Jackson Free Press

"It's where people come to help," a calm radio voice explains. "It's an assortment of tents and trailers in a parking lot right in the middle of some of the worst destruction from last week's monster tornado in Yazoo City."

The voice belongs to Randy Bell, a broadcast journalist with decades of awards and honors for covering Mississippi news. This report followed the April 24, 2010 tornado that tore through the state and killed 10 people. Bell's story, "Volunteer City," explained the staging point for volunteers with buzzing chainsaws ready to move into action.

The story won Bell and radio stations WMSI and WQJQ-FM the Edward R. Murrow Award for audio reporting hard news. Bell won both regional and national awards for small market radio stations.

He agrees strongly with other broadcasters that media outlets need an official designation as first responders during disasters. "During Hurricane Katrina, it became difficult not only to get the story out, but to get (to sites) to service our own transmitters," Bell told the Jackson Free Press this morning.

Since that time, he's worked with the Mississippi Emergency Management Association to change so that media--especially broadcasters--can get proper access to sites during a major disaster.

"We basically have a seat at the table," he said. "We don't get everything we want, but at least we have a voice."

Bell began covering Mississippi news 38 years ago. His first radio job was in Vernon, Ala. He majored in communications at Mississippi State University, graduating in 1974.

In 1975, he went to work at WJDX (WQJQ recently changed its call letters to WJDX) as a news reporter. Bell has been Mississippi's Radio Newsperson of the Year 18 times and has won 20 national Edward R. Murrow Awards. He is state chair of Mississippi's Emergency Alert System and helped develop the state's AMBER Alert plan. Bell is regional director of the Radio Television Digital News Association.

He and his wife, Pat, have been married for 39 years and they have two children and five grandchildren.