God plays a real part in many of the Public Service awards.
—MICHAEL GARTNER, PULITZER PRIZE BOARD MEMBER, 1981 TO 1991
August was fading fast along the Gulf Coast, but the 2005 hurricane season was at its peak. The Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss had taken to watching storms like Tropical Depression Number 12 with equal parts awe and anticipation. His New Orleans newspaper was prepared for the worst. Or so he thought.
Amoss, who had led the paper to national acclaim during his fifteen years in charge, had put together a staff that was especially adept at pursuing projects. In 1992, 1996, 1997, and 1999, in fact,
Times-Picayune entries had been finalists for Pulitzer Prizes. Stories making the Pulitzer short list had explored a range of environmental and social topics. And in one of those years, 1997, the paper had been selected for its first two Pulitzers ever. Cartoonist Walt Handelsman had won, and so had the
Times-Picayune itself in the public service category.
1 That award had honored a series of articles titled “Oceans of Trouble,” which analyzed the problems faced by fisheries along the Gulf Coast and around the world.
Building on the prize-winning work, Amoss had turned his staff’s attention to another coastal problem: how poorly the below-sea-level city was protected against nature’s inevitable onslaughts.
2 The work uncovered evidence of inadequate hurricane preparation in the community. Reporter Mark Schleifstein—working with John McQuaid, his partner from the “Oceans of Trouble” series—helped prepare a five-part series in 2002 that pointed out serious weaknesses in the area’s system of levees. It was titled “Washing Away” and its second-day headline read “The Big One: A Major Hurricane Could Decimate the Region, but Flooding from Even a Moderate Storm Could Kill Thousands. It’s Just a Matter of Time.” That time would come during the early hours of Monday, August 29, 2005, with the arrival of Tropical Depression Number 12, renamed Hurricane Katrina by the National Weather Service. The Gulf Coast would remember it as Killer Katrina.
The newspaper had designed its building—located south of Lake Ponchartrain and north of the Mississippi River bend that gives the Crescent City its nickname—to be ready for a major hurricane. Beneath its conspicuous tower, the building was outfitted with a windowless “bunker” area operating as a generator-powered emergency newsroom. Still, it was sobering for the 140 staffers camping there overnight when the hum of the main, nonemergency power stopped at four o’clock in the morning that Monday. The sudden quiet within contrasted sharply with the howling wind without. Any who were dozing early that morning awoke abruptly. A large window in an executive office blew in, and then another and another. The storm was at full force: torrents of rain and increasing structural destruction, readily visible in the huge gashes appearing on the Superdome nearby. Much later, Amoss could wax poetic about the moment. “Standing in our building’s lobby, you could hear the oddly peaceful melody of the wind whistling past the entrance cavity—three sad, flute-like notes played over and over,” he wrote. “At times, the wind would shriek to a high-pitched wail before returning to the three-note dirge.”
3Then the raging storm crested. It was time for the
Times-Picayune to step up. “On Monday morning I told the staff that this was the biggest story of our lives, and that it was absolutely vital that we tell it as only we can tell it,” said Amoss.
4 The telling would require resources unique to a newspaper, especially their newspaper he said, and it would flow from the accumulated, layered knowledge of the complex New Orleans community. From the centrally located headquarters the staff fanned out by any means possible, including boat and bicycle, to see what Katrina had wrought. With phones out and even cell phones dead, however, there would be none of the typical minute-to-minute reports flowing into headquarters during the day. The reporters’ notes would have to be brought back to the newsroom in person.
From what Amoss could see and hear during the day, broadcast reporters and journalists from out of town clearly had too narrow a focus on what was happening across the city. Many were ensconced in the French Quarter and Garden District tourist areas along the river. But one thing the out-of-towners seemed to be getting right: as the fierce winds finally died down, with little apparent flooding, they declared that New Orleans had dodged a bullet. And that meant that so had the 137-year-old
Times-Picayune. “I thought, this is great. We’re okay,” Amoss remembers thinking.
5At nine-thirty on Monday night, Amoss gathered his editors under the emergency lights of the bunker to plan the coverage for the next day. As he described it, “When we started the meeting, we were deciding how to best report the apparent duality of the situation: that the city had been saved, but that the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish had been devastated.”
