After the Storm

In 2005, New Orleans was underwater, flooded by the raging waters of Hurricane Katrina. A decade later, a newfound optimism and pride in the city’s recovery has risen.

With the 10 year anniversary of the hurricane last month (Aug. 29) and the city’s Tricentennial approaching in 2018, NOLA.com and the Times-Picayune have created a new project called the Future of New Orleans (nola.com/futureofneworleans). The effort will focus on the kind of city New Orleans will become as it confronts the challenges and obstacles that might keep it from achieving that vision, explained James O’Byrne, vice president of innovation at NOLA.com.

“As the largest news organization in Louisiana, we can bring to bear on any topic a great deal of talented journalism,” said O’Byrne. “So we think we are in a really good position to facilitate and moderate a conversation about the future of our city and our region.”

O’Byrne described the coverage of the Future of New Orleans as a higher-level, 30,000-foot examination of problems and pressing issues and opportunities long term to promote conversation and change in the community.

In addition to the focused coverage, the Future of New Orleans will have community leaders, local authors, business owners and other voices from religious, political and cultural avenues describing their vision of the region’s future.

“What I think is valuable about a project like this is that it plays to our continued strengths as communicators and distinguishes our brand from the commodity journalism that is being generated in a lot of places by a lot of different narrowly focused vertical start-ups,” O’Byrne said. “(That ability) to really tell people what these individual events add up to in the aggregate, to identify movements and trend lines that really help readers understand their world in a fuller and more integrated way—I think those skills are uniquely the strength of those newsrooms whose roots are in the legacy newspaper world.”

O’Byrne said challenges include narrowing down the list of the most critical issues and topics to focus on, but the project will utilize the entire newsroom staff, including sales and marketing.

The Future of New Orleans will run through the city’s Tricentennial anniversary. However, the conversation about New Orleans’ future is one O’Byrne said will continue on even after the project is over.

“I think it’s reasonable to predict that there are aspects of what we do in the next three years that will continue indefinitely,” he said.