"Local News in the Eye of the Storm" table of contents
Local News in the Eye of the Storm: Coverage of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina
Yanan Sun, Local News Researcher
Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media,
UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media
When natural disasters strike, local news coverage is crucial for communities. Journalists from local media organizations are often among first responders, delivering timely and factual information that can be life-saving. With a relatively higher degree of trust than national news, local news organizations play a critical role in disputing rumors, preventing confusion and panic during recovery. Local news organizations also foster a sense of solidarity in times of distress, often highlighted by capturing individual stories within the community. These narratives help heal people from a disaster’s aftermath, but also connect exiles caring about their hometown to the community.
This study focuses on the local newspaper coverage of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina. Through natural language processing techniques including topic modeling, keyword extraction, and name entity recognition, we reveal the changes in coverage focus, sharing of actionable information, and the originality of local reporting. These findings provide an overview of disaster and recovery-related information reported by local media, which offer insights for future study about disaster journalism and local communication systems. They also shed light on communities’ information needs and information circulation during disasters, providing concrete insights with textual data.
Highlights from this report:
- Over 84% of local newspaper articles about Hurricane Helene include actionable information related to disaster recovery.
- Information about roadways and transportation (53%), power restoration (45%), and where to get food and water (38%) received the most coverage.
- Stories initially centered on Hurricane Helene’s status (35%), including updates on its impact across different locations (20%) and subsequent events like flooding and related weather systems (15%).
- Stories about power restoration (45%) and relief efforts (16%) gained prominence in the later stages of reporting.
- Local newspapers maintained steady coverage of community-related stories (13%), including entertainment (5%, 88 articles). schools (1%, 23 articles), and farms (1%, 20 articles).
- About 77% of local newspaper articles about Hurricane Helene were produced by the outlet rather than republished from wire services or other publications.
- The percentage of original reporting was relatively high in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane but declined over time.
Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida on September 26 as a category-4 hurricane, the strongest storm to hit the region. The storm traveled northeast through Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and North Carolina, causing significant damage in each. The storm stalled over Tennessee, bringing torrential rainfall that caused catastrophic flooding in central Appalachia. Counties in western North Carolina are among the most affected regions, undergoing catastrophic damages and fatalities. The hurricane later led to severe flooding, prolonged power outages and disruptive transportation. These posed more barriers to communication and hindered recovery efforts.
Local newspapers play multiple roles during emergencies, not only informing communities but saving time, resources and lives during prevention and recovery. Over the course of a disaster and its recovery, journalists often transition from disseminators of fast, factual information in an emergency to accountability reporters. Following natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and storms, journalists raise accountability questions to authorities about prevention and response actions.
Local newspapers can bring messages of hope and a sense of community after disasters. As alternatives to national news media, local journalism provides a more realistic, close-up portrayal of the recovery status, since local journalists stay in the community longer compared to national journalists who are situated elsewhere. In addition, while national news media are often more likely to shift their focus to other stories, local journalists continue to update the latest status after the disaster, and more importantly, ensure that victims are remembered and that ongoing aid needs are addressed.
No specific analysis exists yet on local newspaper reporting about Hurricane Helene due to the limited time since the disaster. However, a study on misinformation and disinformation on social media highlights the detrimental impact of myths on public trust in the government and mainstream media. This underscores the need for local journalism to fill the gap and build a trustworthy news cycle in local communities.
This report examines local newspaper coverage of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. Using data from Newsbank, we analyzed over 1,700 articles published by 18 local newsrooms in western North Carolina. The report explores several aspects of disaster reporting.The report examines disaster reporting by identifying trends in news topics and investigating actionable information shared by local newspapers (e.g., food, water, shelter, transportation). It also assesses how much coverage was produced by the outlets rather than republished from wire services and other outlets, highlighting the critical role of local media in informing the public during emergencies.
We gathered original texts of newspaper articles with keyword “helene” published between September 23 to October 23 from NewsBank. The data was filtered based on the NC News Census by CISLM to contain only local newspapers from 37 impacted counties designated as disaster areas by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in western North Carolina.