Katrina, US and us

THE brute force of a hurricane sparks a reflexive response: fight or flight, cherished pictures or heirloom china, beer or water? And news anchors, too, rely on well-worn instincts: go toward the disaster, set up shop and then stand out in the wind-driven rain to let the storm wreak havoc on their generally well-attended hair. Conditions, they will mostly tell you, are "worsening." But that news...

Journalism seems to have recovered its reason for being. As in the weeks after 9/11, news organizations have plunged into the calamity in New Orleans, with reporters chronicling heartbreaking stories under harrowing conditions in a submerged city. Suddenly, there were no more absurdly hyped melodramas like those of Natalee Holloway or Terri Schiavo, just the all-too-real drama of death and...

The story of Hattiesburg, Miss., is being told worldwide through journalism of a new kind. After Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Louisiana/Mississippi coast Monday it churned through Hattiesburg about 75 miles to the north. Destruction was widespread and conditions deteriorated in the days after the storm. Worldwide media attention focused on the disintegration of New Orleans because of the...

The axiom that journalists should be dispassionate interpreters of events, no matter how harrowing, has been severely tested in the deadly wake of Hurricane Katrina. The magnitude of the destruction left by the storm and the desperate straits of thousands of its victims were challenge enough. Many reporters, clearly affected by what they were seeing, showed their empathy in their stories, and some...

It may sound callous, but the truth is that the thousands of middle class Indians who sat glued to CNN watching and discussing, of all things, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, weren't remotely driven by a sense of Christian charity or Hindu compassion. On the contrary, you could detect their smirk at the descent of the American Dream into a Third World nightmare. Don't get me wrong, the Indian...

(KRT) - The Sun Herald and its predecessor newspapers, The Daily Herald and the Sun, have a proud 121-year tradition of never having missed a publication day. That is pretty amazing when you consider that we do get the occasional hurricane in these parts. Last Sunday afternoon, our staff hurried to put the finishing touches on our Monday edition so that everyone could speed to a place where they...

Among the many cruelties delivered by Hurricane Katrina, there was this: The people most in need of information about the storm were the least likely to be able to see, hear or read about it. Journalists from the two hardest-hit areas -- New Orleans and the adjacent Gulf Coast of Mississippi -- have labored to describe the unfolding catastrophe. They have worked around demolished newsrooms and...

CBS News sent a boat packed with supplies -- including desperately needed fuel -- to rendezvous with its crew hunkered down in New Orleans. CNN was securing boats to navigate the flood zones and checked into renting dump trucks (the better to plow through rising waters). NBC News located mammoth recreational vehicles that sleep six, have working toilets and showers, and are packed with supplies...

Staff at news outlets in New Orleans and the surrounding southern US improvised to produce makeshift internet-only coverage after one of the country's most severe environmental disasters hit regular publishing operations hard. In Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, the city's daily Times-Picayune was unable to print or deliver newspapers so resorted to distributing PDF editions on the paper's website...

The New Orleans Times-Picayune is doing an excellent job in keeping publishing despite the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. After offices were flooded the paper published only online using pdfs. The paper publishes on NOLA.com, a New Orleans local website that was launched in 1998 in affiliation with The Times-Picayune. The paper has set up a list of missing persons, where people can post...