When disaster hits, newspapers deliver

Newspapers have lots of issues to work out as we seek the right niche products, delivery channels and business models for our future in a fragmented marketplace. But don't try telling the people of New Orleans or the Mississippi Gulf Coast that any blogger or aggregator can mean as much to a community as a newspaper.

Jim Amoss, editor of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, and Stan Tiner, editor of the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., told their colleagues at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention that they found out after Hurricane Katrina how much a good newspaper means to its community.

"There really is an insatiable hunger on the part of our readers for the news," Amoss said.

Tiner said even though readers and carriers scattered when their communities were wiped out, Knight-Ridder printed 80,000 copies of the Sun Herald for free distribution at displacement centers along the Gulf Coast. With power out along the coast, people had no other source of news - TV, radio or Internet.

People snapped up the print edition when they could get their hands on it. People who had fled to other states read the online edition, sometimes using them to confirm the safety and whereabouts of friends and family. "Those real basic human pieces of information - they were everything," Tiner said.

The Sun Herald's circulation has bounced back to within 4 percent of its pre-Katrina level. Though some subscribers have not returned, non-subscribers have realized the importance of their newspaper. "You'd be surprised how many papers you can sell when you give them away," Tiner said. "They call us and say, 'You've got to deliver to my FEMA trailer.'"

Tiner and Amoss were honored Friday with the ASNE Leadership Award. Last week, their papers shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

With false reports and unconfirmed rumors flying onto television without confirmation, local newspapers with reporters scattered through the disaster zone and with an understanding of the community became the place readers could turn to for credible information.

Amoss's family had fled to a motel in Tyler, Texas. They felt relief at the television report that New Orleans had "dodged a bullet." Then they read the truth of the unfolding catastrophe on nola.com, the Times-Picayune online edition.

Later the Times-Picayune debunked widely reported bogus claims from officials, such as the tales of rape in the Superdome and bodies stacked in the convention center.

"It reaffirmed what newspapers are all about," Amoss said.

Both editors attributed their honors to staffs that responded spectacularly to the biggest story of their lives.

Before Katrina, Amoss said, Christopher Rose was a gossip columnist, reporting such things as Britney Spears sightings at Emeril Lagasse's restaurant. In Katrina's wake, he grew "into the voice of New Orleans," telling disaster tales "both anguished and full of humor," Amoss said. After his columns were published in book form, book-signing parties at New Orleans bookstores drew "lines of Times-Picayune readers stretching around the block."

Tiner also praised the help from Knight-Ridder, the Sun Herald's vanishing corporate parent. He remembered the "wonderful feeling that help has arrived," when a group of Knight-Ridder colleagues arrived with help as varied as counseling, ice and spam.

Though no one can fully anticipate a disaster the scope of Katrina, Tiner said his paper and his community were served well by disaster planning, which had been updated in the wake of the 2004 hurricanes that devastated papers in Florida.

Both papers excelled not only by rising to the challenge but by practicing good journalism in the quiet days and years before Katrina hit. "The same rules that applied on August 28 applied on August 29," Tiner said. "You will own the story if you practice good journalism the way you knew it the day before the disaster."