6 Then in an instant that duality vanished. Breathlessly, features editor James O’Byrne and art critic Doug MacCash dashed into the meeting with a report no one wanted to hear: on a six-hour bike ride, they had witnessed breaks in the levee along the 17th Street Canal that led into the lake. To the north, huge portions of the city were being flooded, and the lake waters were moving inexorably south. From a train bridge over Canal Boulevard they had seen a newly formed rushing river, seven feet deep, heading toward the city’s business district. “Don’t worry about spinning it,” O’Byrne advised his editors. “We’re going under water.”
7As disbelief turned to horror, thoughts of winning another Pulitzer Prize were far from anyone’s mind. Self-preservation was a more real concern. Most staffers had already evacuated their families, but they had no picture of what it would take to cover the destruction around them. Further, they worried about whether anyone would be reading their reports. The decision had been made on Monday not to publish a print version for the next day. The paper would appear instead online on the paper’s affiliated website
www.nola.com (for New Orleans, Louisiana). Still, the drive to get the news out had never been more critical. The headline they prepared for the online version of page one was “CATASTROPHIC.”
In fact, there had been relatively little direct wind damage to New Orleans even at the height of Katrina. Seventy-five miles to the east, at the landfall of the swirling mass around her eye, though, the storm unmercifully hammered the Mississippi coast cities of Gulfport and Biloxi with a level of destruction never before seen on American shores. Right in its path was the Sun Herald. The 47,000-circulation Gulfport-based paper with fifty-five staffers was only one-fifth the size of the Times-Picayune. Like most small dailies, the Sun Herald itself had never won a Pulitzer. But its executive editor, Stan Tiner, was known for a supportive, instructive style. It is where he had gotten his nickname “the coach.”
Like the
Times-Picayune, the Mississippi paper had fortified its building and trained staffers to deal with storms. The 121-year-old
Sun Herald had not missed a publication date since the hurricane of 1947, and the staff did not want to break that string. The newspaper had also created an emergency plan—one that involved drawing on outside help if necessary. Working through the chain that owned it, Knight Ridder Incorporated, the
Sun Herald arranged for its sister publication farther inland, Columbus, Georgia’s
Ledger-Enquirer, to publish the Mississippi paper if a coastal catastrophe stopped its own presses. Knight Ridder tradition called for providing financial aid and lending journalistic support from its other papers during emergencies. “Stan rallied the troops and on the Friday before, he laid out our mission,” says features editor Scott Hawkins. The rallying cry: “This is going to transform our coast forever, and will put us to the test as a newspaper.”
8 On Saturday, Tiner’s theme became personal safety for his team. He and publisher Ricky Mathews advised staffers to care for themselves and their families first and then get back to the newsroom as soon as possible. As the warnings about Katrina became direr, a disturbing thought occurred to Tiner: “We had no way of knowing how many of our staff we might have seen for the last time.”
In the beginning, southern Mississippi used the “Camille standard” to measure the new storm. People still could see the old water lines marking how far inland the seas had reached during the area’s previous record hurricane in 1969. That was the worst-case scenario in the minds of long-term residents. Many who were outside the area ravaged by Camille chose not to evacuate. “They had a sense of invulnerability,” according to Tiner. “They thought they were immune from death.”
9As the storm’s power built on Monday, though, it was clear that Camille was no longer the worst case. Katrina was sending surges far higher—creating walls of water twenty-eight feet high—and causing destruction much farther inland.
A skeleton crew was able to keep the solid one-story headquarters building open even as two-thirds of the
Sun Herald’s reporters, editors, and photographers remained largely scattered. The
Sun Herald’s website (
www.sunherald.com) continued to churn out information. For the many south Mississippians who had evacuated and those few in the area who had electricity, the site provided a valuable source of eyewitness news as Katrina drove inland west of Gulfport on Monday morning. Everywhere, staffers crossed their fingers that the arrangement with the Georgia paper would allow Tuesday’s papers to be published and to make their way south to the
Sun Herald’s battered coastal market.
In short, Monday at the Sun Herald was not a day for thinking about awards any more than it was at the Times-Picayune. Survival came first. Overcoming the many natural obstacles to getting essential information to beleaguered readers was, of necessity, secondary.
