By Douglas McCollam
Late in the afternoon on Tuesday, August 30, a large delivery truck for the New Orleans Times-Picayune pulled up on a freeway overpass near the middle of town and stopped. At the wheel was David Meeks, a sports editor for the paper. Riding with him was Michael Perlstein, a veteran cops and courts reporter. Like many Orleanians, the men had been through a harrowing two days as Hurricane Katrina howled through the city, then flooded it. In short order, New Orleans descended into chaos, with armed looters, uncontrolled fires, and unclaimed corpses, one of which turned up just down the street from the house where they were staying. Without saying much the two men got out of the cab and went to the rear of the truck, which had been their sole means of navigating the inundated streets since the storm hit. From the back they removed a battered red plastic kayak and carried it down the overpass to where the floodwaters rose up to meet them. Wearing a red life vest, Meeks stepped into the bobbing craft, paused to get his bearings, then paddled off up Interstate 10 to look for an old friend.
As he paddled he saw a city that was submerged for more than a hundred square miles. To his left, the angels and crosses adorning crypts in the city’s largest cemetery loomed above the surface. Nearby, a river of murky water flowed through the gates of the city’s most exclusive country club. The current was against him and, in the ninety-plus heat, sweat ran in rivulets. After about a mile Meeks guided his kayak off the interstate and past the Florida Boulevard exit, making for his home, purchased just a year ago, on Memphis Street in the Lakeview section of the city. He found it under about eight feet of water. Exhausted, Meeks tied off on the gutter of his roof, sat in the kayak and wept. After a few minutes, he surveyed his options. Seeing that the front door was submerged, he kicked open a window so he could swim into his living room. Inside, the water was so high he was able to propel himself by pushing off the downstairs ceiling with his hands. Getting to his back steps, he yelled up to the second floor. There was Carson, a mixed-breed shepherd that had been beloved by Meeks’s dead father. As Meeks was contemplating how to get a large traumatized dog out of a flooded house and into a small kayak, he heard voices outside.
Back at the truck, Mike Perlstein was starting to worry. It was near dark and Meeks hadn’t turned up. As the boats that had used a nearby train trestle as an impromptu launch for rescue operations returned, Perlstein would ask if they had seen a guy out there in a red kayak. No one had. But just as the sun was dropping behind the horizon, a flatboat carrying Meeks, Carson, and three Cajuns from a neighboring parish appeared in the distance, a red kayak trailing in their wake.
Newspapers, the saying goes, are a daily miracle, and perhaps never has the expression been more apt than at The Times-Picayune in the wake of Katrina. Ashton Phelps Jr., the Picayune’s longtime publisher, says that covering Katrina put “maximum professional pressure with maximum personal pressure” on his staff. The day after the storm hit, the paper had to abandon its headquarters and its city, with hundreds of staff members and their families fleeing in a long convoy of Times-Picayune delivery trucks. Living mostly in borrowed houses, often separated from friends and family, wearing donated clothes, and working with hand-me-down equipment and donated office space, the paper managed to produce coverage of the disaster that serves to remind us all of just how deep is the connection between a city and its newspaper, how much they need each other. This may be even more clear now, in the storm’s extended aftermath.
New Orleans is my hometown, and the Picayune was once my daily, and naturally I was curious to see how they were coping. So two weeks after Katrina I went down to Louisiana to spend a few days at the paper’s improvised headquarters in Baton Rouge and in its New Orleans “bureau,” which was in fact a small house on a side street in the middle of a dead city. One of my first explorations there was with Meeks to see his house. The floodwaters had receded just the day before, and it was the first time he had been back to Memphis Street since the kayak expedition. A shallow stream still flowed under our feet, and the smell was powerful and saturating, though not what I had expected: acrid more than rotten, coating your mouth and throat with an alkaline film. Every inch of dry ground was covered with viscous goo that changed color from gray to black whenever you stepped on it, so that you left a cartoon trail of ink-stained footprints. Inside the house, slime coated everything. The doors and cabinets were warped shut and dozens of waterlogged books lay swollen and scattered like dead fish after an oil spill. Miraculously, a group of family photos fixed to the front of the refrigerator were untouched, having somehow stayed on the dry side of the floating appliance. Meeks couldn’t get over that. “The rest of it,” he said later, “you just have to let it go.”
Let it go. That was a sentiment I heard often around the Picayune during my visit. Most of the paper’s senior staff had their homes flooded or damaged. Like the citizens of the city they covered, they were refugees. Adding to their troubles was the uncertain future of the Picayune. At a meeting shortly after the evacuation Phelps told staff members that their jobs were safe until the end of October. That led to speculation that the paper might shut down after that time. Phelps, along with members of the Newhouse family, whose Advance Publications owns the Picayune, aggressively shot down all rumors of the paper’s demise, declaring flatly that it would continue to publish. By mid-October, the paper had rebounded strongly, restoring about two-thirds of its circulation and promising no immediate cuts. But with the core of New Orleans slow to recover, it remains to be seen what happens to the paper in the long run.
