Newsrooms work together to provide hurricane coverage

AAlan Miller

s Hurricane Florence was bearing down on the North Carolina coast, journalists in our sister newsrooms in that state already had been hard at work for days to cover the storm preparations and evacuations.

We knew that they were headed not only toward disaster but also toward a marathon of coverage during and after the storm.

And while the teams at the North Carolina newspapers also owned by GateHouse Media are composed of capable professionals, we expected they might need help in covering the aftermath.

So as Florence was swirling toward a direct hit on Wilmington — and the Star News newsroom there — on Sept. 14, we contacted its editors to let them know that the Columbus newsroom would send help if requested. We offered reporters and/ or photographers, a pickup truck, a portable generator and fuel, if needed.

When I asked for volunteers that day, more than a dozen Dispatch staffers immediately offered to leave the comforts of their homes and our office to go to hurricane-ravaged North Carolina.

I expected that we might need to send a couple of people by mid-week last week, after the storm had moved out of North Carolina.

But by 7:25 p.m. Friday, we received an urgent request for help.

“Things have shifted in Wilmington, and they are desperate for your generator, reporter and pickup truck,” wrote one of our colleagues in Austin,