behind the news

The Newspaper That the National Media Forgot?

While not as high-profile as New Orleans, the staff of the Biloxi, Miss. Sun Herald stayed at their posts during Katrina, too.
October 4, 2006

Just two years ago, as a student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Josh Norman was accused by one of his professors of “doing the hokey-pokey” with journalism. Last night, Norman was back at the J-school, telling war stories to this year’s class from his work on the Biloxi Sun Herald‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

One of his best was of going door-to-door with two firefighters who were urging residents to evacuate before the storm hit. Norman said they would often encounter residents who were insistent on staying; some bragged of having survived Hurricane Camille in 1969. At one house, the firefighters encountered a woman who stubbornly brushed off three attempts to get her to leave. Finally one of the firemen, visibly frustrated, tried a new tack.

“You know we’re going to find you naked, right?” he said.

“Huh?”

“Well, that’s what happens. There will be a surge; it will rip your house apart, destroy the neighborhood, and then we’ll find you dead — with no clothes on.”

Without hesitation, the woman turned to her husband: “Pack!”

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With the resurgence of national media attention to the Gulf Coast that came with the anniversary of Katrina having dissipated, it’s easy for the rest of the country to think it has heard all it needs to about the storm and what it revealed about America and its media. Norman and Stan Tiner, the Sun Herald‘s editor in chief, however, insist there is more to learn. “There is so much more to be done there,” said Norman. “It should be the duty of every journalist to go there and see for themselves.”

One of Katrina’s lessons for the press, perhaps, is how such crises offer newspapers a chance to recapture the position of civic leadership that they once enjoyed. The Sun Herald spearheaded and served as a forum for the recovery effort. It managed to print a paper every day during the disaster, keeping intact the legacy of 121 years of uninterrupted daily reporting. During the height of the crisis, the Sun Herald distributed 80,000 papers a day for six weeks — for free. Meanwhile, Knight Ridder, the paper’s owner at the time, created a Katrina fund to provide grants to Sun Herald employees whose property was damaged by the storm. Knight Ridder employees from across the country raised $325,000 for the fund, and that was matched by Knight Ridder corporate.

Many Sun Herald reporters stayed behind when the storm was at its worst, reporting on the paper’s blog in real-time. To Tiner, real-time blogging was one of the paper’s greatest achievements. While the national media were preoccupied with the devastation in New Orleans, the Sun Herald blog enabled people across the country to grasp the true scope of the disaster.

It would be fair to say that many in southern Mississippi are irritated by the fact that their struggles have been eclipsed to such a great extent by the national attention that was poured on New Orleans. After all, the storm didn’t hit New Orleans directly and actually left much of the city intact, whereas Biloxi was almost entirely reduced to rubble. But of course, Spike Lee isn’t planning a follow-up documentary in southern Mississippi.

Tiner lent a voice to that frustration last night, explaining why his editorial page shifted — practically overnight — from a position of detached objectivity to one of advocacy. “It became impossible not to note that we had become a footnote to the larger story,” Tiner said. He pointed to editorials entitled, “Mississippi’s Invisible Coast,” and “Help Me Now,” that admonished the national media for largely ignoring the devastation that had been visited on the residents of southern Mississippi. Noting that the readers of the Sun Herald had suffered the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, one editorial lamented, “It becomes more and more obvious that to national media, New Orleans is THE story — to the extent that if the Mississippi Coast is mentioned at all it is often in an add-on paragraph that mentions ‘and the Gulf Coast’ or ‘and Mississippi and Alabama.'”

It’s hard to imagine that this effort didn’t elevate the paper in the eyes of many of its readers. Circulation still isn’t quite back to what it was before Katrina, but that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as the economy and population have plummeted.

Meanwhile, Tiner and his staff are trying to stay true to the paper’s revitalized role in the community. “We’re mostly all Katrina, all the time,” said Tiner, reminding us that the aftermath of the storm still dominates reality for Gulf Coast residents.

“We’ve gone nuts over a bowling alley that opened.”

Correction: The above post has been changed to make clear that money from the Katrina fund created by Knight Ridder to help Sun Herald employees affected by the storm was not used by the paper to subsidize the distribution of free newspapers in the aftermath of the crisis.

Mark Boyer was a CJR intern.