Autumn Phillips is the executive editor at The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. “This was a very unpredictable storm. It seemed that we didn’t know what it was going to do and where it was going to hit, even hours before it reached us,” Phillips reflected a little more than a week after the hurricane carved its path north, hugging the country’s coastline.
Fortunately, for much of the East Coast, the damage and toll were far less than what Florida experienced to their south. “Charleston was spared, for the most part, from Hurricane Ian,” Phillips reported to E&P in an email. “We experienced high winds and a lot of rain, but the direction of the wind kept the expected storm surge from flooding the city, as we’d expected. For the most part, it was downed trees and a lot of debris, all of which has to be cleaned up.
“But we are a statewide paper, and our reporters covered the damage up the coast,” Phillips explained. “Ian made landfall as a Category 1 near Georgetown, where we have a newsroom. If you look at photos from our coverage of that area, you’ll see the flooding. We sent reporters and photographers there during the storm and in the days after.”
A mere day after the storm passed, The Post and Courier newsroom was hard at work reporting on the damage throughout the state, with a focus on recovery efforts. Reporter Shamira McCray found that eight South Carolina counties had been impacted.
Reporter Jennifer Berry Hawes was dispatched to Murrells Inlet to chronicle the hurricane’s impact there and to tell the stories of the community’s resilience.
The Post and Courier’s journalists are expressly prepared to report on hurricanes coming up the coast. “We held formal hurricane coverage training in June,” the executive editor explained. “It’s been three years since Charleston faced a bad storm, so there are a lot of people on staff who have never covered a hurricane. We talked about how to write a good feed, how to stay safe, and what to pack for nights in the office. We reminded everyone that we have boxes of pencils and pencil sharpeners because pens don't write on wet paper. We reminded everyone to keep full gas tanks and phones charged, and we stocked the newsroom with food and water."
Covering a hurricane can lead reporters in many directions — public safety information and advisories, response and accountability stories, recovery and rebuilding efforts, costs in commerce and loss of life, and volumes of stories about kindness, charity and resilience. As Hurricane Ian came closer, they formed teams and delegated assignments.
“We started planning about a week before it arrived in Florida,” Phillips recalled. “We have a standing hurricane protocol. We have divided the newsroom into ‘storm team’ and ‘recovery team.’ The storm team usually sleeps in the newsroom and works around the clock, covering the storm from all angles. Even as we write the breaking news, we look for larger themes and always end the day with a large, sweeping story that gives context and ties the narrative together.
“When the storm passes, the recovery team gets to work telling the human stories on the ground, digging into the climate change angles and doing accountability reporting on any failures of response,” she added.
After Hurricane Ian passed, The Post and Courier’s coverage shifted to clean-up efforts and concerns about beach erosion. There were an untold number of boats left adrift or damaged by the storm. Reporter David Slade wrote about one of them, a storied shrimp boat — the Shayna Michelle — that ran aground on Myrtle Beach following a daring Coast Guard helicopter rescue of its crew.
The Post and Courier doesn’t cover weather events as superficial occurrences. The news publisher invests in broader reporting on the environment and climate change. “This was really a climate change storm,” Phillips suggested. “The day before it arrived, we asked senior projects reporter Tony Bartelme to write about it, with feeds from several reporters out in the field. We asked Tony because he has written extensively about climate change and the changing Gulf Stream, which factored into the behavior of this storm."
You can read that story here.
“We kept this story updated throughout the day,” she explained. “Tony did the final update at 11 p.m. We posted a new story at 2 a.m. and kept the updates coming as residents nervously braced for the worst. The most-dire predictions had a storm surge reaching Charleston at the same time as an extremely high tide. The mayor invoked the names of Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Irma from recent years to warn residents of what we could face in terms of flooding.”
In 2021, The Post and Courier was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for the news outlet’s coverage of climate change and flood risks in “Rising Waters.” “In the second year of the Rising Waters project, we sent a reporter to Greenland to cover the impacts of climate change there and how it is changing life in Charleston,” Phillips noted.
Gretchen A. Peck is a contributing editor to Editor & Publisher. She’s reported for E&P since 2010 and welcomes comments at gretchenapeck@gmail.com.
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