coverage of a crisis – a crisis, that in this case, also has victimized many of the journalists as well.
Looking back on what they taught me during our two days together, I realize how many of their acts of leadership apply to our everyday pursuits of good journalism. For example, when we asked them to recall examples of effective leadership they had witnessed and the qualities exhibited by the leaders they admired, their list included:
Listening. Decisive. Trustworthy. Dependable. Calm. Focused decision-making. Able to clarify. Allocates resources effectively. Knows when to empower, when to take charge. Exudes confidence. Communicates well. Motivates. Prepares – as a plan. Is There. Empathetic. Compassionate. Seeks input, and allows venting.
When I think of the best leaders I’ve encountered in newsrooms, I picture women and men who possess those very same qualities.
I think of men and women who believe the leadership you demonstrate every day prepares you to lead in times of crisis.
One editor observed that since Katrina, she was taking more time to learn what’s happening in the lives of her staff, so that she could better respond to their personal issues.
Another editor agreed, and observed that many editors are taught to keep a distance from their staffs; getting too close makes it difficult to manage, the theory goes.
Listening to these editors share how their staffs have responded to compassionate leadership suggests we might want to throw that theory on the pile with the ruined carpets. Aren’t I much more inclined to follow the editor who has demonstrated a concern for me? Won’t I respond much more enthusiastically to the editor who understands that I am struggling every day to balance this very hard work with life’s challenging issues?
The danger, it seems, is not a matter of getting too close to someone; the danger is not knowing someone – a very poor basis for establishing any kind of effective relationship.
The editors also discussed how their values and those of their communities may have changed – or been amplified – by this incredible experience. We agreed that many values – including fairness, truth, accuracy, usefulness, relevance, compassion and independence – are largely shared by journalists and the community alike. We also agreed that journalists and the community share a belief in the value of watchdog journalism – until, of course, the journalism collides with someone’s personal interests. And the community holds some values, the editors said, that might not make their list: patriotism, religion, more positive and less negative news.
Which values have the journalists decided in Katrina’s aftermath are even more important?
Responsiveness. Helpfulness. Providing the bridge to government.
We talked about values because of the potential for conflict when our values clash with those of our audience. And we discussed whether in the aftermath of Katrina, that potential for conflict had changed. Certainly it still exists – the journalist’s determination to monitor the recovery effort and those responsible for its success undoubtedly will ruffle some feathers. But is the potential for conflict any greater?
One important change is the much more intimate relationship that exists between the newsroom and the audience in Katrina’s aftermath. For now, at least, the shared experience of braving catastrophe has made the journalist’s connection to the audience much stronger—and certainly demonstrated the journalist’s commitment to the health and well-being of the community.
But as in families, closeness can lead to higher highs and lower lows. Feelings are strong. Letdowns become betrayals.
So how do good leaders mitigate the potential for conflicts with the community’s values?
Here’s what the editors suggested:
"Listen to the community." "Be open to learning." "Be willing to clarify or correct." "Use good judgment." "Reach out to the audience."
Again, I was struck how good leaders practice these same approaches every day, not just in times of crisis. I was also struck by the realization that this style of leadership requires a big dose of humility. Doesn’t it?
Ask yourself: Am I be open to the possibility that the next call I get might completely change the direction of a story we’re reporting or an editorial stand we’ve taken? Does my newsroom exhibit that level of humility?
Ultimately, we arrived at the question that quieted the room – at least momentarily: What will our staffs need from their leaders in the weeks and months ahead?
"Keep talking with them." "Help them feed off your energy, and feed off theirs." "Stand in their shoes." "Help them find a measure of control – in their stories and in their personal lives." "Respond to them individually – not one-size-fits-all." "Plan more—reduce the ‘pinball effect.’" "Think unconventionally."
Sounds like someone I’d like to follow.
Posted at 11:36:44 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A94037
A Journalist-Guided Tour of Mississippi’s Coast
By Scott Libin
Leadership & Management Faculty
I didn’t see a single Christmas decoration.
Friday afternoon was cold and gray by Gulf Coast standards. Along Highway 90 in Mississippi, it was ugly by any standard. My Poynter colleague Kelly McBride and I took a tour with two local journalists of what was once a scenic stretch of beachfront from Biloxi through Gulfport and Long Beach to Pass Christian.