In one way the Times-Picayune is fortunate. Unlike Gannett or Knight Ridder, Advance (which is also the parent of Condé Nast) is a private company insulated from the quarterly earnings metric that drives so much of newspapering today. But everyone intuitively understands that unless New Orleans, zombie-like, rises from its crypt in the coming months, some changes at the paper are probably unavoidable. “That would break my heart,” one editor told me, before conceding that it was likely. It would be one of the cruel ironies of the disaster if it succeeded in diminishing the Picayune just as New Orleans needs it most, just as the Picayune is demonstrating why it is that newspapers still matter.
EXILE IN THE EXURBS
One of the first things I noticed visiting the Picayune is how much the staff’s demeanor mirrors the city it covers. Informal and easygoing despite the circumstances, the reporters and editors plowed through twelve-hour days with little sniping or griping. “It’s one of the rules,” says features editor James O’Byrne. “No one can be an asshole right now. People are too fragile.” At meetings the editors ran down the lineup and batted around the latest rumors — alligators on I-10, roaming sniper squads — with gallows humor, pausing to spell out the name of an editor who said something politically incorrect, insulting a public official or joking darkly about the plight of victims. (So many lurid rumors popped up during the disaster that the paper ended up having to set up a kind of “urban legends” team to knock them down.) Most stories, of course, were no joke. It was the Picayune that first broke the story of the impending flood on the day of the storm, while most news outlets were still reporting that the city had “dodged a bullet” (the scoop was the result of an epic six-hour bike ride around New Orleans by O’Byrne and the paper’s art critic, Doug MacCash). It was also the Picayune, through its Nola.com Web site, that wrote the first graphic stories of victims stranded on a forlorn interstate and others hacking their way onto their roofs to await rescue. The paper’s HELP US, PLEASE headline, appearing over a photo of a desperate woman on her knees the Friday after the storm, became the plea of the embattled city.
Presiding over most meetings was Jim Amoss, the Picayune’s low-key editor. Amoss pushed to make sure coverage looked beyond the immediate New Orleans area to the paper’s readers in the surrounding parishes. Also, Amoss on several occasions expressed concern over whether the paper was giving enough coverage to the racial overtones of the disaster. Though the city is known for historically having more relaxed racial attitudes than most of the South, the stark contrast in wealth between white and black, combined with a high violent-crime rate and the relative absence of a middle class in the city, has fed bitterness on both sides of the racial divide. In 1993, the paper ran a series of stories exploring the roots of racial tension in New Orleans. The project was one of Amoss’s first initiatives after taking over as editor and it caused a huge stir in the city. In the decade that followed, such comprehensive projects became something of trademark for the Picayune under Amoss, with everything from the Formosan termite to world fisheries receiving exhaustive investigations (the fisheries series, “Oceans of Trouble,” won a Pulitzer in 1997).
At fifty-eight, with a short mop of gray hair, Amoss still manages to retain the youthful air of a favorite professor. Though a graduate of Yale (where he studied German literature and did his senior thesis on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain) and a Rhodes scholar, he nevertheless describes himself as a late bloomer. “Today I’d be diagnosed with ADD — perfect for an editor,” he says.
After graduating he worked for two years as a hospital orderly in Boston in lieu of serving in Vietnam, then returned to New Orleans in his mid-twenties with no clear idea of what he would do with his life. Amoss began freelancing articles from the city, and a sense that journalism might be his calling took hold. He went to journalism school at night and applied for a reporting job with the Picayune but was turned down. Finally, in 1974, the States-Item, the city’s now-defunct afternoon paper, hired him as a general-assignment reporter. He was twenty-six. “I couldn’t think of anything better than being a reporter in the city I loved,” says Amoss.
A few years into his stint at the States-Item, Amoss was paired with Dean Baquet, now the editor of the Los Angeles Times and at the time a young Columbia University dropout. The two became the paper’s top investigative team as well as close friends off the job. (Baquet is the godfather of Amoss’s son.) Separated by a decade in age and from opposite sides of the city's racial lines, their friendship struck some as unlikely. Terry Baquet, a younger brother of Dean and an editor at the Picayune, remembers first seeing Amoss having drinks with his older brother and wondering why a “rich white kid from Uptown” was hanging out down in the Seventh Ward. But if Amoss and Phelps represent one pillar of New Orleans society, then the Baquets represents the other, the old-line Creole community. The Baquets’ father owned Eddie’s, a restaurant that served as a watering hole at the crosscurrents of New Orleans culture. Terry, like his four brothers, went to St. Augustine High School in the city, a traditional Catholic prep school for well-to-do African Americans. Like Amoss, Terry Baquet came to journalism later in life, at the recommendation of his brother. “He told me it was an honorable profession,” Baquet says.
