The Red River still was rising on April 20, 1997, when Editor Mike Jacobs and Publisher Mike Maidenberg told readers of their editorial that life in Grand Forks, N.D., would never be the same:
Grand Forks has sustained deep wounds, and there will be scars. On Saturday evening, as we write, the river continues its historic rise and fire is tearing at the heart of downtown. Thousands of buildings are immersed. Several of the town’s most historic structures are alight. There is no apparent power that can save them. These buildings were part of our past.
This week, as he followed reports of Hurricane Katrina’s deadly assault on the cities and towns of the Gulf Coast, Mike Jacobs recalled those days no one had imagined possible: the foul-smelling, chocolate brown floodwaters that crested at 54 feet; the fires that swept through downtown and destroyed his newsroom; the heroic efforts of the Grand Forks Herald staff to publish their newspaper –- and to help a community rebuild.
His experience, and that of his newspaper, seems particularly instructive today as the communities devastated by Katrina measure the profound ways in which their lives will never be the same.
In the days and weeks ahead, news organizations throughout the affected area will have the opportunity to play a major role as their communities recover. The Grand Forks Herald did. And in some important ways, the experience forever changed the way the newspaper relates to its community.
First, though, Jacobs makes a point. “It would be trivializing what happened on the Gulf Coast to make too direct a comparison to what happened in Grand Forks. We did not have the loss of life or nearly the property damage or dislocation of people.”
What is comparable, however, is this: Neither the people of Grand Forks nor the people of the Gulf Coast thought such destruction possible. As Jacobs told a PBS reporter in 1997:
It’s an unimaginable event. I mean, this has not ever happened, and, you know, we had all the science, we had all the predictions, we had all the elevation maps, you know. We were out there. We literally wore ourselves out. I mean, I still hurt from sandbagging. You know, we wore ourselves out, and we knew we were going to win because we’ve always won before. And it just didn’t occur to us that the river has that kind of power.
But the river, engorged by the melting of nearly 100 inches of snow, was that powerful. So were the fires that accompanied the flood; in all, 11 downtown buildings were destroyed, including the one that housed the Herald newsroom and the company’s production plant.
Jacobs said the destruction of the paper’s facilities actually helped determine that the Herald would play a leadership role in the recovery.
“Because we lost our plant, we could not survive economically unless we rebuilt and did so quickly,” he said. “The situation added an urgency to our decision-making.”
He said that the quick decision by Knight-Ridder and the Herald to rebuild set an important precedent: the rest of the business community followed and forced the city to make decisions necessary for the recovery to proceed.
But the Herald did more than just decide to rebuild its facilities -– it helped its readers confront the awesome task of rebuilding their lives.
“For the first several days,” Jacobs recalled, “we provided two important things. First, we provided proof that you could survive this. And second, we provided hope that you could rebuild. Remember, none of us had any idea what we were facing.”
He said some reporters on the Gulf Coast have irritated him by criticizing as “irresponsible” those residents who are attempting to return home already.
“You cannot appreciate the level of desperation people feel to get home,” Jacobs said. “It’s a natural human response to return to the nest and start to rebuild.”
Experiencing that desperation with the rest of the community helped shape the Herald‘s coverage. Jacobs said the paper set out to do three things: Give as much practical information as possible (“we ran a recipe for bleach for six weeks”); offer sophisticated daily reports on the evolving situation, and to make the newspaper’s editorial voice as “inspirational” as possible.
That voice, Jacobs said, also assumed another important characteristic: It attempted to reflect the collective voice of the community.
“A disaster brings a community together in a way it usually isn’t,” Jacobs said. “Every day I would get out of the office and talk with people, and I tried to reflect in my editorial what their thinking was on that day.”
More than eight years later, the Flood remains for Jacobs -– now the Herald’s editor and publisher -– an experience that crystallized his thinking about his newspaper’s role in the community.
“I’m a small-town guy,” Jacobs said. “I;ve always worked in small cities. And I had a fairly well-developed notion of the newspaper’s role in a small town. But nothing could have fused those points of view like this crisis did.
“I always had thought of the newspaper as the ‘town nag.’ Now I describe it as a friend that’s in a position to make helpful suggestions.
“I think we’re a humbler institution after the disaster. We used to be haughty.
“Not long before the flood, we ran an editorial in which we said it was the function of the newspaper to ‘wound’ public officials. That seemed clever at the time, but that’s not really our role. I’d rather be in there and supportive than out there and haggling.”
“That’s not to say that we don’t go after public officials when the situation warrants it,” Jacobs said, pointing to the paper’s recent coverage of an elected official who faces conflict of interest accusations.
Back in a 1998 interview for The American Editor, Jacobs described the distinction this way:
There are journalists who just think that the paper as an institution is an adversary, that it ought to be positioning itself to be critical of decision-making of government, particularly of private business. I guess my response is that a level of skepticism is very, very healthy. A level of cynicism is more likely to be destructive.
It is right when someone comes forward with a plan to ask how is this going to benefit the community, to ask questions that will illuminate those critical issues. It is not appropriate to say immediately who is getting rich from this, who is screwing whom. Skepticism and cynicism are not the same thing.
In general, Jacobs said, the Herald today “is inclined to be less snippy and more inclined to be appreciative of what decision-makers face day-to-day.”
And what about readers? Has the Herald‘s role during the recovery had a lasting impact?
“Some of the newspaper’s identity in the community continues to be shaped by our work after the flood,” Jacobs said. “But a lot has happened since then, both in the newspaper industry and in the community.
“We had a reduction in the Herald workforce that had a counter effect on what we had tried to do after the flood. We had fewer people to cover the community. Readers process that.
“So the fact is the relationship between the Herald and Grand Forks evolves over time –- and our flood coverage was one factor in the relationship we have today.”
In a sense, the challenge is the same as before.
“Grand Forks is very proud of the fact that its newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for what we were able to do,” he said.
“And that hasn’t mattered to circulation at all.
“People look to us every day to see how we’re covering local news. There’s no resting on our laurels.”
See also:
- Four Lessons of Newspapering: Come Hell and High Water by Mike Jacobs (2001)
- In Event of Emergency (2001)
- Interview with Mike Jacobs (1998) when he won the ASNE editorial writing award for coverage of the floods