The few trees left standing held no holiday lights. Where would you plug them in? The buildings are all gone. Uprooted or upright, the branches weren’t entirely bare. Thousands, maybe millions of scraps of fabric and plastic still flap in the breeze more than three months after the hurricane. Not what you would call festive.
It’s become a cliché to say that even video can’t capture the enormity of the disaster. It’s also true. I’m not quite sure why that is. The stories I’ve seen were powerful, meaningful and important. Still, watching them was like looking through a door open just a crack: What little I could see was vivid and compelling. It could almost convince me I had the whole picture. There was just so much I couldn’t see.
I had seen some pretty extreme tornado damage in other parts of the country, and this was a little like that – but this went on for miles and miles, and what the wind did wasn’t the worst of it. The wall of water, 30 feet high in some places, did damage unlike anything else I’ve ever encountered.
Dave Vincent says seeing it doesn’t get easier with time. He’s the news director at WLOX, Biloxi’s main television station. He’s been there nearly 30 years, and he’s done the drive along Highway 90 four or five times since the storm. Vincent says, if anything, it was harder this time. He thinks maybe that’s because he wasn’t behind the wheel.
His friend and fellow news director Randy Swan did the driving. Swan has been at WDAM in Hattiesburg, about 50 miles from Biloxi, almost as long as Vincent has been at his station. From the passenger seat, Vincent said, he could see even more on this tour: details that the distraction of driving had hidden from him on his first few trips.
No snowmen, no Santas, no reindeer, but some strange stuff survived the storm. From the gutted shell of a casino nightclub, a disco ball still hangs. The Olive Garden is gone entirely, but its sign stands intact. And in one particularly desolate stretch, devoid of all structures, the only thing to hold its ground was a boat – one washed ashore in 1969 and later renamed for the hurricane responsible. The S. S. Camille operated high and dry for years as a gift shop amid the hotels, restaurants and beachfront businesses . They’re all gone now, but the tourist-trap tugboat still sits where one storm put it and another – strangely – left it.
Vincent says unless you had seen the homes along Highway 90 before Katrina, you can’t fully appreciate how beautiful they were. To him they represent one of the differences in the disaster’s impact on his community, compared with New Orleans. As the rest of us learned last summer, in New Orleans, poor people lived in the city’s lowest-lying areas. In southern Mississippi, there was no place more prestigious than a home overlooking the Gulf. Katrina, he helped me understand, was a true leveler, in the literal and figurative sense of the word.
As we turned inland, the damage decreased gradually. Still, even well away from the beach, it’s bad – worse, in fact, than the aftermath of many natural disasters. Swan and Vincent say the multitudes living under blue tarps consider themselves lucky to have one of those, and a roof to support it. Even living in a FEMA trailer beats waiting for one.
Maybe there are Christmas decorations somewhere in the area. Maybe we even passed some. If so, I just couldn’t see them. Nor did I notice them missing, until I got back to St. Petersburg, where people believe that if decorating is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.
I don’t think people along Mississippi’s coast are without the Christmas spirit. I just suspect the way they show it has changed this year. Along with everything else.
Posted at 11:36:04 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A93956
Journalism in Service to Community: A Checklist of Trials and Triumphs
By Aly Colón
Reporting, Writing & Editing Group Leader
The journalists sat hunched over tables in a community college amphitheater. They had gathered in a classroom at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College in Gulfport, Mississippi.
The classroom, where community college students study nursing, seemed appropriate. For these journalists had nursed journalism in the service of their communities during, and after, Hurricane Katrina’s devastating onslaught of water and wind.
Now they were taking a short respite. Along with faculty from the Poynter Institute and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, they paused for a couple of days to think about what they had endured, and where they had succeeded.
The journalists hailed from the Mississippi cities of Biloxi, Hattiesburg and Jackson, along with others from nearby Mobile, Alabama. As a way of understanding what they went through, we asked them to consider some of the trials—and triumphs—of their hurricane coverage.
Here were some of the trials and challenges they faced covering the hurricane and its aftermath:
• Managing communications among themselves and their communities;
• Establishing the accuracy of what they heard;
• Finding transportation;
• Staying safe;
• Dealing with the unusual situation of being part of the story;
• Finding a common language with which to communicate;
• Communicating with those outside the area;
• Returning to a life that was closer to a state of nature than more modern world they were used to;
• Living with aftermath;
• Dealing with compassion fatigue;
• Living with survivor’s guilt;
• Enduring comparisons among those who tried to compare who was the ultimate victim;
• The role that animal and pets played;
• Having to be the first responders to a tragedy;
• Maintaining perspective
• Establishing priorities
• Deciding the right timing for coverage;
• And communicating with different types of communities, especially those whose language they didn’t understand (such as Hispanics and Vietnamese).