Waiting on the Levee
The Times-Picayune staffers, camped out in the newspaper’s building as dawn broke on Tuesday, August 30, had only to look on their own doorstep for proof that the observations from James O’Byrne and Doug MacCash’s bike trip were accurate. The sky was cloudless and Katrina was being downgraded again to a tropical storm. Yet water was at the third stair of the Times-Picayune entryway, rising one inch every seven minutes. Cell phone communications in the city remained out. No signs of federal assistance were evident and, as far as reporters could detect, little effort was going into public safety—barring the SWAT team dispatched to quell disturbances at the Orleans Parish Prison just across the interstate. (Guards lost track of fourteen prisoners, some of whose orange prison overalls were later found just outside the Times-Picayune building.)
It was time to evacuate. “We had planned for wind, water and an extended period without electricity,” Amoss wrote later. “But with almost an entire city going under for an indefinite period, with no civil authority functioning, with a communications blackout, with no federal presence and with no sign that order would be restored any time soon, we were facing an unprecedented challenge for an American newspaper.”
FIGURE 6.1 The Times-Picayune employees evacuate their New Orleans building in a newspaper delivery truck as water rises the morning after Hurricane Katrina hit. From left, A. J. Sisco, Kim Chatelain, editor Jim Amoss, page-one editor Terry Baquet, managing editor Dan Shea, Mark Schleifstein, and sports editor David Meeks. Source: The Times-Picayune staff photo by Kathy Anderson. Published courtesy of the Times-Picayune.
Loaded in the back of a flotilla of newspaper delivery trucks, the staff took off for higher ground, unsure exactly where the next stop would be. “We left with the queasy fear that, for the first time since the Civil War, we might not produce a newspaper for tomorrow”—even an electronic version, according to the editor. “We already knew that New Orleans had become a dangerous and difficult place to practice journalism. It would get worse.”
10 Only as the trucks rolled toward the city limits did staffers begin to see the big picture emerge. Eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded. Gradually the staff began to make the first plans for forming teams for the complex dual job ahead: covering the scene and creating and managing a remote working newsroom that could sustain a full-fledged news operation.
Veteran reporter Mark Schleifstein had continued to follow the levee systems’ weaknesses since his “Washing Away” series. (In fact, he had become not only a weather expert but something of a Cassandra, to the point of advising readers to keep an ax in their attic for emergency escape from floodwaters. For many, it would be life-saving advice.) Schleifstein recalls the tide of emotions as the staff split up during the evacuation that Tuesday. He was one of the majority of staffers choosing to relocate to a temporary newsroom to the west and inland, in the town of Houma. There the
Times-Picayune planned to publish for a time using the presses of the New York Times Company-owned
Houma Courier. Schleifstein’s family had been evacuated and his home was under twelve feet of water. He was planning to serve in that temporary newsroom, where he could do broader stories that might not need to be written from within the city limits. “More important, I know how to take dictation and I know all the editors. I was the grunt, but I was enjoying it,” he says. That is why he did not join the team of a dozen reporters, editors, and photographers who headed back south into the damaged city to set up a bureau and report from the scene. “Now,” he adds, “I wish I’d been with them.”
11The staffers who made the return trip to New Orleans ran into trouble almost immediately. Witnessing a Wal-Mart being looted on a mass scale and police officers participating in the rampage, reporters dove in until they began to feel threatened by the mob. Finally the editor in charge, David Meeks, pulled his Times-Picayune team back. The spot story describing the Wal-Mart melee—headlined “Looters Leave Nothing Behind in Storm’s Wake”—was the first of many accounts of post-storm events in areas of the city that other news media had not reached. The Times-Picayune stories, for the most part written in a makeshift news bureau at the house of one of the team members, continued to have the feel of reports from the front lines of some strange domestic battlefield.
Meanwhile the newspaper operation created to get the paper out—electronically only for that first Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—remained in exile. After Houma, it moved north along the Mississippi River to Baton Rouge, where for six weeks the staff used the facilities of Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Journalism. A fleet of thirty rental cars kept the staff mobile.
