By Catherine Komp, Engagement Director
In the wake of hurricanes and floods, devastation often paves the way for remarkable acts of resilience and innovation within communities.
That was the case following Hurricane Florence in 2018, when Shoresides was developed to serve Wilmington and North Carolina’s rural coastal communities. News Director Rend Smith says there was a clear need to connect people during a really chaotic time.
“We did that by asking people to call into a storyline to tell us about what was happening for them during the storm and after the storm, as a way of creating a connector between folks who were having isolated experiences,” said Smith. “We put them into a podcast and called it Storm Stories, and that was the start of generating public conversation through podcasts.”
The very first episode of Storm Stories wasn’t about the painful parts of a disaster, it centered on love— unexpectedly sparked during a sheep rescue.
“I felt bad because everybody’s still, I guess you can say, grieving, while him and I are like enjoying life to the max,” recounted Lacy Shannon in the episode. “So the hurricane just, it actually healed me. I felt like, yeah, it brought chaos, but it also tore down walls that were in my heart.”
Storm Stories explored resilience and recovery following Florence, including throughout the pandemic. They put out a new episode last month focused on Helene, sharing the experiences of Asheville resident and musician Imhotep Dlanod (who was also displaced by Hurricane Katrina) and a meteorologist’s look at the increasing severity of weather events.
Like much of the work produced by Shoresides, the series is a collaboration between professional journalists, community media makers, youth producers and everyday members of the community.
Shoresides Director of Development and Podcast Production Nick Szuberla said a year after Florence, they partnered with community groups, churches and grassroots recovery efforts on another series called Flood Zone. They went to seven rural communities and set up “story circles” for survivors to share what they were going through a year after the storm. For many, it was the first time they had the opportunity to tell their stories.
One was an elderly woman displaced by the storm who was traveling more than 100 miles each month to visit her property. All that was left was her mailbox.
“She explained she was fearful of losing her relations with her friends, her family, her church and her civil structure and being lonely, being displaced at such a late age in life,” said Szuberla. “And that really struck me about how these weather events have such a long tail that goes past the normal journalism that occurs especially from the national media. I think we learned a lot about people’s information needs.”
Another lesson learned, says Szuberla, is how much people appreciated “reflecting back the positives,” — the mutual aid, collaboration and working together, however big or small.
Journalism’s role in community building
Shoresides is a project of Narrative Arts, a nearly 15 year old Wilmington nonprofit dedicated to advancing social justice and equity through organizing, networking, training, technology and production. Even before Florence, they had been intentionally thinking about the need for local news to transform, build bridges and form new partnerships.
In 2018, Narrative Arts launched the “Free Movement Conference,” which brought together community activists, artists and journalists to talk about the future of North Carolina and the South in general. One of the tracks, says Rend Smith, was journalism and the impact it could have on community building.
“We brought all sorts of folks together who knew a lot about that, including people from Free Press, Pen America and we talked it over and we shared thoughts,” said Smith. “That’s probably when, in combination with my background as a journalist, we started talking about how we could use media in a way that could have significant benefit to the communities that we work with.”
Szuberla adds that prior to Florence they also launched a “Media Ecology Project,” bringing together local and regional media partners to talk about the local news ecosystem. They did this through a series of shared meals, where they heard from community members about information needs and from journalists about their interests.
“And then we went on a local Black radio station’s daily talk show and brought all those folks together and they had a really open discussion about different perspectives and needs within the media system,” Szuberla.
Shaped by local voices
As Shoresides took shape, they worked with traditional media partners (including the News and Observer and NC Health News) and began doing more community outreach and training as they built an impressive portfolio of podcasts. There’s the Shoresides News solutions-journalism podcast, the arts focused Somewhere & Elsewhere; and the environmental show Community Rising, as well as an op-ed series called Speak Your Piece. One delightful episode of the youth-focused She Rocks explores Thanksgiving traditions, fall foot fashion, and the “hot topic” of the day: social media and its distinct impacts on teens and adults.
She Rocks is a collaboration with GRITS: Girls Rocking in the South. Szuberla says they’ve built up an audience of about 800 email and 900 podcast subscribers.
“And that’s primarily young Black girls who make up that audience and they’re in Columbus County, New Hanover County and Carteret, and that has been because we’ve done specific outreach to build those audiences in those communities. That outreach has involved face to face workshops, participating in youth events and tabling to make youth aware and then also drawing usually a cohort of five to six youth to be producers,” Szuberla said.
Other parts of the Shoreside audience include those in the nonprofit sector, activists, working class people, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, those interested in the fishing industry (through their podcast Hooked) and military members stationed abroad.
“We started to see just through some data that we had a lot of listeners in Germany. Someone reached out and he said I’m from that area and I like all the stories about fishing and cultural stories, stories that are about just the community life: restaurants, Barbecue, fishing,” said Szuberla. “So we’ve actually found that we have a little bit of an international following who are listening to Shoresides stories.”
While a large part of their content is in the form of podcasts, they’ve also trained community members in documentary production, including working with Waccamaw Siouan youth on this piece called “We’re Still Here” and partnering with Every Child North Carolina on a series about the Leandro plan.
Charting the future
Like many local news initiatives, Shoresides is small, a “pretty humble” organization as Smith describes it. They have two full-time staff, three part-time and a handful of contractors and contributors.
“We’re certainly looking to grow,” said Smith. “We’re always kind of trying to build the budget, trying to build capacity and you know that’s never easy. We’d like to have a healthy institution where we can create day-to-day coverage as well as the enterprise reporting and then have folks all paid well and be rested.”
The organization began some of that work earlier this year after being selected for LION’s sustainability audit. Last month, they got the welcome news of being one of nine North Carolina recipients of the Press Forward $100,000 “Closing Local Coverage Gaps” grants. And this year, they also qualified for INN’s News Match, which has a record $7.5 million in funding to disburse to nonprofit news organizations across the country, with special funds this year dedicated to newsrooms led by and serving communities of color and rural communities.
Szuberla says these opportunities will help them invest in their staff and their business plan, including developing their individual donor base.
“It’s been soft asks to date. We have not done a lot of one-on-ones, we have not done really direct engagement with partners,” said Szuberla. “I think a lot of people just assume we’re good because we’re not asking for money. So we want to build that for the long haul.”
Editorially, the team will continue to build out beats they’ve been developing: education, health, climate change, youth voices, art, culture and housing. Smith would also like to tackle some new ones, like the impact of AI on everyday people. Shoresides also plans to continue their youth engagement in Columbus County through their longtime collaboration with Community CPR, a mutual aid disaster relief organization founded after Hurricane Matthew. And they hope to bring back the Free Movement Conference in 2026.
Smith says these partnerships are a key part of their model: getting communities to engage with and support their work because they are deeply involved with it.
“One of the things that we’ve learned from Shoresides is that communities generate their own information,” said Smith. “We want to get our information into the hands of the people who need it, [but we also] really want to get what they are saying and what they are seeing out to everyone else.”
As Shoresides continues to move ahead, Smith adds they’ll continue to approach their work “in a way that helps raise us, not just for storms but for coming political changes.”
