A couple of months ago, Christy Arnold received an e-mail from a New Orleans Times Picayune photographer. “I wouldn’t have been able to get the shots I did without your help,” he wrote.

Two days before Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, Christy had e-mailed a list of tips for journalists. Things like: Carry anti-bacterial hand cream. Keep a can of Fix-a-Flat in your car. Wear mosquito repellent.

The advice was battle-tested and, for Christy, was no different than sending advice to family members. Christy and the rest of the staff at the Charlotte (Fla.) Sun had covered Hurricane Charley a year earlier. Their work not only endeared the paper to its hurting communities, but also made the paper a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

“That paper became my family,” she said. “When you go through something like the hurricane or other different situations, it’s just a blessing to be around people who really are like your family.”

A native of suburban Glenview, Ill., Christy didn’t settle on a career direction until her junior year at NIU. She’d tried several majors and had been a walk-on player for the Huskie softball team. Then she got hired as a Northern Star reporter – after having earned a “C” in her only NIU journalism class and settling on English as a major. Immediately, the light came on.

“It wasn’t until I started working at the Northern Star and was around people like Kevin Wendt and Joe Biesk and Joe Menard, and feeling that really old-school journalism environment that I got really interested in the passion involved in it,” she said. “It was that go-get-’em attitude and that hard work and the passion that I think is missing sometimes in some places nowadays.”

Christy graduated in December 1999, after a highly targeted job search landed her an offer in Port Charlotte.

“I took a book of all the newspapers, and I took a map of the country,” she said, “and I ended up applying to papers in the South all along the coast. I figured if I was going to get experience I might as well do it near a beach. Really a mature line of thinking there.”

In June 2005, Christy took a job with the Cincinnati Enquirer. By October, she was dayside crime reporter. But in early 2006, she decided to return to Port Charlotte as a feature reporter.