In early August, wildfires roared through parts of Maui — bringing death, devastation and displacement. It is considered the deadliest wildfire incident in the United States in over a century.
For the staff of Honolulu Civil Beat, the fires fueled a long stream of stories. The nonprofit newsroom accustomed to producing deep dives, investigative and explanatory journalism had to exercise its breaking news muscles to cover the deadly inferno.
“In the beginning, it was nonstop,” Paula Dobbyn, a reporter for Civil Beat, said via email. “We were cranking out multiple stories per week.”
Since Aug. 8, Civil Beat has published more than 230 stories, editorials, and what it calls Community Voices — a cross between letters to the editor and op-eds.
With the fires long out — and months removed from them — Civil Beat’s staff find themselves with a bit more breathing room. Newsletter editor Courtney Teague said they are feeling a bit less distressed and frazzled.
“I think there hasn’t been a day — or more than a couple days — where we haven’t posted a Maui fire story. So it’s still a big emphasis on our team,” Teague said. “And it’s still been hard. People are hurting. Our neighbors are hurting. And we’re doing the best we can to bring them information that will make a difference in their lives.”
Civil Beat is shifting into a new gear for its ongoing coverage of the Maui wildfires. The Oahu-based news organization has set up a full bureau on the island of Maui with a dedicated team led by deputy editor Nathan Eagle, leasing a house in Kahului that will serve as long-term headquarters. Civil Beat’s editor and general manager Patti Epler in October laid out these details and expressed the newsroom’s continued commitment to covering the wildfires’ aftermath.
“There’s arguably no more important story in Hawaii right now than the deadly wildfires that raced through Lahaina and scorched Upcountry Maui nearly two months ago,” Epler wrote in a behind-the-story column. “It’s going to be that way for a long time.”
In an interview with Poynter, Epler shared what it’s like to balance such an important story as the Maui wildfires, and other stories that Civil Beat staff has resumed. She recalled how for six weeks or more, her staff wrote about nothing but the fires and wildfires in the state in general. Epler also recognized that readers need more news than the fires. If you look at the Civil Beat website, she noted, it’s still often dominated by the Maui wildfires because Hawaii lawmakers are taking action with working groups and hearings.
“Because we’re a small staff and the fires do touch on everything in Hawaii from what’s going to happen to the economy, to our electric company — so our electric bills — but there’s a lot more stuff going on,” Epler said. “The legislature is about to start in January, and we do need to get in front of some of the big issues that they’ll be handling. It’s an election year, and so people are starting to file for office. And we need to start paying more attention to those candidates and what their issues are.”
As part of the changes, reporters Paula Dobbyn and Brittany Lyte have been reassigned to full-time Maui coverage. Christie Wilson, a longtime journalist in Maui, was hired recently as a full-time Maui reporter. In her column, Epler said Marina Riker, who covers Maui for Civil Beat, is taking an extended leave of absence “to deal with family issues and the loss of her own home in the Kula fire.” A plan to hire a full-time permanent Maui reporter is in the works, even after Riker returns, Epler added.
In an email, Eagle described covering the fires as “an emotionally and physically exhausting experience” that’s affected staff members, himself included, at different levels and in different ways.
“We endeavor to provide time and space to recharge, to balance the intensity these stories demand, but it’s challenging once pulled into it to pry yourself away,” Eagle added. “There are long days followed by sleepless nights. There are dreams of hope and nightmares of terror.”
For Eagle, leading the Maui team has been incredibly fulfilling, rewarding and humbling.
“My goal for this team is to produce a well-rounded mix of accountability journalism, impactful narrative features, solutions pieces and just generally be the source for readers who want to know what is happening regarding the Aug. 8 fires, who it is affecting and how, and what can or should be done in response,” he said.
Dobbyn, who joined Civil Beat in February 2022, said that even though there are still many angles to pursue, she and her colleagues are being strategic in how they pick and choose what to cover on a day-to-day basis. She’s currently working on an investigation about a real estate developer who is asking the county for a large subsidy to build affordable housing — a project that she said would house many of the fire survivors. The journalist added that they have questions about his background, so she’s taking time to look through court records and other documents as part of her research.
“But after I’m through with that I’ll be turning to a story about the rebuild of Lahaina and after that a project on water, an issue that is super-controversial but also one that touches everyone’s lives on Maui,” Dobbyn said in an email. “So there’s definitely no shortage of things to cover as far as the fire’s aftermath and how people are trying to put their lives back together.”
Dobbyn described it as a “juggling act” to be productive and also mindful that you can’t cover everything.
Part of the ongoing coverage is two special projects: “The Long Road Home,” which follows some survivors as they rebuild their lives, and “The Lives We Lost,” a series of profiles of those who perished in the fires.
Just a few days after the deadly wildfires first broke out on the island of Maui, projects editor Jessica Terrell began thinking about what Civil Beat could do that would be important to the community. She wondered: How could we be community conveners?
Terrell knew that her colleagues were reporting on the immediate aftermath and serving as watchdogs. And then she remembered the series of vignettes The New York Times had done on the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Terrell brought the idea of writing profiles of the Maui wildfire victims to Epler. Some consideration was made into whether the staff had the resources available to pull off a deep-dive project like this. In a later email, Epler said it seemed like an important project to do.
“I think at that time, we had no idea how many people it was going to be,” said Terrell of the number of fatalities that would later rise to close to 100 people.
There were discussions in the newsroom, and a decision was made to ensure they would profile everyone who died, somehow. Terrell now spearheads “The Lives We Lost.” “It was pretty important to me that we focus on their life story, and not the story of how they died in the fire,” Terrell said.
She said she knows other members of the media were doing their best to write about those who died, but noted that some of the stories were about how a family died in the flames, or how they were left at a senior housing complex at the time of the fires. “And if how they died was a really important part of who they were — if it spoke to who they were — then to include that somehow, but to not focus on those last horrible moments,” she said.
Terrell said she began reaching out to people as potential sources for each profile, but was determined to limit the number of times she reached out to be sensitive.
As the project is circulated, Terrell said, the hope is that more and more people will reach out to Civil Beat.
“And as time settles down a little bit — and people aren’t so much in the immediate moment of the trauma of it — that having something that honors or tells the story of their loved one will be something that they’ll want to spend some time on,” she said. “And we’re starting to see that.”
Teague, the newsletter editor, also manages email products and helps build digital audiences, and has been regularly sending key news updates via text message around the Maui fires. Since Teague last spoke with Poynter, she said the breaking news cycle has slowed down and Civil Beat has switched to more of its “usual enterprise coverage, in-depth daily reporting mode.”
She said there’s still a special Maui list for subscribers, where she sends more frequent updates. Teague added that, going forward, the fires showed Civil Beat that text message needs to be an important part of their communication strategy for disasters. The number of people who receive the text message service, she said, has grown from a little over 200 to nearly 700 in just a few months.
“People have been really appreciative, which is so meaningful when you’re under all this pressure and such tragic things are happening around you,” Teague said. “I think that sort of thing helps keep us going.”
