Without a doubt, the Times-Picayune has been doing an outstanding job covering Katrina's devastation and overcoming terrific hardships to do so. Paul McLeary of CJR Daily provides a highly readable inside view of Times-Picayune staffers -- not just the usual news guys, but everyone from the Saints' reporter to the restaurant critic -- tackling the story.
The schedule seems to be this: Gather information all day before heading back to the house about 5 p.m. to write, and then try to file by 7. They share one land line to email their stories to Baton Rouge.
....On this day, I follow [Jeff] Duncan, the football writer, and Steven Ritea, who covers "a school district that doesn't exist anymore," through their daily routine. First thing up is to gather others of the staff and note who is going where. Brett Anderson, who in normal times is the paper's much-envied restaurant critic, is about as far from his usual beat as it's possible to get; he's latching on to a military convoy going out on a search and rescue, while editorial page writer Jarvis DeBerry, equally separated from his usual duties, is heading out to walk through the downtown area to speak with residents who still refuse to leave; he later tells me that some of them claim to have food and water enough for a year, and don't plan on going anywhere. The rest of the reporters and photographers are already out on their rounds.
This batch of reporters is working from a staffer's house that survived Katrina. The CJR series began Monday at the new "main office" of the Times-Picayune at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
How does a hometown newspaper write about a city that in effect, no longer exists? How long can a newspaper staff, effectively homeless and running on fumes, continue to hold up? Where does a newspaper turn for advertising revenue when the city it caters to all of a sudden has neither businesses nor subscribers? Can a 168-year old paper, whose initial cover price was a 6-1/4 cent Spanish coin, long survive after being reduced to what amounts to the country's most tragic metro section?
Answers will be a while coming. Managing editor for news operations Peter Kovacs says that at the moment his only concern is getting the paper out each day, in the face of every obstacle. Contrary to some reports last week that the paper's owner, Advance Publications, an arm of the Newhouse empire, was going to shut down the paper and just walk away from an untenable investment, the company says it is going to see the Times Picayune through this upheaval and out the other side. Indeed, Kovacs says, everyone who was on the payroll before Katrina continues on it, at full pay.
The mundane of journalism -- "go, see, come back, tell" -- has become heroic. "While the staff looks weary and ragged, they're doing what reporters do -- digging out the facts, one by one by one, and painting a vivid daily picture of the ever-shifting scene."
The series continues tomorrow in NO. Meanwhile, the paper has issued a third open letter to President Bush, as reported by Editor & Publisher.
The waters will recede, and the death toll may fall below earlier estimates. It will become easy -- with no evacuees on roofs, no starving, clamoring people at the Superdome and Convention Center -- to decide that you have fulfilled your commitment to New Orleans.
That would be a huge mistake, Mr. President. The New Orleans that we and the nation deserve will be protected by thriving marshlands, walled off for floods, rebuilt even for its poorest citizens. It will be endowed with the schools, roads and new infrastructure that will allow it once again to be a viable urban center, a vital port, a cultural treasure to America and the world.
Addendum: Columnist Chris Rose adds to the view inside the journos' house. Also eminently readable, and poignant.
My colleagues who are down here are warriors. There are a half-dozen of us living in a small house on a side street Uptown. Everyone else has been cleared out.
We have a generator and water and military C-rations and Doritos and smokes and booze. After deadline, the call goes out: "Anyone for some warm brown liquor?" and we sit on the porch in the very, very still of the night and we try to laugh.
Some of these guys lost their houses -- everything in them. But they're here, telling our city's story.