![]() Like many of you, I spent Sunday afternoon flipping between CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and The Weather Channel to watch the powerful Category 4 hurricane rip through Louisiana. So what about Sunday’s coverage? Let’s start here: Sunday’s TV news coverage of Hurricane Ida was impressive. If the world can see what is happening, then help is more likely to follow. There also is another important fact, Tompkins tells me. If you were locked in a shelter, you would be anxious to know what was happening outside.” “It can serve as a proxy for viewers who might have evacuated and want an eyewitness account of what they left behind. “There is some value to the viewer to be able to see the intensity of a storm,” Tompkins said. So I asked him about some of the things we see during hurricane coverage - those reporters who willingly put themselves in the elements. ![]() He now teaches multimedia storytelling for Poynter. He has been a reporter, photojournalist, news producer and news director. Tompkins is the smartest guy I know when it comes to broadcast journalism. “I cannot provide any good excuse for standing so close to the coast that you let waves hit you,” my Poynter colleague, Al Tompkins, told me. The camera showed that Roker could easily have taken just a few steps to his left and would’ve been clear of the waves. Roker was standing in a spot where he was hit by waves crashing over a sea wall. Take, for instance, NBC News weather guy Al Roker, who started Sunday morning’s “Meet the Press” with a live update from New Orleans. There are times when it feels gratuitous. They can be effective, but can also be distracting. The scenes are meant to show the powerful impacts of the storm. Behind them the trees buckle, stoplights sway and street signs rattle. They stand out in the open as the rain and wind whip around them. We saw dozens of reporters doing it on Sunday. And it’s something that all hurricane reporters replicate. In some ways, you might look at Cantore’s coverage as a cliche and possibly even reckless. There were few more haunting images than Cantore standing on a pitch-black street in downtown New Orleans on Sunday night as power was out everywhere around him. He looked like he might get blown down the alley at any second. Shouting into a microphone, Cantore tried to describe the devastating power of the Category 4 hurricane. Toppled and mangled garbage dumpsters were strewn around him. Wearing a baseball helmet (not a hat, a helmet) and rain gear, Cantore stood on Canal Street in New Orleans, shouldering against a driving rain and winds gusts of over 80 mph. There’s a joke that really isn’t funny: If there’s nasty weather out there, the last person you want to see in your town is Jim Cantore. He’s the Weather Channel meteorologist with a cult-like following for going, literally, into the storm. Right there in the middle of it was Jim Cantore. 16 years to the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the same part of the country - dramatically overtook the news on Sunday. ![]() One of the most powerful storms to ever hit the U.S.
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