Work prepared under such conditions, both from the online and the print editions over a period of months, was compiled to become the Times-Picayune’s Public Service Pulitzer entry at the start of 2006. One story, on September 26, carried the provocative headline “Rape. Murder. Gunfights,” although the deck line suggested something entirely different. It read: “For three anguished days the world’s headlines blared that the Superdome and Convention Center had descended into anarchy. But the truth is that while conditions were squalid for the thousands stuck there, much of the violence NEVER HAPPENED.” The debunking grew from the Times-Picayune reporters’ failed efforts to confirm reports of mass criminality from the Superdome and Convention Center. Some false reports circulated widely through the Internet and ended up in many respected publications around the globe. Some aired on such popular broadcast outlets as Oprah Winfrey’s television program. (Police Chief Eddie Compass told Winfrey on September 6 that “some of the little babies [are] getting raped” in the Dome. And Mayor Ray Nagin added more horrors: “They have people standing out there … in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.” The Times-Picayune reporters, checking out every report, told a different story:
As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.
“I think 99 percent of it is bulls———,” said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. “Don’t get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn’t see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything…. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well behaved.” Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports about the Dome and Convention Center.
12
Michael Perlstein, a criminal justice beat reporter who worked on several debunking stories, recalls helping check out reports that a nine-year-old girl had been raped and had her throat slit at the Convention Center. “Once we heard that, obviously we scrambled to corroborate it,” he says. But the closer they looked, the more the stories changed: “She was thirteen; she was six; she was nine. There were more than one. There was a freezer full of bodies. That’s when we realized, we can’t go with this. It was like that grade-school game of telephone: a person who died of natural causes, and was under a blanket, then it’s that he got killed, then it’s a murder, then it gets multiplied.”
13 Amoss now writes off the worst of the crime stories as racist. “You see it again and again, even today,” he says. “The urban legends that arise often have a basis in assumptions of racial primitivism. And there are stories going around New Orleans now about all sorts of incredible anarchy and crime being committed that have some racial basis and that turn out to be totally untrue.”
14Managing editor Peter Kovacs quickly came to the conclusion that these news leads were wildly exaggerated. “Most journalists would be skeptical about these kinds of reports coming from their own hometown,” he says. “If you looked at who was in the centers, it was families with their kids; it was old people; it was people you see in New Orleans every day. If what people were saying was true, why were people staying there like sitting ducks?” The answer was that the stories were not true. The tales were largely fabricated, as the reporters found out. “It was unfair to the victims of New Orleans to suggest that people were so lawless and that the victims put up with it. It disrespected what they really did suffer,” Kovacs says, adding, “Now I understand how the Salem witch hunt happened.”
15The newspaper was drawing more than thirty million daily visits to the
www.nola.com site from around the world, but the printed
Times-Picayune made a special impression when it began reappearing in free deliveries to homeless shelters and areas of the city where people congregated. It proved the city was alive, its life’s blood—its news—still circulating. The
Times-Picayune’s 2006 public service entry blended print- and online-published material as the Pulitzer rules allowed. It contained breaking news revelations and analytical pieces, including several intensive looks at why the levees built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed. (One headline, “Soft Soils Under Levee Sank City,” ran on October 15. Another, “Corps Never Pursued Design Doubts,” ran on December 30.) Some analysis had a global slant: a November 13 article titled “Beating Back the Sea” examined the steps taken in the Netherlands to manage a similar flooding threat in the European country’s below-sea-level lands.
A Pulitzer Surprise
In addition to the storm’s human toll, the price tag for the damage was soaring—and would eventually exceed $80 billion nationally, making it the costliest U.S. storm ever. More than eighteen hundred people would die Katrina-related deaths.
16 And with the hurricane ranking as among the top American stories of the year, Jim Amoss and the
Times-Picayune’s coverage quickly became the talk of journalists around the country. Beyond those thirty million website hits, dozens of articles focused on the excellence of the paper’s coverage.
Not that the paper was cocky—far from it. The staff knew well that the paper faced enormous business challenges as 2006 began, with advertising and circulation both a shadow of their former levels. As a business, it had lost much of its market to the storm—readers and advertisers—without any idea when they might return.
