In the wee hours of July 4, Kerrville, Texas — a small town with a population of 25,141 — contended with a devastating storm that caused the Guadalupe River to rise more than 26 feet. It spilled over its banks within 45 minutes of heavy rain, sending relentless floods into parks, homes and, notoriously, summer camps for kids. It was a natural disaster of such devastating proportions that it drew the attention of the international press. However, it was local news media that rose to the challenge of informing the impacted community during, following and long after the storm.
John Wells was named publisher of The Kerrville Daily Times in October 2024. He relocated his family from Georgia for the professional opportunity. He was also enchanted by the Texas “Hill Country.”
“It’s beautiful here. The people are as friendly as they come. … It’s a small town, but people love their newspaper here. Local news still matters,” Wells said.
Wells recalled the deafening thunder the night of the storm. He got up at 7 a.m. and checked his phone. Messages from Editor Jeanette Eastwood Nash and a former photographer colleague told him the river was flooding. He donned his boots and drove in that direction. The river was raging. Downtown, at a plaza overlooking the water, it had risen 30 feet. Long-time residents came by and said they’d never seen anything like it.
Wells checked in with members of the staff and asked for all-hands-on-deck back in the newsroom, where calls were starting to come in. People were stranded and needed rescue; some reported seeing neighbors and family members being swept away by the floods; others were desperate for information about the missing. Calls came in from the networks — CNN and Fox News — asking for updates and permission to air their videos.
The Kerrville Daily Times is owned by Southern Newspapers, Inc. It employs 12 full-time staffers and two part-timers.
“One of our reporters, Haeley Carpenter, was on her third week on the job when this happened, and she had to go out and cover press conferences and ask the tough questions of the city manager, the mayor and the sheriff. We all had to cover the deaths — the children. That’s something no college program could ever prepare you for,” Wells said. “But you have to press on. This is vital news that we have to get out to our community, so you absorb it, get through it, and when you have a chance, stop and feel the emotion of it. Then, pick yourself back up and get back at it.”
The first 48 hours were primarily spent confirming information.
The Daily Times suspended its paywall for two weeks. Their first print edition about the storm came on the following Tuesday. They gave the paper away for free that day.
Still, they recorded the best subscription-growth month since Wells became publisher. They gained about 100 new subscribers.
“It wasn’t about making money,” Wells said. “It was about getting information out as accurately and as timely as we could.”
The volume of the news coverage was massive. The team easily clocked as many as 70 hours a week in the first two weeks, the publisher told E&P. A few colleagues at other Southern Newspapers titles were dispatched to help with reporting, photography and proofreading.
“We weren’t untouched,” Wells sadly reported. “Our sales manager lost everything. His whole house flooded, but he saved his family. He had to go underwater, put his mom on his shoulders, and get her to the roof so they could survive. Our assistant editor’s family lost everything — their house, but thankfully, no loss of life. But for every member of this community, their whole lives were turned upside down.”
A month after the storm, the pages of the newspaper still carried flood-related coverage, with as much as 30% of the content devoted to it some days. Wells said businesses are starting to reopen, families are getting their kids ready to go back to school, and football is back.
In August, the staff was in the throes of producing a 100+-page magazine, “Guadalupe Rising.” “It’s going to cover the entirety of this horrible event, from the loss of life to the tributes to the volunteers and heroes. We’re selling it for $15 a copy, and we’re giving every single penny to the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country,” Wells said.
“It’s amazing to see what a little newspaper in a small town can do when something like this happens — how big of an impact we can have on the community. … When all of these other news crews leave, we’ll still be here,” Wells said. “And our communities will remember what we did to help.”
Flood coverage continues in Kerrville
A month after the floods, E&P also spoke with Louis Amestoy, publisher of The Kerr County Lead in Kerrville, Texas. He was spending part of his morning sifting through the county’s 9-1-1 logs related to the storm — 325 calls.
Even though the waters had receded, the story was still unfolding in Kerrville.
“Yesterday was just as busy covering the flood as it was on day one,” he said.
Amestoy founded The Lead after decades as a journalist for corporate- or hedge fund-owned newspapers. He’d grown weary of the job, mainly due to a lack of resources, a lack of innovation and a diminished investment in enterprise-level reporting.
