Saturday, October 22, 2005
In American Journalism Review, Brian Thevenot of the New Orleans Times-Picayune gives an emotional behind-the-scenes account of reporters who stayed behind to tell the story of New Orleans after the paper's own building was evacuated.
This was no organized-in-advance disaster response team with special training. After the evacuation, it was the paper's sports editor who convinced the boss to let him take a newspaper delivery truck and a small group of writers into the city.
Thevenot, the paper's education reporter, describes the group as "a bizarre but complementary mix" of writers: an assistant editorial page editor, a police and courts reporter, a music critic, an art critic, a religion writer... eventually hooking up with photographers and reporters who were already in the streets when the flood reached the newspaper building.
(Journalism students may have heard that newspaper reporters often work their way through a series of beats in their career, rather than sticking with one specialty for long -- even those music, art and religion writers probably had spent some time on the phone taking police reports. The resourceful sports editor had been the paper's suburban editor, and the education reporter had been one of his suburban staff.)
Along with job descriptions, the disaster merged old and new technologies mixed -- reporters went back to the century-old techniques of writing stories by hand and dictating them over the phone, while the Web edition, nola.com, became the Times-Picayne's printing press, until arrangements were made to print special editions at an out-of-town newspaper.
Thevenot's detailed how-we-did-it story is linked to a half-dozen of the earliest stories he and his fellow reporters filed from New Orleans after the storm. So there it is, just when you needed some rainy-day reading.
(AJR also has more analysis of Katrina's impact on reporting by "the battered mainstream media," along with several articles on the Judith Miller/Matthew Cooper case and the issue of using confidential sources. Speaking of Judith Miller--and her pre-war WMD stories, Ed Cone is so impressed by Maureen Dowd's column on the subject that he calls it a story "the Times doesn't want you to read." He's referring to the Times putting Dowd's columns in the paid-access-only section of nytimes.com, but Cone provides a summary. Finally, Times Editor Bill Keller says he missed some alarm bells in the handling of the Miller case.)
12:19:37 PM #
This was no organized-in-advance disaster response team with special training. After the evacuation, it was the paper's sports editor who convinced the boss to let him take a newspaper delivery truck and a small group of writers into the city.
Thevenot, the paper's education reporter, describes the group as "a bizarre but complementary mix" of writers: an assistant editorial page editor, a police and courts reporter, a music critic, an art critic, a religion writer... eventually hooking up with photographers and reporters who were already in the streets when the flood reached the newspaper building.
(Journalism students may have heard that newspaper reporters often work their way through a series of beats in their career, rather than sticking with one specialty for long -- even those music, art and religion writers probably had spent some time on the phone taking police reports. The resourceful sports editor had been the paper's suburban editor, and the education reporter had been one of his suburban staff.)
Along with job descriptions, the disaster merged old and new technologies mixed -- reporters went back to the century-old techniques of writing stories by hand and dictating them over the phone, while the Web edition, nola.com, became the Times-Picayne's printing press, until arrangements were made to print special editions at an out-of-town newspaper.
Thevenot's detailed how-we-did-it story is linked to a half-dozen of the earliest stories he and his fellow reporters filed from New Orleans after the storm. So there it is, just when you needed some rainy-day reading.
(AJR also has more analysis of Katrina's impact on reporting by "the battered mainstream media," along with several articles on the Judith Miller/Matthew Cooper case and the issue of using confidential sources. Speaking of Judith Miller--and her pre-war WMD stories, Ed Cone is so impressed by Maureen Dowd's column on the subject that he calls it a story "the Times doesn't want you to read." He's referring to the Times putting Dowd's columns in the paid-access-only section of nytimes.com, but Cone provides a summary. Finally, Times Editor Bill Keller says he missed some alarm bells in the handling of the Miller case.)
12:19:37 PM #
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