I spent the first decade of my working life as a newspaper reporter and then migrated into public relations and communications management. That lasted nearly 40 years until I retired at the end of 2017. Since then, I’ve backslid into journalism of a sort with “Trouble in God’s Country.”
Today, though, I’m going to put back on my old PR hat and offer some unsolicited advice to Governor Brian Kemp.
Not that he needs it, to be honest, but that’s never stopped me before.
Right now, the first thing on the governor’s to-do list every morning is maintaining a focus on Hurricane Helene and its devastation of much of Georgia. Kemp and his team are doing a fine job of that.
Helene has been on the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution every day since Helene made landfall near Perry, FL late on the night of September 26 and then barreled up through southeastern Georgia all the way to North Carolina. You’d expect that kind of coverage, and kudos to the AJC and other media for keeping it up.
Kudos as well to Kemp. He’s done what a governor should do in the face of this kind of calamity. He’s mustered his emergency management team and taken on the job of being the face and voice of the state’s response to Helene.
“We aren’t going to sugarcoat anything. It’s going to be a long, hard, tough recovery,” he told the AJC. “But we’re working hard, and we’ll work hard every day until we get it done.”
I’ve lost track of all the devastated communities he’s visited in the past 10 days, but his efforts have helped keep a media focus on the storm and its aftermath – and that focus will be vital to sustaining public attention and getting the state and federal support and assistance the state will need to recover.
As I’ve indicated in past columns, I disagree profoundly with the governor on fundamental policy issues like Medicaid expansion, gun safety and reproductive rights. But I give him a solid “A” for both leadership and management in the face of Helene.
Maintaining that focus on Helene and its aftermath is going to be harder and harder to do as time passes. He can’t spend all his time on Helene and media and public attention will eventually begin to wane and shift as new news happens and new disasters occur.
It’s already happening. As I write this, Hurricane Milton is currently roaring across the Gulf of Mexico toward Tampa Bay and showing every sign of trying to outdo his big sister. By the time you read this, Milton probably will have made landfall as a Category 3 or 4. Millions of Floridians are bugging out for Georgia. Tuesday’s Atlanta rush hour started in Valdosta.
National media attention is already shifting to Florida. That doesn’t mean the story is winding down in Georgia, but it will take more effort to sustain media coverage going forward. My advice – and Kemp’s team may be way ahead of me on this – but his office should create a special communications team whose job is to keep the story alive.
Led, of course, by his office, this team should include public information officers and media relations managers from GEMA and other relevant state departments (Agriculture, Public Health, Community Affairs, Economic Development, etc.) as well as representatives from key interest groups: local governments, healthcare providers, utilities, and business groups, among others.
Traditional American journalism was decimated first by the Internet and then by the Great Recession, especially at the local level. Many newspapers folded outright and those that survived suffered massive cutbacks in their newsrooms. The AJC has recently been beefing its staff up a bit, and the fact that it’s recently established bureaus in Savannah, Macon and Albany will help. So will efforts like the Georgia Trust for Local News to reinvigorate community journalism in South Georgia.
Even with those improvements, Georgia’s newspapers and broadcast media lack the reporting resources to chase all the Helene stories that need to be developed and told. That’s where Kemp’s Helene Information Task Force comes in.
Its job would be to function as a newsroom and develop stories critical to keeping Helene in the public eye and top of mind. Without that kind of concerted effort, even Helene will be crowded out of our collective consciousness and all but forgotten as new calamities take precedence. And if Helene is allowed to slide down the memory hole, so will a massive swath of southeast Georgia.
Many in the media will chafe at being spoon-fed stories developed by this government-led task force. As well, I can tell you from experience that many senior government bureaucrats will resist putting out stories that might reflect poorly on their agencies or operations.
But the mission right now and for the foreseeable future must be to document the scope, scale and magnitude of the destruction across southeast Georgia.
Charlie Hayslett Guest Columnist [email protected]
