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By Matthew Crowley
The lights went down and James O’Byrne let the
pictures start telling his story.
A house reduced to a pile of sticks.
A Volkswagen bug with both doors ripped off, holes where the windows
and windshields were.
A man wrapped in a black trash bag, huddled under a store awning.
Cars up to the top of their hoods in water.
A woman on her knees, mouth agape midscream, her face a mask of
anguish.
Katrina had been there. She had ripped and ravaged and ruined.
For the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the
storm became a test of resourcefulness and will. The staff members
had lost their homes, their possessions, their office. They were
separated from family and neighbors. But nothing, Times-Picayune
Features Editor O’Byrne said, was going to stop them from telling the
story of what had happened to them and their city.
“This is a story about the power of newspapers,” O’Byrne said in
his keynote address at the American Copy Editors Society’s annual
banquet Friday night at the Cleveland Renaissance.
O’Byrne started against the backdrop of a picture of water. It
filled the street and the frame of the picture. This, he said, was
the Lakeview neighborhood where he and many of his colleagues lived.
The gasoline station where he fueled his car was on one edge of
the frame, the sign peeking through the water. His house was less than
a mile a way. He’d snapped the picture from a railroad bridge, sitting on
his bicycle.
“As I tried to process this extraordinary, life-changing event,
I looked down through the gaps in the railroad ties beneath my feet,
and I could that this was not, in fact, a sea, but a river, flowing
rapidly and inexorably south, toward the Superdome, the newspaper,
the core of our city.”
Some reporters from out of town arrived on the scene and declared
that New Orleans had “dodged a bullet” when the storm hit. From
their vantage points in the French Quarter, on high ground, the
phrase seemed to fit, O’Byrne said; it was all they could see.
But the staff of the Times-Picayune knew a different story. Reporters,
editors and photographers would fan out across the city to tell
it.
“For New Orleans, the unfathomable was occurring,” he said. “Over
the next 24 hours, most of the city went under water, and stayed
that way for a very long time. Our urban landscape, our way of life,
our people, our commerce were buried by a black flood of water and
mud and sewage and oil. Within a single day, our way of life disappeared.”
No American city had ever been so ravaged in the way the storm
and the following flood had wrecked New Orleans, O’Byrne said. Multiple
levee failures sent three feet of water streaming into 80 percent
of the city, an area seven times the size of Manhattan. More than
1,200 people died in Louisiana, almost all in New Orleans, as a direct result
of the storm, he said. More than 1 million people were displaced; more than
200,000 homes were heavily damaged or destroyed.
And, of the 30 staff members in O’Byrne’s department, 13 had homes
severely damaged or completely wrecked by the storm. Forty of O’Byrne’s
neighbors died. Seventeen are still missing.
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| O'Byrne,
left, receives a standing ovation after giving an address
at the ACES conference banquet that left few dry eyes. |
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The water O’Byrne, and his Aug. 29 bike partner, Doug
MacCash, had seen from that railroad bridge, arrived at the paper
the next day, he said. Three feet of water stretched in every direction,
and was still rising. Dry land was three miles away on the interstate,
he said, reachable only by traversing a flooded service road for
three quarters of a mile.
“These were the conditions under which our team of reporters and
photographers did extraordinary and memorable journalism,” O’Byrne
said, “siphoning gasoline to run cars and recharge cell phones and
laptops each night, huddling in unairconditioned houses during the
worst heat wave of the year and risking their lives every day to get
the story.”
In the days after the storm, one T-P reporter, Gordon Russell,
got caught in a police dragnet and had an automatic weapon pointed
at his head. He was released, minus his notebook, badly shaken,
O’Byrne said. In another case, photographers Ted Jackson and David
Grunfeld got permission from a neighbor to break into a house for food. Jackson
broke a window to get in and met a shotgun barrel. A neighbor, who’d been
told to shoot looters on sight, was holding the gun. Lucky for the
photographer, O’Byrne said, the gun-toting neighbor listened to
Jackson’s explanation. He didn’t shoot.
O’Byrne’s job was to build a newsroom from scratch in a rented
technology-park space in Baton Rouge; the staff had headed there
seeking haven. An information technology staff member used his own
credit card to charge $22,000 in computer equipment. O’Byrne rented
30 cars on the publisher’s plastic. He sent the assistant sports editor to
Wal-Mart for gasoline, gasoline cans, food and water. He used the
general manager’s credit card.
The paper published an online edition Tuesday night in Houma. Print
would follow.
“In less than 18 hours,” he said. “We had a fully functioning newsroom
again.” By Thursday night, three days after the storm hit, the paper
was back in print, first in Houma, La., later in Mobile. The Web
site was transformed, he said. Pages that averaged 80,000 page hits
a day before the storm were getting 80 million hits a day after.
"Copy editors produced papers on Sunday night while the storm raged,
and on Monday as the city filled up," O’Byrne said. “They boarded
the trucks as we fled the building. They lost their homes and their
communities. They arrived in Baton Rouge without possession or a
place to live. And they did whatever they could to keep us operating
as a newspaper.”
The headlines, hundreds of point sizes large, told the city’s story
over several days: “CATASTROPHIC.” “UNDERWATER.” “HELP US, PLEASE.”
New Orleans residents, O’Byrne said, expressed their gratitude
for their newspaper’s work during the storm. When O’Byrne and MacCash
arrived on a Lakeview bridge, where firemen had pulled people from
roofs and the second stories of their homes, they were met warmly.
“… I thought to myself how can they be happy to see us,” O’Byrne
said. “They’re stranded, surrounded by water and have just lost
everything. But what became apparent was this: the newspaper had
arrived, and that was enough for them.”
When Jackson and other photographers went to the Convention Center
on a later day, people rushed to them, took them by the arms and
showed them devastation.
“Tell the truth,” the people said.
The gratitude continues now, O’Byrne said. One e-mailer wrote recently
to say how proud she was of her hometown paper.
“I can well remember sitting is Roswell, Ga., (physically OK) reading
every word on Nola.com trying to get the real picture of what happened
to our city,” she wrote. “ … without the courageous efforts all
of the people at the Times-Picayune, we would not have made it.”
The Times-Picayune won two Pulitzer Prizes for its work, one for
public service, the other for distinguished reporting for breaking
news.
“So the members of the Times-Picayune copy desk, who worked through
Katrina’s aftermath, including two in this room, Paula Devlin and
Carol Carpenter, are Pulitzer Prize winners in every sense of the
term,” O’Byrne said.
Now, more than seven months after the storm, New Orleans lives
in limbo, O’Byrne said. Although uptown New Orleans, spared by the
flooding has come back, and now buzzes with traffic, the suburbs
are still dark, desolate, destroyed. O’Byrne someone can drive through
suburban streets for three hours without seeing an inhabitable house.
“We understand why for so many, this story seems to be winding
down,” O’Byrne said in closing. “But for us it’s just the beginning.
So my request — you can call it a plea if you like -- to you and
anyone else works in the media is very simple:
“Please, don’t forget about us.”
Matthew Crowley is a business copy editor for the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. He can be reached at matthew_crowley@copydesk.org.
ROBINSON PRIZE WINNER AND AUBESPIN SCHOLAR SPEAK
AT BANQUET
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