Amestoy moved from California to Texas in 2019 and began to build a locally focused, all-digital news source. The Kerr County Lead has three primary publishing platforms: an email newsletter, a website and a webcast show called “The Lead Live.” The newsletter has two pay models, free — with roughly 4,000 subscribers — and a paid option.
“We have an 80% open rate on our emails,” he said.
On the eve of July 4th, Amestoy was preparing to cover holiday festivities the next day, including an annual concert that draws upwards of 10,000 each year and a patriotic bike parade.
“That crunchy community stuff was going to be our day,” he recalled. But the National Weather Service issued a flood watch the night before, and Amestoy kept tabs on the weather updates until he went to bed for the night. It proved a fitful sleep. The lightning startled, and thunder boomed. When he awoke at 6:30 a.m., he saw his phone had “blown up” with alerts and messages, including from the city manager, who told him, “The river is out of hand.”
“At this point, the river was probably 35 feet tall. It was just below one of the main bridges that connect north and south Kerrville. It was 900 feet wide and covered the entire park,” he said. Throughout the day, he provided real-time updates on Facebook Live.
“I have extensive experience covering California disasters, so I know that the first 24 hours are critical to how you cover a story like this. You have a lot of incremental reporting,” he said.
“I pretty quickly knew that this was going to be a very long day,” he recalled. “My sources were telling me that we already had fatalities. And then I started hearing about Camp Mystic, and it turned into a never-ending day.”
Amestoy is essentially a one-person operation, though he does enlist freelance help as needed.
He was painfully short of one critical resource during and in the aftermath of the storm — people. His girlfriend, Jennifer Dean, a former journalist who works full-time developing education curricula, took on the role of photojournalist. Amestoy’s ex-wife and daughter also came to Kerrville from San Antonio to help him get information out to the public.
“Allison, my daughter, helped build the first missing persons list with two other people here in town,” he said. He enlisted a former colleague to help with public records requests.
Their team covered press conferences. They fielded calls from residents who wanted to be on the livestream he was producing from a local brewery, the Pint & Plow. He appeared on national news programs to share his eyewitness accounts.
What he needed was another photojournalist, a licensed drone operator and more reporters.
One association — INN, the Institute for Nonprofit News — offered monetary support. Otherwise, Amestoy said, “There was a shocking lack of empathy or support from within our industry, and I think we can do better than that.”
It wasn’t enough to factually report on what the community was experiencing. So much of the job became about correcting misinformation. Both The Lead and the Kerrville Daily Times had to retract a story about two girls who survived by clinging to a tree; it proved untrue.
Fingers were pointed at local and state officials, who were accused of malfeasance. Amestoy said that was a false narrative. He cited meteorologists and climate scientists who said there was no way people or technology could have predicted the rainfall, an estimated four months’ worth of rain in mere hours.
“I think the failure of the national media was to turn immediately to accountability, or the blame game, because that’s the easiest story to tell, and I saw it play out over and over again,” he said.
Amestoy figured that, by focusing almost entirely on finger-pointing, those outlets missed an important facet.
“The real story is in the FEMA maps and where people are allowed to live and build homes 100% inside the floodplain, where everyone died,” he said. “Anybody who was sleeping inside that floodway zone on the FEMA map died — all 117 of them [in Kerr County]. To me, that was the bigger, broader story. Why were they allowed to do this? Is Texas going to change its rules? Does Texas have the political will to tell property owners that they can’t build there anymore? That’s the debate we’re having now.”
An event of this magnitude may take months if not years to reflect and report on. The Lead will be following up on efforts to rebuild, on how the community heals and investigations into how $100 million in donations are distributed. In mid-August, he was still compiling obituaries.
Amestoy’s team produced a 40-page print edition to memorialize the historic disaster.
“There is great satisfaction in making sure you tell a story accurately,” he reflected. “I believe community journalism is a balancing act of the good and the bad, and a lot of times, we are celebrating community. There are a lot of things to celebrate, even though we’ve been through this horrific tragedy. The celebration is going to come.”
Gretchen A. Peck is a contributing editor to Editor & Publisher. She's reported for E&P since 2010 and welcomes comments at gretchenapeck@gmail.com.
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