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| Paula Devlin
and James O'Byrne, both of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, discuss
how the newspaper and the copy desk coped in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
They also showed a video and slides from the tragedy. The Times-Picayune
this week won two Pulitzers for its hurricane reporting. |
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When
disaster strikes
Despite
their own hardships, Times-Picayune staff members
put readers first and used their resourcefulness
to report on the biggest story of their lives
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By Naomi Seldin
and Matthew Crowley
Times-Picayune staff photographer Ted Jackson
stood on a bridge in New Orleans as a nearby family clung to a porch,
and to life. Fourteen-foot-high water stood between him and the
family members, who screamed for help as the flood swallowed their
home.
“I begged them just to hold on, to stay there, because help surely
would be coming soon,” he recalled.
Helpless to reach the family, Jackson reached for his camera. “The
man standing with me, he looked at me, and he said, ‘You’re not
taking a picture of this,’” Jackson remembered. “And I said, ‘I
have to; we have to show what’s going on here.’”
Jackson quickly shot three or four frames.
Lessons from disaster
Devlin and O'Byrne offer these tips:
You’re only as good as your people, but some of those people
will be spectacularly good when you most need them to be.
Newspapers count, and there are some stories that only a
newspaper can tell.
You should have a plan. But in a major disaster, your success
will depend on how you respond to the things you didn’t plan. Things like:
The water’s still rising, and the prisoners are escaping.
Keep an axe in the attic — although that may be a New Orleans-specific
lesson. |
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“I remember telling the man that one day, we’ll sit down
and have a cup of coffee over this and I’ll explain why this picture
is so important,” Jackson said. “And I remember him saying, ‘I will
never have coffee with the likes of you.’”
Jackson’s experience, and others like his, filled an eight-minute
video that opened Thursday and Saturday sessions of “Dealing with
Disaster,” a first-person account of the Times-Picayune’s ordeal
by staff members Paula Devlin and James O’Byrne.
Devlin, the newspaper’s copy desk chief, and O’Byrne, the paper’s
features editor, led the hushed crowd through their experiences
covering and surviving Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic flooding
that followed on Oct. 30.
Hurricanes are a way of life for the paper’s staff, Devlin said,
and the Times-Picayune is experienced at preparing for and covering
them.
Approximately 240 people, including staff members and family members,
met at the newspaper according to plan, with everything -- sleeping
bags, food, bottled water and champagne, O’Byrne said -- they anticipated
would be needed to ride out the storm. Generators powered the newspaper’s
“hurricane bunker,” which was equipped with backup Internet, satellite
and analog phone lines, and computers “stolen” from the copy desk
nearby.
Photographers captured the resilient mood at the paper. In one
picture, smiling members of the copy desk lined up for dinner outside
the cafeteria, where an ice cream machine was plugged into a generator.
But on Monday afternoon, as the rest of the world reported
that New Orleans had “dodged a bullet,” O’Byrne and the newspaper’s
art critic ventured into the city on bicycle and found a different
story. On Tuesday morning, O’Byrne said, staffers awoke to the surreal
sight of photographer John McCusker kayaking across the building’s
front lawn. The details of what happened next are now well-known: the
decision to abandon the building, the delivery trucks commandeered to ferry
the staff and their families to safety, and the volunteers who chose
to stay behind and report to the rest of the world that New Orleans
was not, in fact, OK.
Those who left had 15 minutes to take what they could carry in
their laps. A small group of copy editors got off at the Courier
in Houma, La. With “a few laptops, no fonts, no page templates,
no coding and precious little time to get out a paper,” they produced
a 13-page online edition for the next day, Devlin said.
The rest — 75 strong, O’Byrne said — continued to an office park
in Baton Rouge, where they began to assess their immediate needs.
There were the professional: at least 20 workspaces to start rebuilding
a desk, computers, software, monitors, transportation, photocopiers,
printers, pens, paper. And the personal: clothing, food, places to stay.
By Wednesday afternoon, O’Byrne said, they had 22 “fully equipped”
workstations, four design stations and two photo-editing stations.
The staff put out Thursday’s edition online from Baton Rouge. On
Thursday night, they printed a newspaper for the first time since
Monday’s edition. For the next five weeks, they became a “newspaper in
exile.”
Meanwhile, Devlin said, they watched as their
city, their homes, “devolved into chaos and fire, utterly abandoned
by the federal government.” On the video, David Meeks, now city
editor, described the internal conflict.
“When you’re a journalist, you’re always taught to keep an arm’s
length from everything,” he said. “It doesn’t calculate what happens
when the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States
hits your house, hits your family, hits the family of all your friends,
the people you love. Once that happens, no matter who you are or no
matter how objective you think you’re going to be, you will never be the
same.” The staff also learned how important the newspaper had become
to those forced to flee New Orleans “and to those left behind.”
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| The crowd
shows its appreciation at the end of Thursday's "Dealing with
Disaster" session. |
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When Meeks delivered newspapers to the convention center,
he was mobbed by residents frantic for information, cut off from
the outside world.
“We don’t have anything for these people,” O’Byrne recalled in
another segment of the video. “We don’t have water, we don’t have
food, we don’t have escape, we have nothing to give them. “What
became apparent to us as we talked to them was that the mere fact
that the Times-Picayune, the local newspaper, was there was a tremendous comfort
to them,” he said.
Devlin described the story-flow process. Reporters would e-mail
stories to line editors, who would call them up and paste them into
Microsoft Word. When they were done editing, they moved the documents
into a shared folder on the desktop. Rim editors would then call
up the stories, edit them, write headlines, then save them with a new slug.
Page designers would flow the stories onto Mac pages, which rim
editors were assigned to proof.
Seven months later, and back in New Orleans, life remains a struggle
and Katrina a large part of the newspaper’s focus. On NOLA.com’s
home page on Friday afternoon, a link to a story by O’Byrne about
the Times-Picayune’s two Pulitzer Prizes awarded Monday is small,
below banner coverage of a deadline to gut flooded homes in the city
and Saturday’s mayoral race.
But Devlin says the newspaper’s staff and mission are stronger,
and others interviewed for the video agree. “I’ve never been more
emotionally involved with a story,” said Terry Baquet, Page 1 editor.
“I loved the news before, but this news affected me and everybody
that I know and am close to; my family, my friends. And I feel like I’ve
been part of something really, really important. And every day that we put
out a good newspaper, I feel like I’ve contributed to the rebuilding
of New Orleans.”
Naomi Seldin is a business and news copy
editor at the Times Union (Albany, N.Y.). She can be reached at
nbseldin@yahoo.com.
Matthew Crowley, a business copy editor for the Las Vegas Review-Journal,
contributed to this report. He can be reached at matthew_crowley@copydesk.org.
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