Here were some the triumphs they listed:
• Getting the product out EVERY DAY;
• Fulfilling a need;
• Re-learning journalism as a calling;
• Focusing on the path from desolation to recovery;
• Finding good in everyone;
• Connecting people;
• Seeing a larger picture;
• Generating goodwill;
• Realizing how important and inspirational journalism is;
• The redemptive quality of good journalism;
• Seeing the mission of journalism that includes all media;
• Successfully sorting through information and getting to facts;
• Providing a sense of normalcy;
• Watching competition give way to cooperation;
• Seeing competition lead to better and different stories;
• Creating new forms of journalism, such as cartooning;
• Offering snapshots of "Before & After."
Posted at 11:34:47 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A94046
Images of Devastation, Feelings of Hope
By Roy Peter Clark
Vice President, Senior Scholar and Reporting, Writing & Editing Faculty
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:
· Journalists need physical and moral courage to fulfill their duty to the public.
· On certain big stories, journalists are part of the public, and should not be held to the same standards of neutrality imposed in calm weather.
· To do their work, journalists need special support, from the companies that own them, from their colleagues, from the profession, and from the public.
· Members of the public may hug whoever delivers their paper in a storm, worth remembering as we sound the death knell for print.
· After a storm, watchdog journalism is more important than ever. (Think FEMA or the Red Cross, or State Farm Insurance).
· Timing is everything. News judgment after a storm means planning for immediate coverage, but also for the stories of loss and rebirth that will come down the road, months and years after the event. The editor must know when to print stories of grief, but without instilling compassion fatigue.
· A rousing version of "Proud Mary" can lift the spirits, even under the most trying circumstances.
· We all owe the residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast the duty of remembering how much they have suffered and how much they need us and how much we need them – especially when so much of the coverage has shone on New Orleans.
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.
Posted at 11:33:58 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A94043
Respect and Restraint: Traits to Remember in Disaster Coverage
By Bob Steele
Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values
We learned a great deal from the journalists who attended Poynter's "Covering Hurricanes" seminar. I was particularly struck by the thoughtfulness and professionalism of the reporters, photojournalists, producers and editors who were thrust into exceptionally difficult situations reporting on the violence and the victims of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. They were humble in recounting stories where they were courageous. They were reserved in describing the horror they witnessed.
During our session on "Choices amid Chaos," I asked reporter Dee Dixon of the Beaumont (TX) Enterprise to recount the story of a New Orleans man, Donald Jacko, one of many who lost so much when Katrina swept ashore.
Dee Dixon met Jacko about ten days after Katrina's winds and floodwater had ripped apart his home and ravaged his family in New Orleans' Ninth Ward. By then, Jacko and his two sons were evacuees in Beaumont, applying for financial assistance and social services at a Red Cross Shelter.
Their loss was much more than material. As Dixon learned and wrote about in the Beaumont Enterprise, Donald Jacko had lost his wife and and his mother-in-law. Both drowned when they fell from the roof of their home as floodwaters roiled, Mr. Jacko and the two boys clinging for life and somehow surviving as the women died.
Dee Dixon's wrote a story for the Enterprise (a story co-bylined with Jacqueline Lane that included other accounts of Katrina victims), and at my request Dee told the story of Donald Jacko at our seminar last weekend.
I'm sure it was very difficult for Dee to interview Mr. Jacko that day, to learn of his pain and trauma, and to turn that interview into a newspaper story.
But she did so, thoughtfully and professionally. My impression is that she treated Mr. Jacko with great respect even as she asked him difficult questions. She showed him compassion even as she probed for details of what happened that horrific night in New Orleans.
Dee Dixon did what she needed to do as a professional journalist. She sought specific information to tell an accurate, contextual and fair story about something that was very important. She wrote a clear, compelling account that helped her readers better understand at least one more piece of the terrible tale of Hurricane Katrina.
I wasn't there when Dee Dixon interviewed Donald Jacko. But I was greatly impressed by the sensitivity and professionalism that Dee exhibited as she told the story, first in the newspaper and then to our group of journalists at the seminar last weekend.
I sensed that Dee Dixon cared deeply about what she was doing as a journalist, and she cared deeply about Donald Jacko.
