Alum’s hurricane blog draws national attention
By Katharine Merola
As Hurricane Katrina threatened to blow into her darkened Baton Rouge apartment, Kaye Trammell, MAMC 2002, PhD 2004, diligently updated her blog using a new BlackBerry, which continued to function through the storm.
“That’s when [blogging] became really a cathartic relief for me,” said the Louisiana State University assistant professor of mass communications.
The day before Katrina hit, Trammell started hurricaneupdate.blogspot.com. Posting 27 entries between 2 p.m. and midnight, she initially used it to update family members but it soon gained worldwide readership.
USA Today (Aug. 29) and The New York Times (Aug. 31) mentioned her hurricane blog and quoted her, and The Washington Post ran her op-ed piece about blogs (Sept. 3). All three pieces focused on how journalists and others used blogs during Katrina.
Trammell
Trammell, a commissioned public affairs officer in the Naval Reserve who spent five years as a journalist in the U.S. Navy, has lived alone in Baton Rouge since last year. She couldn’t join her husband, UF Web Administrator Mark Trammell, in Gainesville in time to sidestep the hurricane because LSU held classes until the Friday before the storm.
“During the worst of the storm,” her husband of more than seven years said, “the blog was really the only contact we had.”
The day after the storm hit Louisiana, Mark wrote in his blog, “I’ve been gravely concerned for Kaye’s well-being. That is a severe understatement. Her Hurricane Katrina blog has kept me somewhat sane.”
Aside from temporarily losing power, Kaye Trammell escaped Katrina’s wrath, so she has focused on her students and the many evacuees in Baton Rouge. Three thousand students from New Orleans area schools are taking classes at LSU. Some may have enrolled in Kaye’s visual communication and public relations classes, although she has no way of knowing how many.
“I have restructured my semester to be more understanding to my students,” said Trammell, who earned her bachelor’s in communication from Old Dominion University in Virginia in 1999. “I am cognizant of the fact that while they might be okay today, their outlook may deteriorate as the reality of the situation sinks in later in the semester.
“As a faculty, we are acutely aware that our students have lost their homes, some of them have lost their universities and a lot of lives here have been touched.”
One of the lessons she shares with her students is the power of blogs.
On the day Katrina hit Baton Rouge, “I knew that if I were to stop blogging,” she said, “then my family, and huge amount of readers that I had amassed at that point, would really freak out about the whole thing, wondering if I was okay, and what was going on.”
Trammell continues to update her blog every few days, posting entries about the relief efforts, other hurricane blogs and her post-Katrina experiences. She has studied blogs since she wrote her dissertation on the role of politics in the genre, and even keeps a blog about blogs, “so this is mass communication?” (kaye.trammell.com/blog).
“Blogs will never replace how people get information or the quality of information that traditional journalists release,” she said. “But what blogs did in this case was allow people to really see from a first-hand view what was going on with the people that were being directly impacted at that moment.”
