Newspaper staff rises to cover Camp Fire tragedy

It’s an iconic if horrifying shot of the Camp fire pulverizing Paradise — a large ball of grayish-black smoke with fire radiating on the right, taken less than two hours after the Northern California inferno started a week ago.

The photo ran on the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post and Time magazine. It was taken on an iPhone from the roof of the Chico Enterprise Record’s office by the paper’s editor, David Little.

The responsibility fell to the Chico native because the newspaper’s only photographer is on medical leave. The image also ran prominently in the Enterprise Record’s Friday print edition.

“It was just the first photo we posted on our website that morning and stayed there till (the) afternoon,” Little said. Until “we got some real photographers in town.”

Little has run the small paper and several others, which are part of the Digital First Media Group, for almost 20 years. The Enterprise-Record’s staff was 45 when he started; now it’s 10 with four parttimers pitching in. Journalists from their sister papers in the San Francisco Bay Area were dispatched to assist with coverage.

The last week has been like nothing else the 40-year-newspaper veteran has experienced. Like the community they’re trying to keep informed, members of Little’s staff have been displaced and are worried about missing friends and lost loved ones.

For several days after the fire started, two employees were missing. Both were found alive and well. Throughout it all, Little’s staff continued to perform at the highest of levels. Informing the community in times of crisis is why many of them got into the business after all.

“We have had a lot of help from a lot of people,” Little said in an interview, his tired voice hoarse from the smoke.

“Everyone has been dealing with evacuations, sheltering family and friends, and yet they’re down here working hard all the time. That’s why people are doing this, because they know people depend on it. It gives you hope that people appreciate newspapers in a time like this.”

The boxes of free pizza sent by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Redding Record-Searchlight tasted pretty good too.

Little also manages the Oroville newspaper, which covered last year’s dam spillway failure that led to the evacuation of about 180,000 people.

That experience, he said, prepared his staff for the last week.

They came to understand what, with their limited resources, they should be focusing on — and that’s getting out facts as fast as possible. With a bigger staff a lot more is possible, and for Little, his focus has been on maximizing what they — with the help of photographers and reporters from the East Bay Times and Mercury News — can do.

“The beautiful, heart-wrenching stories are fun to tell, but they take longer, whereas the nuts-and-bolts information is what’s essential.”