Public: ‘It demonstrated the importance of a newspaper’
The presses will resume rolling as soon as Monday at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
After six weeks of publishing online or as a guest at other newspaper plants, the 168-year-old paper is going back home this week.
As the press thunders to life, it will be a joyous and symbolic moment, not simply for the newspaper, but for the community.
For if ever the importance of a newspaper was apparent, it was in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Before public officials acknowledged the magnitude of the disaster, journalists at the Times-Picayune with unique knowledge of their city discovered and shouted it. They shared with the world the suffering of flood victims when the government was slow to respond. They explained how warnings were ignored, how systems broke down and how stories of death were exaggerated. And with the help of the Web, they brought together a community scattered across the country.
Only a community’s newspaper could deliver that. And only the newspaper will be able to fully and publicly address the daunting issues ahead for the city.
The lessons of the Times-Picayune’s experience should resonate with readers and with journalists in the struggling newspaper industry: If journalists passionately care about their communities, if they truly look out for the interests of readers, and if they deliver a public service to their community, they indeed will be essential. They will be read.
Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss speaks humbly about his newspaper. Like most of his staff, he can’t yet occupy his home. Yet he and his staff are able to perform incredible journalism because they personally understand what their readers are facing. They bring passion to their story ideas, their reporting, their editing. They ask the tough questions their readers share and have a firsthand understanding of the disaster.
By contrast, much of the media are regularly criticized for emphasizing the trivial over the substantial, for being more compliant than skeptical, for looking out for their own interests more than the public’s. Many are so detached from the communities they cover that they can’t serve them.
Journalists everywhere need to ask: Are they challenging the claims of government, whether they are about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or how taxpayer money is spent?
Are they helping readers delve into the difficult issues of race and poverty enough to bring understanding to the complexity, or are they skirting such important issues? Are they offering ideas for solutions when elected leaders fail to?
And are they writing stories to serve readers or their journalistic interests?
The Times-Picayune, which shares the same owner as The Oregonian, returns to daunting challenges. Most employees still don’t know if or when they’ll go back to their homes, and they will resume publishing with few advertisers open for business and most of their subscribers displaced.
Yet what the newspaper has meant to readers has helped sustain the staff.
After the levees began leaking and the floodwaters began to rise, public officials and the national press were reporting the city had dodged a bullet. But a reporter and an editor rode bicycles through neighborhoods and witnessed the growing disaster, with residents scrambling to second stories and rooftops. When the journalists told the victims they were from the newspaper, the residents rejoiced.
“They said, ‘Thank God, the newspaper. Thank God, The Times-Picayune,’ “Amoss said Friday. “It was a moment you couldn’t have possibly provoked, and that illustrated in a truly vivid way the importance of a newspaper in its readers’ lives.”
The newspaper soon had to evacuate all its staff and abandon its press plant. Days later, copies of the newspaper began to resume reaching the dry parts of New Orleans.
When they saw the newspaper, people wept with joy.
