As the hurricane season beckons, Ricky Mathews, president and publisher of the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., and NAMME’s first Award of Valor winner, gives us an update on life in post-Katrina Southern Mississippi.
Q: When the Sun Herald won the Pulitzer Prize for service journalism, you said, “I think our best journalism is still ahead of us.” Do you still feel that way?
A: Absolutely. Here we are a year later and over 100,000 Southern Mississippians are still living in FEMA trailers. We need at least 70,000 new housing units just to get square. It’s a huge challenge that few other communities have ever faced before. There is so much left to be done. The newspaper has to remain the watchdog of this process—to make sure that the work is being done. There are going be some great things happening here and of course there are going to be some people who aren’t going to do what they’re supposed to. The most important challenges we still have to deal with include available health care, mental health, and housing issues, both for residents and those coming in to help us rebuild.
Q: Are you planning any special year-after-Katrina coverage or will the paper approach it as just a part of the ongoing story?
A: Our coverage is more focused on ‘here’s where we are after the storm.’ We’re covering the challenges and the response to what happened as an ongoing project. But as we approach the one-year anniversary, we’ll put together five or six days of concentrated coverage. But we still do it every day. We do a before-and-after piece, picking a particular spot to show what it looked like then and now to show the progress, but progress is relative.
If you have a house and a job, you are on your way to finding ‘the new normal.’ Too many people are still without at least one of those things, and some residents don’t have homes or jobs.
Q: Have you changed your weather coverage to put more emphasis on tracking storms?
We’ve always understood the importance of weather here on the coast. We have one reporter who covers it full time. Our goal is to educate people so they can make the proper decisions, but our residents are grossly aware of what weather can do to them. If you live in a FEMA trailer, a bad thunderstorm is an ordeal. Forty thousand people here are very aware of that.
Q: What preparative measures do you see being taken to prepare for hurricane season? Is there a master plan in place?
A: The big plan for those in FEMA trailers is to get the heck out (laughter)! A detailed evacuation process will take effect 72 hours before a storm is projected to hit. There was no mandatory evacuation plan until 24 hours before Katrina. A network of buses will take people without transportation to the Coliseum in Jackson.
Q: Have many newspaper staffers left the area and chose to not come back?
Almost everyone here was affected by the damage. About 25% of our employees lost everything. We lost about 50 employees. Most of those who didn’t return were people without roots in the community. We’re lucky, most of our key people stayed through thick and thin. We’ve always respected each other, but I think those feelings have grown.
The newsroom remains stable, though we’re down about 20 employees. And not because we want to be. We need more people to get the job done. But business is brisk everywhere. There’s a big labor crunch.
Q: Sounds like good news for the area and the Sun Herald’s classified section.
Employers are flocking here. We project by the end of year the employee count will surge. Our major driver is tourism. Before the storm, there were about 17,000 hotel rooms in Southern Mississippi—we’re down to about 7,000. We’re getting a huge influx of construction workers who are going to need places to stay. Within four years, construction jobs will start to level off and tourism jobs will take their place.
The newspaper is doing well financially and that will continue, but the revenue mix will swing more toward employment advertising. The casinos that were on the water are going to be land-based now, and they’re building bigger and better. That means they’ll employ more people after the construction wave. Getting people back to work causes them to put down roots and that leads to home ownership.
The crucial, ongoing task for the Sun Herald is to chronicle the story of our recovery: Where do we go from here and how quickly can we get people back to work. That’s our major assignment for the present and the future.