Posted at 11:33:20 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A94049
A Different Kind of New Orleans Vacation
Fanua J. Borodzicz, who serves as assistant to the dean at Poynter, helped organize the recent Covering Hurricanes conference in New Orleans. When it concluded, she took some vacation time and stuck around New Orleans. Here's her account of what she did and saw:
|
Photo By Sarah Gagnon
French Quarter clean-up volunteers |
The bright sun streamed through my hotel room facing the Mississippi River this morning on Royal Street in New Orleans' French Quarter. It could have been any other crisp December day in this city known for its Saints. Yet today was another of many days of recovery in an area devastated in so many ways by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
I heard on local Fox 8 News the night before that a group was planning to spend December 20th cleaning up the streets of the French Quarter. Here was a chance for me to volunteer to do something to help this healing community. It's a place I visited once before at this same time of year a few years ago under merrier times, a community I returned to last week for a journalism conference about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and their effects on the local journalists who covered the story and experienced many of the things they wrote about.
|
Year of the Storms:
Stories Yet to be Told |
|
|
As a visiting volunteer, I joined the management team from the Hilton Garden Inn New Orleans hotels, the Convention Center and the French Quarter/Central Business District properties. Our assigned task: cleaning the famous Bourbon Street from Canal Street to the end of the 900 block. With brooms, trash bags, cleaning solution and rags in hand, we spent about five hours today sweeping away debris. We hoped it would serve as a sign that New Orleans is getting back to normal -- and that the French Quarter would lead the way. I had heard about a month or so ago that as the French Quarter goes so does New Orleans, and today it appeared to be true.
My new "colleagues" of determined souls, some whom had returned from evacuations to Texas, Alabama and Tennessee, represented to me the soul of New Orleans. They included people who had stacked up furniture to climb to the safety of rooftops to await rescue by helicopter, and others who returned three times to an abandoned family home to discover, each time, that more and more household items had been looted. They included people those whose families are contemplating whether to remain in New Orleans, as well as people whose families have already decided to stay put in places like Houston, never to return home.
These are among the many stories of this tragedy, as are the damaged houses on side streets along Canal Street, homes with spray painted markings on the doors and flooded cars scattered out front. I haven't made it down to the 9th Ward yet, a major area of flooding once the levees breached. I'll rely on the dedicated journalists here to carry these stories forward and keep us abreast of how goes New Orleans.
Posted at 11:32:40 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A94091
Lessons from Katrina
|
Year of the Storms:
Stories Yet to be Told |
|
|
Poynter President Karen Brown Dunlap asked participants in Poynter's recent Covering Hurricanes conferences to share "one journalistic lesson that you've learned in covering Katrina and the aftermath." Here are some of the lessons shared, as compiled by
Candace Clarke:
"I have learned, or re-learned, just how important what we do is to the communities we serve. Covering Hurricane Katrina has given me tangible evidence of the impact journalism has on people's lives."
-- Drew Tarter, photo director, The Sun Herald
* * *
"There are two lessons I learned that cannot be segregated in my mind because they overlap on the time continuum from the moments of disaster to the human and community recovery - days, weeks and months later:
The first is journalism's absolute necessity in this information-laden world. It fills the void where people in sympathy, empathy and who are living the disaster need to see, feel and hear what is happening.
The second is to sometimes kick start the conversation. There are so many things happening all at once, journalism serves as a tool to focus the communal conscience. People need to be told what is important, what to concentrate on and how to address it."
-- Mike Keller, staff writer, The Sun Herald
* * *
"Katrina reinforced the need to be flexible and persistent. From the satellite phones of the early days to the football game story filed from a laptop plugged into my Jeep's cigarette lighter and a bank of free Bell South phones in a pitch black shopping center parking lot, we have to get the stories out. It can be done, and we know how to do it from anywhere, at any time and any way possible."
-- Don Hammack, sports writer, The Sun Herald
* * *
"Take the important equipment with you - stay organized in your car. It's worth going back into the mud-swamped office for your Rolodex."
-- Karen Nelson, reporter, The Sun Herald
* * *
"My assignment during Katrina was to go to Columbus, Ga., and get the paper out from there. I learned no matter what the situation we can count on fellow journalists, both in and out of Knight Ridder, to help us with whatever we need. the offers to help were non-stop, and the compassion we saw was overwhelming."
Blake Kaplan, assistant city editor, The Sun Herald
* * *
"Listen to as many people as you can - standing in line with them, in every day situations...to learn what they're talking about - their problems., their needs."
