Gulf Coast Papers Plan Katrina Anniversary Coverage

By: Joe Strupp As the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina looms just a week away, newspapers in the still-recovering Gulf Coast region are walking a careful tightrope between not hitting readers too hard with stark reminders of the most devastating natural disaster in U.S. history, and giving it deserved recognition.

Noting that coverage of the hurricane aftermath and clean-up has never really stopped since the Aug, 29, 2005 disaster, editors told E&P that marking the one-year date is part daily story, part special approach.

"Every day is Katrina day," said Stan Tiner, editor of the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., which shared a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage with the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. "This thing is so fluid, it has always been necessary to keep up with it."

Times-Picayune managing editor Peter Kovacs agreed. "Evidence of what happened here is still around here, people's memories are still pretty recent and raw," he said. "There are neighborhoods that don't look any different now than they did when they drained the water out of the city."

Still, those papers, and The Advocate in Baton Rouge, are marking the one-year occasion with different approaches, most of which focus on the future and the planned recover and improvements. The Sun Herald appears to be the most ambitious, with a five-day series of special sections, ranging from 24 pages to 40 pages, that will begin this Friday and run through next Tuesday, the anniversary date.

"It is a massive undertaking," Tiner said. He added that the first section will look back at the first 48 hours during and after the hurricane, with the following four sections focused on the current situation, the future, volunteers, and survivors' stories, "We will also be covering all of the [one-year anniversary] events that will be going on," he said.

In addition, the Sun Herald, which drew national attention during the past year for running at least a dozen Page One editorials about the post-hurricane situation, plans to run a hurricane-related editorial daily during the series, although not on the front page. "We have come to realize the power of the local editorial page," Tiner said. "It puts the stamp on the local community."

Prior to the five-part series, the Sun Herald will publish a three-day Q&A with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, beginning Wednesday, Aug. 23, as well as a special investigative report related to Katrina on Thursday, Aug. 24. "It is our hardest piece of news that comes out of our reporting on this series," Tiner said, declining to offer more specifics. "That is all I want to say about it."

At the Times-Picayune, which won two Pulitzers for its Katrina reporting, editors already started the one-year later push with the publication of a book on the disaster, titled "Katrina: The Ruin and Recovery of New Orleans." The 192-page book includes photos and stories from the past year, said Kovacs. He added that the paper plans to run at least eight or nine days of Katrina anniversary stories beginning this weekend, Saturday or Sunday, but no special sections. He said some 20 writers are working on the related stories.

"Stories on different days have different aspects," he said. "It is mostly focused on how the city is doing now. It will be a couple of pages a day at least, maybe two or four stories a day. Our goal is to spread the stories out a little bit and let people digest them a little at a time."

The Times-Picayune also has been soliciting personal stories from readers, which will be published as boxes throughout the multi-day series, as well as online. "We have had a lot of luck in the past year with readers submitting to us," Kovacs explained. "We tried to get readers to continue to tell their stories."

Kovacs said that the news stories will focus on issues ranging from flood control standards to different aspects of rebuilding. "We are trying to say what is the temperature of rebuilding in different areas of the city," he said, noting that there is caution about overwhelming readers, but stressing that "people want to know it. I think they want something from the newspaper about this."

In Baton Rouge, Executive Editor Linda Lightfoot of The Advocate, which housed many Times-Picayune staffers following the devastation, also is drawing stories from readers. "We are finding people who were featured in photographs we took and seeing how they have faired," she said. "We have already found some, they will be mainly profiles."

Lightfoot said a three-day series of stories is planned beginning Sunday Aug. 27. "We have had so much coverage for the past year, I'm not sure people are not getting hurricaned out," Lightfoot said. "We have given it a lot of attention. You have to do something different that is looking forward."

Kovacs said the hurricane, in many ways, affected New Orleans more than Sept. 11 affected New York City. Although the death toll in New York was much greater on that date, which will see its fifth anniversary in a few weeks, the devastation to New York as a region was not as severe.

"It's as if every borough of New York but Queens was uninhabitable," Kovacs said about New Orleans today when asked about the neighboring anniversaries. "It is possible to live a life in New York unreminded of Sept. 11. It is not possible to live a life in New Orleans unreminded of Aug. 29."