The wind arrived with devastating force. Windows broke. The power failed. Water rose outside.
Inside, people who had no way of knowing the fate of their own homes and loved ones — no way to protect what was precious to them, personally — huddled, waiting to do their jobs.
The journalists of New Orleans’ Times-Picayune were doing what journalists do in times of distress: whatever is necessary to record what is happening and get that information to the public.
A year ago, a similar scene — but one not nearly as severe — played out, repeatedly, in the Sentinel’s newsroom as three hurricanes criss-crossed Central Florida in quick succession. Charley, Frances and Jeanne left trees down, roofs damaged, power out and debris everywhere.
When the sun came up after each storm, people found newspapers at their doors, telling them about what had happened, what to expect and where to get help. As in New Orleans, that information was collected by journalists who had suffered the same sort of losses as the people about whom they were reporting.
In Central Florida, though, when the storms passed, things started to dry up. Driving around fallen trees, Sentinel delivery people could get newspapers to readers’ doors.
New Orleans is under water.
The streets are impassable. A large portion of the populace has fled. There certainly are no businesses eager to buy advertising to finance the publishing of a newspaper. What is the point of a local newspaper staff continuing to gather news under such impossible conditions?
If the journalists of the Times-Picayune asked themselves that question, they quickly answered it: If they couldn’t publish on paper, they’d publish on the Web. Operating for two days and nights out of their crippled newsroom, they put out an electronic newspaper and augmented that with a breaking-news Weblog.
Without electricity, of course, their city had little or no access to the information they were posting. Those residents who had fled the city, as well as relatives and friends of those still there, though, were able to maintain an uninterrupted view of what was happening in New Orleans.
Other news organizations from throughout the country also rushed in to help provide that view. Television networks provided ongoing coverage. The Sentinel, sending its own team of journalists into that area, published page after page of information about the tragedy.
Even other news organizations, though, have turned to the Times-Picayune’s journalists for information. That is their home, and they know it best.
Tuesday they had to abandon their building. So they set up shop in newspaper offices in the nearby cities of Houma and Baton Rouge. Friday, with help from their hosts, they resumed publishing a real newspaper for delivery to accessible areas of their city.
Journalism, as has been famously said, is the first draft of history. When we look back on the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and what it did to New Orleans, we will owe a great deal to the journalists of the Times-Picayune who didn’t run from the storm but stayed and provided a record of perhaps the worst natural disaster in this country’s history.
