Fall Conference When: Friday, Oct. 28 Where: Campus Life Building, Room 100, Time: Program runs 9 a.m. to 11:45, with awards luncheon to follow in the Holmes Student Center’s Duke Ellington Ballroom. To register: Download a form. Deadline: Friday, Oct. 21 Cost: $60 for a newspaper’s first participant, $30 for each additional participant. Includes program and luncheon. Parking: Registrants may park in the Newman Center lot, just north of the Campus Life Building. Download a pass. |
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FROM THE PRESIDENT
Editor’s note: This newsletter went to press on the eve of Hurricane Rita striking the Gulf Coast.
By Joe Corrado
NINA PresidentAs we know all too well, for many, life after Hurricane Katrina has been anything but business as usual. The storm and ensuing flood left large portions of the Gulf Coast under water, cities in ruin and thousands of people homeless.
It also left many Americans with a desire to help – a desire that was matched by newspapers here in Illinois and throughout the country.
No paper may have been hit harder than the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, which itself was forced to abandon its building and, for three editions immediately after the storm, paper production. The Web site NOLA.com began publishing not only full news stories and columns, but also updates from reporters and others, and its blog offered a way to alert authorities to people needing rescue.
In Houston, a city untouched by that storm but the home – for at least a while - of thousands of New Orleans evacuees, the Chronicle added a new temporary work category in its classified listings and began distributing 10,000 special News for Katrina Evacuees newspapers to the Astrodome and local shelters.
These are newspapers serving two of the cities affected most severely by Katrina, but the desire to help can be seen in local papers everywhere. Flip open your newspaper these days and you’re sure to see contact information for relief agencies, listings of upcoming or ongoing fundraisers, coverage of recent events aimed at helping Katrina victims and stories about local people who are going out of their way to offer a hand.
It’s all part of covering a catastrophe, but in some ways, it’s so much more. I’ve long been proud of newspapers’ ability to help those who need it the most – from the family down the street who lost everything in a fire to the thousands down the river who lost everything in a flood.
When they do their job well, newspapers not only inform their readers, but also prompt them to take action – to vote, attend a city council meeting or even try a new recipe. For those papers, pushing people to help hurricane victims isn’t anything extraordinary, just business as usual.
Related: Three reports of what NINA-member newspapers are doing in the aftermath of Katrina.