Amoss himself is a low-key native New Orleanian who spreads credit around freely and does not much like to brag. “Any good newspaper has to have a staff that can spring into action as a team, and be deployed in a coordinated way and have a maestro, or several levels of maestros, directing it,” he says. “But it would be disingenuous to suggest that I imagined this in some fashion. It is so unimaginable what happened to this community and what happened to this newspaper that it really couldn’t have been planned for.”
17 Still, when his staff’s accomplishments were celebrated in the
Columbia Journalism Review or in the article Amoss wrote for
Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists, other newspaper editors took note. And in February,
Editor and Publisher named him editor of the year.
Thus, many journalists were shocked when premature word began to spread on March 8, the day the Pulitzer jurors ended their deliberations, that the
Times-Picayune was not among the three finalists in public service. Instead, Mississippi’s
Sun Herald was on the list for its Katrina coverage, along with the
Washington Post and the Toledo
Blade. The second two choices had been expected. The
Post had examined the split between national security and individual liberties during the nation’s war on terrorism while the
Blade had exposed illegal activity—involving Ohio’s governor and others—in connection with a state investment fund in rare coins. With the New Orleans paper in the running, the
Sun Herald had been considered a definite dark horse, if it was mentioned at all.
How the Times-Picayune failed to make the jury’s cut yet nonetheless ended up with a gold medal is a classic study in the circuitous process by which winners are sometimes chosen. The board may start with the nominations presented to it by jurors, but it has full discretion to add, subtract, or draw from other categories for its final award determinations.
When the jurors congregated on Monday at Columbia, the seven members assigned to public service were led by the Tampa Tribune executive editor Janet Coates. Having worked just southeast along the Gulf Coast from where the storm hit the hardest, she was quite familiar with the work of the Tribune’s neighbor papers. She had also been a junior-level editor on the Knight Ridder Miami Herald during its Hurricane Andrew coverage fourteen years earlier.
While there were seventy-eight entries, the number was actually about 15 percent lower than in recent years. Coates believed the decrease reflected other papers withholding submissions in the category because the Times-Picayune seemed a shoo-in. But the jurors were committed to starting from scratch and not letting prejudgments affect their review.
Also on Coates’s jury were journalists from Akron, Baltimore, Indianapolis, and Seattle, along with an
International Herald Tribune editor and one journalism legend: the University of Maryland journalism professor Gene Roberts. As an editor, Roberts had turned the
Philadelphia Inquirer into a virtual Pulitzer-winning machine in the 1970s. Before that he had been a
New York Times reporter and had led its civil rights coverage in the 1960s. (Roberts, a former Pulitzer board member, was in the process of co-authoring a book that would win the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History:
The Race Beat: The Press,
the Civil Rights Struggle,
and the Awakening of a Nation.)
18On the first day of jury deliberations, individual jurors started reading copies of the submitted entries. (Submission of electronic files was still several years away.) Rejects were taken off the table, literally, and piled onto the floor. By the end of the first day, half the public service submissions remained in contention. The second day the jury cut the candidates down to twenty and then winnowed them down to about twelve.
At that point, the job got much tougher, Roberts remembers. “I thought as many as eight or ten of the entries in Public Service were extraordinary,” he says. Indeed, in his mind there were five or six that legitimately could have earned the Public Service Pulitzer in another year. But in 2006, the public service panel was riveted by the storm and the two papers that had covered it so well. When only six entries remained on the table, they included the Times-Picayune and the Sun Herald. The jury was reluctant to give over two of its three finalist selections to coverage of one event, even an event like America’s worst hurricane ever. The board members decided to nominate the Post and the Blade for certain. But for their third choice, they split between the Times-Picayune and the Sun Herald. So a query was sent to Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler. Could the jury simply make a joint entry—nominating both Gulf Coast papers, along with the Toledo and Washington nominations?
“Basically, he said no, it wasn’t possible,” according to Roberts. “We should come up with a total of three, and if the board wanted to award two Gold Medals, then that was its prerogative but not ours.”
19 A vote was taken, and the third pick became the paper whose hurricane coverage was a slight favorite: the
Sun Herald. Jurors then prepared a note to the board elaborating on their thinking and listing the
Times-Picayune among its three “alternates” for the Public Service Prize. “We knew there was going to be a buzz about our finalists,” recalls Coates. But by including the New Orleans paper among the alternates she believes the jury sent a signal that both Gulf Coast papers were worthy.
