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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s way to share more with her audience between her official reporting duties for the CBS network stations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of Sharp\u2019s videos caught Katie\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Sharp and her photographer looked at each other and decided they had time to spare to check on Katie\u2019s home. Unfortunately, the news was grim. Katie\u2019s home, which had been in her family since the 1950s, was gone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t necessarily understand the impact that those videos would have in the moment, but I\u2019m glad to see that so many people resonated with them,\u201d Sharp said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt 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,\u201d Sharp said.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t get for days or weeks to come. That, she said, is what the Volunteer spirit is to her.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Volunteer spirit is just going out of your way to help somebody else and not thinking about yourself in that moment,\u201d Sharp said. \u201cI hope that I was able to show that Volunteer spirit. This wasn\u2019t about me. It was about helping somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Ashley Sharp (\u201818) 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\u2019s class to join their team. The journalism and media student at the time worked part-time for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":67762,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,20,8,56],"tags":[],"locations":[],"class_list":["post-67123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni-news","category-featured-story","category-news","category-school-of-journalism-media"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/cci.utk.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Ashley-Sharp-on-CBS-Morning-3-768x1024.jpeg\")