Of all the editors and writers I spoke with at the paper, none, save perhaps Amoss, were so obviously emotionally attached to the city — to the idea of New Orleans — as was Terry Baquet. It was hard for him to talk about what had happened without becoming emotional. Though his historic cottage had been flooded and looted, he seemed most concerned about his fish, a collection of Japanese Koi in a large backyard pond, which had been swept away. The most important item he says he salvaged from his house was a giant portrait of his father painted by an orphan from his neighborhood, whom his dad had taken under his wing. To Baquet, someone saying that New Orleans couldn’t or wouldn’t come back might as well be slapping his grandmother.
As Amoss and Baquet demonstrate, it is hard to imagine a major paper more closely tied to its community — and thus to its community’s fate — than The Times-Picayune. In print continuously for more than a century and a half, the paper’s roots stretch back to well before the Civil War. A report released in march by the Scarborough group, a media research firm, showed that among the top fifty American newspapers, the Picayune has the highest percentage of daily readers in its market. Another survey showed that about 80 percent of adults in the New Orleans metro area read the Picayune at least once a week. That sense of rootedness extends to the people who work at the paper. Phelps is the third generation of his family to publish the Picayune. Jim Amoss’s family also has strong ties to the city, and many Picayune veterans have been there twenty years or more. All this lent a sense of family tragedy to what happened to the city and the paper that covers it.
Yet the Picayune, under Phelps’s direction since 1979, has also moved to lessen its dependence on traditional New Orleans. Though only the thirty-fifth largest paper in the country by circulation, it nevertheless publishes six zoned editions in surrounding communities. Donald Newhouse, who oversees the paper for Advance, says that more than twenty years ago Phelps developed this strategy in an effort to hold onto readers as they moved out into bedroom communities. As a result, today almost two-thirds of the paper’s 260,000 paid circulation is based outside the New Orleans city limits, most of it in areas less damaged by Katrina.
Nevertheless, the long-term financial hurdles the paper faces are daunting. According to TNS Media Intelligence, before Katrina the paper published about eighty pages in a non-Sunday issue, and grossed about $9 million a month in ad revenue. By mid-October, the paper had worked some of its zoned editions back to prestorm size. But while it had increased display ads substantially, its classifieds and supplements were still at a fledgling level, and by any estimate the paper was still well short of its prestorm revenue. Both Phelps and Newhouse declined to provide CJR with exact numbers on the paper’s poststorm financial performance, saying that the situation remained too chaotic to get an accurate fix. The paper was justifiably proud of nursing its circulation up to about 185,000, but the real issue is advertising, which traditionally supplies about 75 percent to 80 percent of newspaper revenues. A prolonged drop in ad revenue and paid circulation would certainly suggest a paper with a significantly smaller staff than before the storm. Phelps, though, declined to make that prediction, and said that for now any staff reductions will come through natural attrition, mainly support personnel who choose not to return to the city. In general, all Phelps would concede was that if New Orleans doesn’t rebound commercially over the long haul, the Picayune will have to adjust.
Just how affected New Orleans will be in time remains uncertain. An analysis made by one New York investment fund suggests the city may struggle for several years, losing a significant portion of its white-collar professional class. In late September, even Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, predicted that the city might rebound to only about half its old population base, a comment that Steven Newhouse, head of Advance’s Internet operations, described as stunning. “I couldn’t believe he said that,” Newhouse told me. “It just makes no sense with everything in flux.”
A FLOOD FORETOLD
In 2003, when the American Society of Newspaper Editors asked Jim Amoss what he worried the most about, he put hurricanes first on the list. It is one of the ironies of The Times-Picayune’s position that it, more than any other private or public institution, predicted what could happen to New Orleans in the event of a major hurricane. In 2002, the paper focused one of its famous series on the city’s vulnerability to a direct hit from a major hurricane. “Washing Away” envisioned breached levies, the city filling with water, and the difficulties in evacuating tens of thousands of poor citizens who lacked the means to escape. Like Cassandra’s, its warning went largely unheeded.
The paper did have its own hurricane plan of sorts. After Hurricane Georges in 1998, it was decided that with the next strong hurricane production would move into a small interior space on the third floor of the paper’s headquarters, protecting it from wind damage and water. The plan, however, did not take into account the kind of flooding caused by Katrina. For example, while the generator was on the third floor, key circuits down on the first floor were vulnerable. By the time the staff awoke in the Picayune building early Tuesday morning after the storm — they had sheltered there with their families the day before — the water was threatening to invade the building. While there was some reluctance to leave, the situation looked increasingly dire. So Phelps ordered that the paper’s fleet of delivery trucks be assembled at the paper’s loading dock to ferry the approximately 250 staff people and family members out of the city. Phelps told everyone to bring only “what would fit on their laps.”