20The buzz started early, thanks to the rumor mill that routinely spread advance word about the finalist selections in those days. (In recent years Pulitzer secrecy has prevailed.) Within weeks, the New York Times, having heard that the Times-Picayune was not a jury selection, published a comparison of the Sun Herald’s and the Times-Picayune’s hurricane coverage. The Times wrote, “The Sun Herald likes to emphasize that it did not miss a day of print publication, while the Times-Picayune points to the scope of the disaster in New Orleans and its near-impossible reporting conditions.”
Overshadowed in Mississippi
Why had the public service jurors favored the Sun Herald? Most of those who died storm-related deaths had been southern Louisianans, and much of the damage had been in that state’s Delta region. But Katrina killed more than 200 and displaced hundreds of thousands along the Mississippi coast as well, flattening whole communities that had been the Gulfport paper’s market. And while the Times-Picayune had clearly distinguished itself, few denied that the Mississippi news organization had pulled off a near miracle of publishing.
“This was a smaller paper, with a newsroom that was a victim of the disaster as much as its community had been, and you saw the completeness of their voice,” says Coates. “Its editorial message got stronger and stronger and stronger.” The message? “We are a community and we are being forgotten here, and we need help in the face of disaster and the ineptitude of the relief effort. What we saw in the entry was a paper picking up everything it has and throwing it—and not in a helter-skelter way. It was trying to make order out of chaos.”
Roberts, who was as high as any juror on the work of the Times-Picayune, notes the continuity with which the Sun Herald seemed to explore the story in every aspect of the storm with its spot-news, feature, and editorial writing. “It seemed to me that they must have had even the janitors writing,” he says, “because they were everywhere for a staff that size.” The website’s public service “was just mind-boggling,” adds Roberts. “They were responding to individual requests, putting out constant notice of where people could get relief. If you had been a victim of the storm it would have given you up-to-the-minute ideas about what to do.”
And then there was the underdog factor. It was something that Stan Tiner alluded to in his Pulitzer nomination letter: “Much of the country was focused on New Orleans … meanwhile South Mississippi was struggling to survive, having taken the full force of Katrina’s killer winds and deadly storm surge head-on,” he wrote. “The
Sun Herald provided hope to its community, giving authentic voice to their struggle, their anger and triumph.” He recalled that on Monday, August 29, “thousands of South Mississippians, dazed and disoriented, living in improvised shelters or in the shells of their own homes were handed an eight-page
Sun Herald detailing the full scope of the disaster and timely information on where to turn for help. Many actually cried in disbelief.” One woman asked, looking through the pages from amid the rubble of East Biloxi’s Main Street: “A paper? How did you do this?”
FIGURE 6.2 The Sun Herald front page two days after Hurricane Katrina hit. Source: Used by permission of the Sun Herald, South Mississippi News Leader.
If the jurors did factor in the Sun Herald’s ability to put out a print edition without missing a day—thanks to its effective prearrangement with its Georgia sister paper—they were also awed by the journalism being produced. It was both artful and helpful, filled with hard news and sympathetic editorials geared to its stricken readership. And it contained some of the most remarkable color photography ever taken in a disaster. Stunning shots appeared each day during the storm, sometimes presented sideways on a full page to help capture the scope of the horror and the pathos.
Executive editor Tiner had dispatched a team of five copy editors and designers to Columbus—nearly 10 percent of his staff—and a Monday paper was distributed free at shelters where survivors were congregated. On Tuesday the page-one banner, “Our Tsunami: At Least 50 Die in a Storm as Fearsome as Camille,” echoed remarks by Biloxi’s mayor. Inside the eight-page paper, headlines included “How It Felt” and “After Landfall: What Mississippi—and the Nation—Can Expect as Katrina Moves North.”
