The July 4 flash floods in Texas that claimed more than 100 lives, including dozens of children who were swept away from their cabins at sleepaway summer camp, were a test of the public radio network's ability to deliver continuing, comprehensive news coverage to two different audiences with completely different needs.
For the people living near the flooding, this was a public safety story. They needed information to keep themselves safe and to find out if their friends and families were safe. It's a simple need that requires a massive effort to fulfill.
News consumers in the rest of the country needed to know how bad things were: How many people were dead or missing? How many homes and businesses were destroyed? And what were officials and community members doing in response to the crisis?
In recent years, NPR has invested in strengthening the network, which consists of roughly 300 member station newsrooms as well as NPR reporters and editors stationed around the country. This investment was needed because in the past, the network had not always lived up to its potential.
Local radio journalists would be annoyed and insulted when NPR would ignore local reporting and instead send in its own correspondents to cover big stories. NPR editors have told me that, in the past, they couldn't always count on the availability or the skills of the journalists at local stations to provide information to a national audience.
And both local and NPR journalists complained in the past that the network didn't communicate like a network, which made coordination on big stories difficult or sometimes non-existent.
In my five years as the NPR Public Editor, I've had many conversations with newsroom leaders at NPR and throughout the network of local stations. NPR has committed to building better infrastructure and communication strategies. And the local stations are increasingly stepping up their commitment to provide essential news coverage to their communities. (I recently gave a talk at a public media conference about the need for local stations to continue to deepen their service to their audiences). — Kelly McBride
How did the public radio network perform as it covered the July 4 flash floods in Texas?
Because local public radio stations have relatively few newsroom staffers compared to their commercial competitors, they often rely on automated programming on holidays. That was the case at Texas Public Radio, which is based in San Antonio and serves the region affected by the flooding. However, TPR and most stations require that a host, a reporter and an editor be on call for breaking news.
TPR vice president of news Dan Katz told me that he woke up the morning of July 4 to a phone call from a colleague who was seeing pictures of the devastation on social media. TPR had aired National Weather Service warnings about flooding the day before. "We didn't know it would be that bad," he told me. "Otherwise, we wouldn't have been automated."
By 9 a.m. Central time, Katz said, TPR was broadcasting information to the community and coordinating with NPR supervising editor Alfredo Carbajal, who is based in Texas.
TPR serves a large swath of Texas including Kerrville, the community 90 minutes from San Antonio that experienced the most devastating flooding.
Katz and his staff were keenly aware that they were providing lifesaving information to people directly in the path of the flood, as well as telling people farther away from the floods what was going on.
A host of local and national journalists were on the story, providing updates in real time:
- TPR's arts and culture reporter Jack Morgan was on the scene by midmorning, supplying information to Katz and his team in the studio.
- Morning Edition host Norma Martinez was on the air in the 9 a.m. hour doing interviews with the National Weather Service.
- General assignment reporter Brian Kirkpatrick and editor Yvette Benavides worked from the studio, as well.
- Benavides translated the first story and several others into Spanish.
- TPR host and senior reporter David Martin Davies provided reports for NPR's newscasts.
- In the early evening, Morgan taped an interview with All Things Considered host Ailsa Chang. That interview was broadcast on the later versions of ATC.
Chief national editor Catherine Laidlaw told me that the network needed to make sure Morgan "was where he needed to be, that he had the information we needed and that he was clear of his local broadcast." She added, "But we knew it was going to be a big story."
Local stories are distributed to NPR's national audience on the website, on newscasts and in the magazine shows. Here's how and when NPR shared the story with its national audience:
- At 1 p.m. Central time on July 4, the first newscast mentioned the flooding. More information was reported in the 3:30 p.m. Central time newscast. Starting at 5 p.m. Central, the story was featured every hour.
- In the 7 p.m. hour Central time, ATC broadcast the interview with Morgan. It was heard primarily by listeners in the Pacific time zone.
- At 6:17 p.m. Central, that same interview was posted to NPR's website.
That evening, Austin-based NPR reporter Sergio Martínez-Beltrán made it to the scene and supplied stories later in the weekend, as did correspondent Greg Allen. And reporters and photographers from the stations in Austin and Houston arrived over the weekend. Those reinforcements were critical to enhancing the local effort.
Katz is experienced in directing breaking news coverage for the public radio system. He was in Connecticut in 2012, where he helped direct local coverage of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. And he also led local coverage for TPR of the Uvalde school shooting in 2022.
The coordination between national, regional and local elements of the system worked better this time than he's ever experienced, he said, and the national stories strengthened the local report.
"Sometimes national stories just don't read right or sound right to a local audience," Katz said. "That was not the case this time. We were all producing content that we all could use."
Laidlaw said the local reporting was even more critical to the national report, "I think we've been able to serve the audience orders of magnitude better than if we hadn't had this collective."
NPR and TPR also managed to avoid falling for a fake news story that two campers had been rescued from a tree, miles downstream. "We so badly wanted that to be true, but we didn't have any sourcing to confirm it," Katz said. "We prepared a shell post in case we could confirm it, but never published because we couldn't confirm."
While it's no easy feat to coordinate coverage across a news network where every station is independently able to make its own decisions, it's possibly easier to do in a breaking news situation. Most journalists and most newsrooms are at their best on deadline when big news is happening.
But the public radio network needs to live up to this promise every day, even when there isn't a natural disaster to cover.
The challenge for NPR is to take the lessons of the July 4 Texas floods and apply them to their daily news shows. The most pressing stories coming out of the federal government in Washington, D.C., can be told from local stations, but it takes a lot of coordination. Telling the national audience about relevant and interesting stories from across the country will make the news shows more compelling every day.
And local stations across the country need to be pitching NPR solid stories from their markets that are worthy of a national audience. Their reporters need to be prepared to go on the air when a national broadcast calls. For that to happen, local newsroom leaders have two main responsibilities: to refine their news strategies and to develop and promote the skills of their local journalists.
The network doesn't always function as well as it should for many reasons. But NPR's recent intentional work to improve collaboration seems to be paying off. This past weekend, news consumers in Texas and across the country got to experience the kind of robust, informative and useful storytelling that comes from a public radio network functioning like a well-organized system. That's an exciting prospect for those who rely on public media to keep them informed. — Kelly McBride
The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo and Nicole Slaughter Graham and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and from our inbox. As always, keep them coming.
Kelly McBride
NPR Public Editor
Chair, Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership at the Poynter Institute
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