Riding in the back of the last truck, David Meeks felt as if they were abandoning the city. As the convoy made its way toward a bridge over the Mississippi River he noticed that much of uptown New Orleans, the largely affluent section nearest to the river, was dry. On the outskirts of town, Meeks approached Amoss with a proposal: What if he and a team of volunteers agreed to go back in? After asking a few logistical questions, Amoss agreed to the plan. Meeks had plenty of volunteers, including the paper’s editorial-page editor, art critic, and religion writer. In all, eight Picayune reporters and one photographer agreed to plunge back into the flooded city. The paper lent them a delivery truck. But other than that, they were on their own.
The first week was particularly harrowing. Moving from house to house, the group tried to find working phone lines and avoid gangs of looters. One day right before deadline, all communications went down and the reporters had to race sixty miles outside the city to file, finishing their stories in the back of the delivery truck on the way. As things grew more desperate, holding onto the truck itself became a concern, and Meeks was careful not to expose it to crowds.
On the Friday after the storm, when he and the reporter Trymaine Lee (who had stayed in the city all along) went to the Convention Center to pass out the first print edition of The Times-Picayune, Meeks was careful to park a few blocks away. At the Convention Center, people mobbed them, desperate for the newspaper as if it were food or water.
By the time I caught up with the New Orleans crew a couple of weeks after the storm, things had settled down and the “bureau” had the feel of an extended campout. The rattle of the house’s 5,700-watt generator could be heard up the block and dozens of bright-red gas cans were lined up along a broken backyard fence, where house laundry was placed to dry. Inside, droning fans pushed the thick air around, and bottles of rum and Southern Comfort competed for shelf space with jumbo packs of paper towels and military rations (the Captain’s Chicken was good, the Thai Chicken sucked). On the floor, a care package from Field & Stream magazine contained a case of “Combat Bath: Full Body Cleansing in a Waterless Environment.” A crew of often-shirtless reporters banged away on their laptops, under the watchful eyes of a rescued Carson, the bureau’s unofficial guard dog. Out of sight, and never used, were a shotgun and a .357 Magnum the group had been lent in case of trouble.
At night they slept on mattresses on the floor in stifling heat and humidity. Most were reluctant to rotate out when offered the chance.
By mid-October, “ Fort Picayune” had closed and the paper was in the process of reclaiming its New Orleans headquarters. Though the city was officially open for business, it remained oddly quiet, its citizens slow to return, a discouraging sign to many. But the Picayune staff was back to nearly full strength, at least for the time being, and seemed anxious to take on the challenges to come.
Those challenges will be formidable. New Orleans needs a newspaper like never before, to talk to itself about planning and rebuilding, about the direction of its healing economy, about outstanding environmental questions, about its devastated housing, its wounded police force, its image. A surge of money almost as deep as the floodwaters of Katrina is coming, and in a place noted for public corruption and waste, accounting for that largess and documenting whether it gets to the people and neighborhoods that need it will pose a reporting challenge nearly as tough as covering the storm itself, and just as vital. The paper’s hardest work, it seems, is yet to come.
What toll these arduous weeks have taken and will take yet on the Picayune staff is unclear. Most told me that they had cried more than once while covering the story. Shortly after the paper temporarily relocated to Baton Rouge, a counselor specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder came in to talk to the staff. Gathering in the front room, amid cardboard boxes stuffed with clothes, shaving cream, baby wipes, and safety razors, the counselor asked each person to describe his or her strongest fear to the group. When his turn came, Jim Amoss said his biggest fear was that New Orleans was never going to be the same, that something would be forever broken. “It’s such a precarious thing,” Amoss told me one day, sitting at the folding tables that serve as the paper’s conference room. “It’s not transportable. If we were to live in a new city like Baton Rouge, or Atlanta . . . .” He thought for a moment. “That’s like traveling to a different country.” When we spoke, Amoss thought the future of New Orleans still hung in the balance. “It’s a lot about perceptions,” Amoss said. “I think it will come back the way it was. I’m optimistic.” I asked if he were speaking as a clear-eyed newsman or as a civic booster. “Is it propaganda, you mean? No, if people believe that it will come back, it will.”
At that moment I realized I wasn’t sure whether Amoss was talking about The Times-Picayune or New Orleans itself, and thought to ask him. Then I realized it probably didn’t make any difference.
Douglas McCollam is a contributing editor to CJR.
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