Chico paper has a local mission
Chico paper’s staff tirelessly covers the wildfire that displaced them and left loved ones dead or missing.
Small staff strives to supply Camp fire evacuees with vital information.
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 appeared on the websites of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Time magazine. It was taken with 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 was published 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, now part of Digital First Media Group, for almost 20 years. The EnterpriseRecord’s staff was 45 when he started; now it’s 10 with four part-timers 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 or mourning 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. After all, informing the community in times of crisis is why many of them got into the business.
“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 free pizzas sent by the Las Vegas ReviewJournal 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, but Little’s 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, heartwrenching stories are fun to tell, but they take longer, whereas the nuts-and-bolts information is what’s essential.”
No one is being allowed back into Paradise. So the paper posted an interactive map Wednesday that allows readers to search by address to see what’s been destroyed in the small town and its surrounding environs.
Little also supervises the twice-weekly Paradise Post, and its staff of two has been in overdrive, he said. They work in the Chico office, and the paper is printed there as well — along with a dozen other dailies and six weekly and semiweekly papers from Monterey to Eureka. The challenge, though, has been where to deliver the Paradise Post.
“How do you distribute a newspaper to a town that’s not there?”
So they bring the full press run to evacuation centers and update the website constantly. Little said he hasn’t paid much attention to readership figures but was told the coverage is getting record traffic.
The 55-year-old has also found time to write. His regular Sunday column was about his heartbreaking return to his grandmother’s home in Butte Creek Canyon. The house survived, but the surrounding area didn’t fare well.
“I only cried three times. I thought I did pretty well,” he wrote.
The other was a searing unsigned editorial about President Trump’s baseless tweet from the weekend concerning the state’s “gross mismanagement of the forests.” He pulled this together with longtime staffers Steve Schoonover and Laura Urseny. (Steve was supposed to retire this week but agreed to stay on to help out.)
Their response to the leader of the free world? “Zip it.”
“One thing we will always do is stand up for our area,” Little said. “If some outsiders want to try to run roughshod over our area, we’re always going to fight back.”