-- Lisa Monti, business editor, The Sun Herald
* * *
"The biggest lesson I learned from Katrina derives from my greatest regret. I was out of town during the storm - my grandmother had a stroke. Her life was probably not in danger, my family knew. But the storm wasn't supposed to be a major one for our area, broadcasts seemed to be telling us. I got back into Mobile and was on the ground reporting later the day of the storm, but I regret not being in Bayou la Batre during its most desperate hour.
The lesson I learned is to measure decisions and their consequences more carefully. I've done some valuable work since the storm, I feel. But I'll forever regret not being there for the storm itself."
-- Russ Henderson, reporter, The Mobile Register
* * *
"I was reminded that every picture you shoot matters, and every picture depicts history.
Never forget that what we do day-to-day is produce a historical document."
-- Smiley Pool, photographer, Dallas Morning News
* * *
"I've learned many lessons from covering Katrina. I learned that it's difficult to cover an event that you're also living - but it has made my writing better. I have heard many people's stories, and I've learned how strong we are - as a profession, as a community and as a people, and how important it is that all these stories be told.
I've learned how good people can be. The response from churches, cities and community groups has been overwhelming. Sometimes journalists tend to be cynical - well, much of the time - and this has taught us all that tragedy brings out the goodness in people."
-- Melissa Scallan, education and weather writer, The Sun Herald
* * *
"I learned just how important the media is and is needed. We became first responders as well as journalists. For the first time in a long time, we were needed, and in turn were able to provide a service over and above the norm.
While we serve as the voice of the public everyday, this storm brought out that voice in a way that all could hear and understand - we were also the voice that brought back a sense of normalcy to a hurting community. 'It was good to hear a familiar voice," were the words that echoed during and after the storm.'"
-- Randy Swan, anchor/news director, WDAM TV
* * *
"I learned so many things over the last three months, but I think the most important lesson is how important it is to identity and utilize resources.
At The Sun Herald, we were very fortunate to have an outpouring of help and support from our Knight Ridder sister papers and as well as corporate. At times it was overwhelming to have so many resources at our disposal. But by the same token, I learned fast how to employ and deploy those resources to best tell our story quickly."
-- Kate Magandy, city editor, The Sun Herald
* * *
"You not only need to focus on the disaster before you, but be able to think out of the box, to view from above and to be ever vigilant in watching government at its most and least obvious points.
Be compassionate. Be human. But don't be so involved with victim sympathy that you are afraid to appreciate how your readers and others deserved some of the damage. We put ourselves beside a glass of water filled to the brim, built our homes to insufficient code levels, subsidized putting them in flood and surge zones, then complained when a cyclical act of nature made the water in that glass spill over. We built poor levees and ran them corruptly. We allowed an emergency agency with a legacy of waste and ineptness to remain inept and wasteful, to even be consumed by a bigger bureaucracy. And we didn't tell people strongly enough to get out when it was clear they needed to.
One of our most important tasks as journalists is to learn the lessons of the tragedy and make the casualties' experiences pay off for those in the future. We need to respect our readers' losses, yes, but tell them what they and their leaders did wrong to prevent further losses from storms that are not a possibility, but an eventuality."
-- Paul Cloos, assistant managing editor, Mobile Register
Posted at 11:32:03 PM
E-mail this item |
Add Your Comments |
QuickLink this item: A93926
Sense Memories: Recalling the Stories They Told in the Storms
Poynter's Jill Geisler was among a group of Poynter faculty leading a recent conference on Covering Hurricanes co-sponsored by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Here's her account of one of the conference sessions in New Orleans:
|
Year of the Storms:
Stories Yet to be Told |
|
|
Sandy Davis carries food and water in her car every day. No matter that the hurricane season is past. The staff writer for the Advocate, of Baton Rouge, can’t forget how very hungry she was, covering Katrina. Her paper had given her money, but there was nowhere to buy food. She turned down provisions offered her by emergency workers, because, she said, she would be taking it from the mouths of victims.
Her eyes seemed sad, even as she joked, “I could feed everyone here right now out of my car.”
She was talking about the fellow journalists in the room who took part in the New Orleans Dart/Poynter workshop. Like her, they had covered hurricanes. Like her, they carry memories that stay with them – and may have changed them.
Bruce Shapiro of the Dart Center asked them to think about a sense memory of Katrina or Rita; a smell, a
