Journalism students are taught to report the news, not to actually be the news.
But sometimes, they just can’t help it.
One of those times was Sunday, when Hurricane Jeanne — the fourth hurricane to hit Florida in the past six weeks — snarled its way across the Tampa Bay area. Ellen Gedalius, who graduated from the Medill School of Journalism with a master’s degree in journalism in 2001, was penning an article for the Tampa Tribune when she received a phone call.
The news? Her apartment was destroyed.
Even though Jeanne had weakened considerably, the storm was still packing enough wind to blow the roof off of Gedalius’ two-story apartment building. Heavy rain turned the building into a swimming pool.
Rushing back to her apartment with colleagues from the Tribune, Gedalius found the entire apartment completely soaked from the couch to the carpet. It smelled rather foul as well, she said, and there were bugs everywhere. Gedalius said when she called a friend after seeing the devastation she was “incomprehensible. I couldn’t explain to her what was going on.”
The apartment was uninhabitable, but Gedalius salvaged as much as she could, grabbing clothes, photos, her computer and other “sentimental stuff.” The Tribune paid for a hotel room for her in the days following the storm, and Gedalius said she received more than a dozen invitations from friends and colleagues to stay in their homes.
“The people at the Tampa Tribune have been so understanding,” she said. “Everyone from the executive editor on down has been reaching to me to see if I need anything.”
For Gedalius, though, Hurricane Jeanne seems to be only a temporary setback. Right out of graduate school, Gedalius landed a job at the Courier News in Bridgewater, N.J., covering the county government. In Tampa, she has been working as an education reporter and has also been doing some special elections coverage.
“Things are going pretty well with me,” Gedalius said.
So well, in fact, that Gedalius covered the three other hurricanes which slammed into the peninsula — most recently Hurricane Ivan. She spent three days in Pensacola covering the aftermath of the storm. When Jeanne hit, it was “weird” for her to be part of the very same phenomenon that she became so used to covering for the newspaper, she said.
“Reporters can become the victims of hurricanes and disasters,” she said. “They become part of the story.”
Reach Mike Cherney at [email protected].
