'Times-Picayune' to Launch Own Version of 'Portraits of Grief'

By: E&P Staff Taking a cue from The New York Times' award-winning ?Portraits of Grief? following the 9/11 terrorist attacs, the Times-Picayune of New Orleans will be running its own ongoing series of profiles of local victims of Hurricane Katrina, likely starting Sunday. It will continue for several weeks or months.

The death toll is now approaching 1000, but only 32 of the dead in Louisiana have been officially identified and their names released by a morgue. The Times-Picayune series will also include victims along the Gulf Coast as well as lives lost in Hurricane Rita.

One severe problem editors and reporters face: Unlike the New York situation after 9/11, it will be difficult to locate family and friends of the victims, because they are widely scattered.

Editor Jim Amoss said the motivation for the series is that a figure like 1000 deaths can become ?a numbing statistic,? and the paper wants to ?constantly remind people, remind readers of the culture and the lives behind the statistic.?

In an interview with Brooke Gladstone of National Public
Radio's program ?On the Media,? Amoss explained, ?One of the problems that we're running into is how to categorize people. Our first line of inquiry is going to be to find obvious victims of the storm--people, for example, who drowned. But what do you do with people who died in subsequent days or weeks?

"For example, this week a famous chef from New Orleans, Austin Leslie, died of a heart attack. And I think there are probably some fairly good reasons to believe that he would not have died had it not been for the storm and the grief that followed the storm. So that's one of our challenges, how to deal with these kinds of cases.?

Amoss acknowledged that working on these profiles will be wrenching for the staff (as it was at the Times), especially on top of what they have been through since late August. ?I think this is one of the most painful tasks that any reporter can undertake, but I think also at the same time it has a cathartic effect to be doing something that people will be so grateful to have,? he said.

The paper is still operating out of Baton Rouge, before a return to New Orleans in less than two weeks