Alumna Goes Viral for Coverage of LA Wildfires
When Ashley Sharp (‘18) learned about the 2016 Great Smoky Mountain wildfires, she wanted to help.
She knew WBIR Channel 10 News would need assistance covering this tragedy, so she requested to be excused from Professor Sam Swan’s class to join their team. The journalism and media student at the time worked part-time for the television station as an editor and photographer and wanted to contribute her efforts to report on what many locals remember now as the Gatlinburg wildfires.
“He looked at me and said, ‘This is more important than being in class.’,” Sharp said. “It’s funny to kind of look back and think of the full-circle moment of that. I was in college helping cover a wildfire in Tennessee, and here I am talking to you guys now about covering a wildfire in California. So, it’s not lost on me how much UT has impacted my career.”
Sharp’s coverage of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires recently went viral—almost a decade after covering her first wildfire as a student—for her raw and empathetic coverage of the tragedy.
The CBS Sacramento Channel 13 News reporter and anchor is no stranger to covering natural disasters. Prior to the LA wildfires, she covered disasters such as the 2020 Middle Tennessee tornadoes and several flooding events. She has also reported on other wildfire disasters in Northern California, but that was a very different experience than reporting on the wildfires in Los Angeles due to its geography and dense population. Nonetheless, all her previous experiences from as far back as college prepared her for the moment.
“I think that once you cover some of these disasters, and unfortunately see all of the destruction, it does impact you and makes you want to change the way that you cover them as you go along,” Sharp said. “For example, how can I be more compassionate? Is there a way to help? Is there a way to do my job as a reporter but also make an impact on the community?”
She feels her coverage of the fires in LA allowed her to do that but never imagined it would receive as much attention as it did.
Connecting with LA evacuees
It all started with a comment from evacuee Katie on a TikTok video Sharp posted of the destruction in Altadena, a suburb of Los Angeles.
Sharp and her photographer, Dave Grashoff, had just wrapped up another 12-hour shift of on-the-ground coverage of the fires for the station. Sharing additional content on social media was Sharp’s way to share more with her audience between her official reporting duties for the CBS network stations.
One of Sharp’s videos caught Katie’s attention. The reporter seemed close to her family home, so she reached out hoping Sharp could swing by and tell the Angeleno if the house was still standing.
Sharp and her photographer looked at each other and decided they had time to spare to check on Katie’s home. Unfortunately, the news was grim. Katie’s home, which had been in her family since the 1950s, was gone.
After posting a video response to Katie, Sharp said other requests started to flood in from evacuees for updates on their homes, and she felt compelled to do all she could to help.
“I didn’t necessarily understand the impact that those videos would have in the moment, but I’m glad to see that so many people resonated with them,” Sharp said.
Her willingness to help not only caught the attention of millions on the internet but also caught the eye of icons in the industry who she had looked up to as a freshman college student pursuing a career in journalism. In January, she was invited to New York City to share her story on the CBS Morning Show, where she got to meet award-winning journalist Gayle King.
“It was never about recognition, but the fact that somebody so iconic in our industry like Gayle was so kind to me and so engaged with asking me about my own reporting and my own journey, that was a pivotal career moment for me, honestly, and it really validated that this is the type of reporting that people want to see,” Sharp said.
Sharp said whether it is a tragic or happy story, viewers always crave the human connection behind it. Her videos gave evacuees answers they were desperately searching for and that motivated her to do what she could to help out.
Sharp said this exemplified the Volunteer spirit instilled in her at UT and aligns with the mission of being a journalist. She said it would have been easy to take action if she had known her TikTok posts were going to get this many views. However, her motivation came from a genuine desire to provide people with information they otherwise wouldn’t get for days or weeks to come. That, she said, is what the Volunteer spirit is to her.
“The Volunteer spirit is just going out of your way to help somebody else and not thinking about yourself in that moment,” Sharp said. “I hope that I was able to show that Volunteer spirit. This wasn’t about me. It was about helping somebody else.”
Alumna Goes Viral for Coverage of LA Wildfires written by Ernest Rollins and originally published on the College of Communication & Information site.