Robin Roberts said Rock'n Robin Productions has been nominated for a 2026 News and Documentary Emmy Award for the special Hurricane Katrina: 20 Years After the Storm. The nomination is for Outstanding Recorded News Special, and the project was made in partnership with ABC News Studios.
In an Instagram post, Roberts described the special as being led by @robinrobertsgma and called the nomination “a testament to resilience, memory, and the power of bearing witness” to the long aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The recognition lands around the 20th anniversary of the storm that devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, and it puts the special’s focus squarely on how New Orleans and the surrounding region have recovered and changed since then.
Roberts thanked ABC News Studios and the people who took part in telling the story, saying the project was made with care, honesty and heart. That matters because the nomination is not just for a news package about a past disaster; it is for a retrospective that measures what has endured alongside what was lost, and that is the harder story to tell.
The 2026 News and Documentary Emmy Awards ceremony will take place later this year, giving the special another moment in the spotlight as awards voters weigh work that revisits one of the defining disasters of the 21st century. For Roberts and the team behind it, the nomination itself answers the question raised by the project: the storm is over, but its story still carries weight.
