Public Served Despite Fire and Flood

by Randolph T. Holhut

But just imagine trying to do that job when your newspaper plant is first inundated by flood waters, and then is gutted by fire. How do you keep publishing when your computers, your presses, your photo files and clippings -- virtually everything you use to put out a paper each day -- is destroyed, along with the homes of almost all of your employees?

In the case of the Grand Forks Herald in Grand Forks, N.D., in April 1997, they did what every paper tries to do when hit with a natural disaster. They kept publishing and covered the story the best they could with the resources at hand.

The Pulitzer Prize committee recognized the superhuman effort of the Herald's staff by awarding it the public service prize. Of all the Pulitzer Prize categories, this is the most coveted. This is the award that goes to a paper that goes above and beyond the call of duty, the award that doesn't merely recognize a star turn, but the teamwork of a paper's staff. The story of how the Grand Fork Herald earned that award is in keeping with the best traditions of newspapering.

The next day, editor Mike Jacobs and his staff temporarily set up shop in the student union building of the University of North Dakota. They bought the last eight laptop computers from the university bookstore and Herald publisher Mike Maidenberg declared to his troops that "we are going to publish this paper come hell or high water."

They got plenty of both. That night, the Herald's main office -- which had been recently renovated at a cost of $3 million -- was one of 11 buildings that were destroyed by fire. All the paper's archives were destroyed. Its presses were sitting beneath 54 feet of murky water. Everything needed to put out a daily newspaper was gone. Everything, except the paper's staff, which worked around the clock during the first days of the disaster to somehow start over and rebuild a newspaper from scratch.

The rising water forced the Herald's staff to move again to a grammar school in Manvel, N.D., where a couple of classrooms and a few computers became a makeshift newsroom. They e-mailed their stories to their sister paper, the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, where the Herald's copy editors put the paper together. Other reporters from the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, the owners of the Herald and the Pioneer Press, came in to help.

The Pioneer Press production staff printed the paper, which was airlifted to Grand Forks and distributed free to residents. The Herald's normal press run of 40,000 was tripled, and still they had trouble keeping up with the demand for copies from news-starved residents.

The Herald reported on every aspect of the disaster that they themselves were part of. Despite the challenge of working in the newspaper equivalent of a MASH unit, the paper got out every day. From lists of every relief agency in town to a free bulletin board to give residents a way to relay messages to one another, the Herald did everything it could to keep the Grand Forks region informed during the crisis.

For a small city newspaper far away from the big city dailies that usually cops the big awards, getting a Pulitzer Prize was, as Jacobs said, "recognition of the importance of newspapers in times of crisis and in communities under stress."

Even in calm times, a newspaper is the soul of a community. In triumph and tragedy, it is where people turn for the hometown news. Most places in the U.S. don't get comprehensive news coverage from the electronic media. When people want to know what their town council or school board decided last night, who won the high school football game, who ended up in district court, who died, who was born, what's playing at the movie theater, what's for sale at the stores downtown or who's complaining about what on the Letters page, they open up their local newspaper.

What the staff of the Grand Forks Herald did during the 1997 Red River Flood was something that the staff of almost any newspaper in America would do (and occasionally has done) under similar circumstances. It sounds corny, but there still are newspaper men and women who still believe that journalism is a public trust and that they are public servants as much as cops or teachers. No matter what the circumstances, the paper must get out because people are depending on it.

A year after the flood, the Herald's staff is preparing to move back to the paper's renovated and enlarged downtown headquarters. Battered but unbowed, they proved to us all what it really means to be a journalist.