When the School of Communication’s Alberto Cairo, associate professor and Knight Chair in Visual Journalism, and Joseph B. Treaster, professor, saw Hurricane Dorian threatening Miami, their first thought was: How can we help people understand this momentous event, how can we tell the story?
Both ended up publishing work in The New York Times, which now has more than 4 million subscribers around the world. Talk about Miami faculty impact.
Cairo, created a fast-paced narrative with graphics for The Times’ Op Ed Page on how to accurately read the National Hurricane Center’s colorful hurricane tracking maps. People routinely misread the maps and misjudge the danger.
Treaster, who worked for The Times as a reporter and foreign correspondent for more than 30 years before joining the university as the Knight Chair in Cross Cultural Communication, worked with a team of Times reporters covering Hurricane Dorian. He wrote one article about the often difficult decision of whether to evacuate. He wrote another on coping with gasoline shortages, and another on how art collectors were protecting their treasures.
“This shows the strength of our faculty,” said Sam Terilli, department chair for the Department of Journalism and Media Management and a former general counsel for The Miami Herald. “We’ve got a powerful mix of professionals and academics. They’re regularly making a national impact. They give our students something they can’t get elsewhere.”
Below is their work:
Cairo: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/29/opinion/hurricane-dorian-forecast-map.html
Treaster: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/us/dorian-hurricane-evacuate.html?searchResultPosition=3
