It’s taken days to understand the full devastation of Hurricane Helene, both here in Florida and up through North Carolina.
In Florida, boats rest on streets and in trees, showing the ruinous path of the storm surge. On block after block, in cities and towns across the state, soggy piles of people’s lives and livelihoods sit on the curb.
In North Carolina, my colleague Tony Elkins is sharing from Asheville, where he’s safe and busy clearing the roads with neighbors.
This is a glimpse at coverage in just two of the many areas impacted by Hurricane Helene. If you’ve seen powerful work that deserves to be recognized, including from Georgia and South Carolina, please reach out.
In North Carolina, Blue Ridge Public Radio “has the best reporting,” Elkins wrote colleagues on Slack from the top of his driveway on Monday. “99.9 I think is the star. It’s an iHeart station. They are broadcasting 24/7 with a call-in format. People are helping and asking for help. It’s absolutely uplifting and devastating. You literally can’t listen for more than a few hours without breaking down. Their DJs are literally holding the community together.”
Poynter’s Angela Fu spoke with several journalists covering Hurricane Helene’s aftermath, the loss of communication and basic necessities.
That includes the nonprofit Asheville Watchdog, which is already asking tough and necessary questions about response time. The Asheville Citizen-Times started offering text message updates. Spanish language nonprofit Enlace Latino NC posts critical information about food, water and FEMA assistance. Multicultural newspaper The Urban News directed people to a Starlink station so they could contact family. And Shannan Bowen, executive director of the North Carolina News Workshop, is organizing pooled resources to help newsrooms in Western North Carolina.
In Florida, WFTS meteorologist Denis Phillips is the voice for what’s coming and the reminder to stay calm. He uses Instagram and Facebook to answer questions and keep us informed. When he starts posting or goes live, you know it’s serious.
Tampa Bay’s NPR station, WUSF, is collecting people’s voices and stories. Axios Tampa Bay is directing people on how to give and where to help.
The Tampa Bay Times, which Poynter owns, didn’t just cover the tense before, devastating during and heartbreaking after of Hurricane Helene. Journalists there also quickly put the storm into perspective as “the worst storm in a century.”
It’s powerful work, considering the Times is significantly smaller than it was a few months ago after cutting 60 jobs through buyouts. Some in that newsroom were also impacted by the storm.
The home of a Tampa Bay Times photojournalist, who has spent years documenting hurricanes, was flooded. His newsroom and community are stepping in to raise money.
Screen shot, GoFundMe
For Sharon Kennedy Wynne, a longtime reporter at the Tampa Bay Times who has led her community on wild adventures, there’s a meal train as her family prepares to gut and rebuild their home.
We see this from local newsrooms during nearly every disaster, even if it takes time for the outside world to see it. The nonprofit Honolulu Civil Beat shifted into a breaking news operation following the Maui wildfires in 2023. In 2022, Florida talk radio hosts stayed on the air for hours after Hurricane Ian. In 2021, a local radio station in Kentucky stepped up after deadly tornadoes.
“No matter what you hear out of Western North Carolina,” my colleague, Elkins, wrote on Threads, “neighbors are what’s getting us through this.”
And regardless of newsroom size, the funding model, the audience, the medium or the mission, local journalists are our neighbors, too.
This originally appeared in Local Edition, our newsletter for and about local news.
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