For a P&C news organization headquartered in Hoboken, N.J., the days during and after Superstorm Sandy were dramatic, traumatic, exhausting…and highly galvanizing.
As journalists, we want to report the Big Stories, and it was soon obvious that this was an epic event for the insurance industry—in the same category as Hurricane Katrina or Japan's tsunami.
What made Sandy different for us, though, from those catastrophes, was that we weren't just covering it—we were living through it. Nearly the entire NU team lost power on the Monday night the wind and rain made landfall in New Jersey, and many of us didn't regain it for almost a week.
For our associate editor, Mark Ruquet, the loss of electricity was the least of his worries. Mark makes his home in the utterly devastated region of Midland Beach on Staten Island—and as he relates in a blog post on PropertyCasualty360.com, on the night of the storm he had to make a mad dash through rushing, calf-high water to get to a car and drive posthaste to higher ground.
While Mark was dealing with the damage and the dark and the cold, he also managed to continue doing something else—writing news reports for our website.
Indeed, the entire editorial team scrambled to find any way we could to gather information and interview executives and experts. For some of us, this meant driving long distances to understanding relatives; for those of us in Lower Manhattan, it involved strapping a virtual office to our backs, trekking miles north and throwing ourselves on the mercy of former employers whose office spaces still had power.
And I have to say, I'm incredibly proud of the entire team's editorial efforts. In the week after the storm—with our offices shuttered, all gas gone and our smartphones constantly on the verge of shutting down—we published more than two-dozen articles—and they were good stories, packed with insight and analysis and quotes and telling statistics. Lending a critical hand—and crucial moral support—were our editorial and production colleagues in Chicago and Erlanger, Ky.
They were grueling, frustrating, emotional, scary (and smelly) days.
Why did we do it? Our bosses certainly would have cut us some slack.
Without getting too sentimental, we did it for you, our readers. Journalists can get a bad rap, and certainly sometimes we deserve it. But I don't know any journalists, at least any worth the name, who don't care passionately, madly, deeply about informing their readers.
With our contacts, and with our combined decades of industry experience—and despite our diminished circumstances—we knew we were uniquely positioned to get you the facts that mattered, to bring to light how the industry was responding, to offer you perspective on Sandy's long-term ramifications.
Doing so is our motivation; it's our thrill; it's truly our privilege.
Bryant Rousseau
Editor in Chief
201-526-1239
brousseau@sbmedia.com
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