With two-thirds of the reporters still not heard from on Tuesday, the Wednesday paper was largely written by a handful of staffers in the
Sun Herald building using the intermittent power from a generator and pulling together what technology they could to send their material to Columbus for publication. On Monday night, out-of-town reinforcements arrived, causing quite a stir. Working with Knight Ridder’s vice president for news in San José, California, Bryan Monroe, Tiner had arranged for a team of journalists from the
Miami Herald, the
Charlotte Observer, and elsewhere to fly into Atlanta the day before the storm. The team had driven down through Montgomery, Alabama, finding ways to circumvent downed bridges and other obstacles and arriving late on Monday evening. There Tiner had been in the newsroom when hulking shadows began to move in the emergency lighting near the entry from the hall. “Bryan’s a large guy, and with the lights so low there was an eerie feel to it when they showed up. We hugged in the hallway, and I said, ‘The Marines are here,’” recalls Tiner, himself an ex-Marine. Along with them, Monroe’s team members brought gasoline, water, chain saws—and at least $12,000 in cash. “There wasn’t anything to buy,” Tiner notes, “but it was a good feeling knowing you had some money, anyway.”
21The banner on Wednesday encapsulated the message that Tiner saw developing from the disaster: “Hope Amid Ruin: Hundreds Now Feared Dead, but Survivors Emerge.” It ran above a large photo of a mother and son reunited and embracing amid the destruction of their neighborhood and a smaller photo of three firemen removing a body from similar surroundings.
22 Both in print and online, the suffering readers saw their plight personalized and understood. Beyond a daily chart headlined “What You Need to Know,” the paper ran a bulletin board of messages from family members and others seeking lost loved ones and trying to match needs with services being offered. The precedent for these two approaches, in fact, had been set at two other Knight Ridder papers that had won Public Service Prizes for their disaster coverage in the recent past. In covering Hurricane Andrew thirteen years earlier, the
Miami Herald had pioneered the bulletin board approach. The
Grand Forks Herald, winner in 1998, came up with the directory of services when the North Dakota paper covered a plague of flooding disasters. It had served readers with a bulletin board too.
The Mississippi paper added many touches of its own, launching the “I’m OK” phone line, for example. The 800 number and e-mail discussion board for readers was part of its extensive Web-based service. The paper registered 1.6 million “page views” online on its peak day Wednesday, compared with an average of about ninety thousand before the storm.
While his staff nearly doubled to around ninety eventually thanks to the temporary out-of-state Knight Ridder influx, the
Sun Herald bylines were still prominent. Their editor’s input was vital, staffers say. Tiner referred to his coverage strategy as “journalistic triage.” The paper couldn’t tell all the stories that were flowing in, so it took what editors considered the most important, emphasizing where possible that growing theme of hope. “We could have written stories for five years about how many people died and how the government screwed it up,” he says. “But part of the plan was to try to organize the storytelling in a way that did not cause our people despair.” Adds Tiner, “The moment a big story like this comes, you can’t tell people what they’ve got to do. Their instincts as reporters and editors and photographers are to go where the information is and get it back to this nerve center. I learned during all this how good my staff was.”
Tiner knew that small papers had a chance at the big prize. He was friends with Texas editor Joe Murray, whose
Lufkin News had won the 1977 gold medal for exposing deceit in the Marine Corps’s coverage of a local trainee’s death. “I’ve thought for a long time that the prize has value for little guys like us, whether we ever win it or not,” says Tiner. “It’s probably not going to happen,” with the
New York Times,
Washington Post, and other powerhouses on the job. “But if I work hard and do the best journalism that I and my little staff are capable of doing, the gods of journalism just might smile on us.”
23If the gods didn’t smile on the
Sun Herald, the Pulitzer board certainly did. At the April meeting, it voted the
Sun Herald a 2006 gold medal, with the
Washington Post and the Toledo
Blade as finalists. That move, of course, validated the jury’s choices. Then, however, the board elected to give a second medal to the
Times-Picayune—the first time since 1990 that two public service winners were named in a single year. It was only the seventh time in Pulitzer history and set the stage for the decision eight years later, when both the
Washington Post and the
Guardian-U.S. website were honored.
24
2006—The Sun Herald, Biloxi-Gulfport, Miss., for its valorous and comprehensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, providing a lifeline for devastated readers, in print and online, during their time of greatest need.
and
2006—The
Times-Picayune, New Orleans, for its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper’s resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant. (Selected by the board from the Public Service category, where it was entered.)
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