Judges' Award
Elizabeth City Daily Advance, Greenville Daily Reflector and Rocky Mount Telegram

Oct. 29, 1999

The worldwide Web is coming up a bit slowly today.

Twice you've had to adjust your keyboard rail to achieve just the right height, before even beginning to compose your thoughts on your Power Macintosh G3.

Yet another delay intervenes. Not one but two levers must be adjusted on that chair of yours — one to go up and down, another to tilt backward a bit. And there it goes again — the Hewlett Packard Laserjet printer's out of paper.
While weighing the hardships that burden journalists of 2000, consider what happened to Cox's North Carolina newspapers during and after Hurricane Floyd.

In Elizabeth City, the hurricane flooded the Daily Advance building and put the press out of commission for a week.

Editor Michael Goodman's staff worked all night Sept. 18-19 to produce a combined edition that was printed in nearby Manteo, N.C. It reached readers on Saturday, Sept. 19.

Occupying a temporary newsroom on the second floor of their building, the staff members produced papers for a week that were printed in Greenville, Manteo and Williamston, N.C.

"We were forced to eliminate some of the paper's regular features during the week," said Michael Goodman, editor of the Daily Advance. "Our coverage of the storm did not suffer, however."

Meanwhile, the hurricane temporarily displaced two key News employees of the Rocky Mount Telegram.

Viola Harris, a reporter, had to evacuate her home and Ross Chandler, editor of the Life section, had to leave his apartment by boat. Chandler moved in with Editor Jeff Herrin and his family.

"We scrambled to report the everyday details of the storm," said Herrin.

"That in itself presented a myriad of challenges as we fought through power outages, flooded roads, downed servers and even airlift logistics to deliver the news to a readership cut off from much of the world."