Stan Tine poses for a photo in his office at the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Mississippi
UM students traveled to Biloxi, Mississippi to talk to men and women who responded to and were affected by the Category 5 hurricane that decimated a majority of the area in 2005.
For many in the nation, the words Hurricane Katrina conjure a collage of images – usually with the Mercedes-Benz Superdome and the flooding that refused to leave the streets of New Orleans. But for the residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the staff of the “Sun Herald,” the paper that has serviced them for 130 years, Hurricane Katrina means something different, something personal.
When the deadly and destructive storm hit the Gulf Coast, it quickly became known as one of the worst natural disaster in the United States’ history. And, though that categorization remains true today, it is one few Americans know due to the national focus on New Orleans in the wake of the hurricane.
“This building was full of reporters from the ‘New York Times,’ ‘Washington Journal,’ and they were on the scene for a day or two,” said Stan Tiner, the Sun Herald’s editor-in-chief. “But Tuesday, when the levees broke, the giant sucking sound in Mississippi was everybody heading to the West.”
Though, this was painful to both the residents and the local journalists, it allowed the “Sun Herald” to occupy a place in the community that otherwise would not have been possible.
In the days after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the coast, communication was almost non-existent – cut off from the outside world, with no access to telephones or internet. While the local paper faced these same limitations, they never missed an edition, publishing in Columbus, Georgia, and trucking each copy in before handing out papers to anyone who was there for a number of weeks.
“Of course, people didn’t know what was going on,” Tiner said. “Print became a very, very important lifeline for information. You’d see a group in line for water or food, and, when you’d come out with bundles of ‘Sun Herald,’ people would come out of that line to get the paper. Really, in the beginning, (it) was almost a rallying point.”
But it was not only the unrelenting and dire communication the “Sun Herald” provided that forged their bond with the community. Almost immediately after the storm, the office began running what became known as Camp Hope out of their north parking lot. Filled with tents and RVs, the lot became a safe haven for those who had lost everything.
“This was their tie to everything, and we were giving them what they needed, and they were learning about themselves and their neighbors and what was going on here,” Karen Nelson, a “Sun Herald” reporter, said.
Soon the “Forgotten Coast” became the paper’s and the peoples’ rallying cry, with the “Sun Herald” positioning itself as an advocate for the people as it reported day after day — journalism that would earn the local daily a Pulitzer Prize that year.
“When we went out to tell the story, it was not from the normal detachment that a reporter or a newspaper would have with its community,” Tiner said. “So, they were in the midst of having to heal with the same conditions and circumstance as the people that we were reporting on. I think for us it created an unusual bond with the people of south Mississippi, because the empathy that came – it was hard to be detached about this story, because it was your friends and your neighbors and your homes. And we were really in this together.”
When confronted with the facts of media coverage in the weeks, months and years after the devastating storm, the “Sun Herald” staff tends to demur, acknowledging that the coverage on New Orleans was excellent and of vital importance. Rather, they had a different, more personal story to tell.
“It left an opening for us to be the principle tellers of the story. There were certainly others who did a fantastic job, but we were here for the long-haul,” Tiner said. “Katrina will never leave us. Some part of that storm will be a part of who we are from here on out.”
