Early on Thursday morning, a residential condo collapsed in Surfside, a town just north of Miami Beach, in Florida. Joey Flechas, a reporter for the Miami Herald, was quickly on the scene, since he lives ten minutes away from the building. “I’m a member of this community who has talked to some of these first responders, politicians and neighbors before,” he said. “And I’m just one of many of us who can say the same thing.” Since the collapse, Flechas and his colleagues have worked tirelessly to cover the story—the state of the rescue mission; the identities of the deceased and the missing; the fact that, as far back as 2018, an engineer had flagged “major structural damage” linked to drainage issues on the pool deck—in English and also in Spanish, for readers of the Herald’s sister title, El Nuevo Herald, in the Miami area and far beyond. The Miami Herald has updated its website with a series of huge banner headlines: “COLLAPSE,” “HEARTBREAK,” and, as of early this morning, “SEARCHING”; El Nuevo Herald’s homepage was still on “ANGUSTIA,” meaning “anguish.” Meanwhile, the confirmed death toll rose to one, then four, then five, then nine. More than a hundred and fifty people are still unaccounted for. As Flechas noted, the collapse has been deeply personal for many journalists in the Miami area. Two of the named victims, Gladys and Tony Lozano, were the godmother and uncle of Phil Ferro, the chief meteorologist at 7News, a local TV station. “My cousin called me. He was... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2021-06-28 12:02:47 UTC ]