Although they aren't hugged on the streets anymore, journalists covering, and living with, the aftermath of Katrina find they have forged a strong bond with readers, who are not quick to forget what they've been through together

Will Doolittle is a projects editor at The Post-Star in Glens Falls, N.Y. He can be reached at will@poststar.com.

EARLY ON, AFTER THE STORM, people burst into tears when their papers were delivered.

Reporters got hugged on the street.

That doesn't happen any more. But, more than two years after Hurricane Katrina, journalists at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss., still talk about the powerful connection with readers forged in the chaos of the storm and its aftermath.

Readers let them know that the stories they were writing were critical to the readers' efforts to rebuild their lives. And reporters and editors felt a responsibility not only to tell the stories of individuals but to act as an advocate for communities struggling to survive.

Covering Katrina, the journalists said, has refreshed their sense of purpose and changed their approach to their jobs. Their personal experience with the storm - many journalists covering the story were, at the same time, struggling to cope with their own losses - has informed their reporting, they said, increasing their empathy with survivors and their understanding of issues facing them.

"The usual distance between observer and observed has shrunk or is nonexistent," said Jim Amoss, editor at The Times-Picayune. "We've experienced what readers are, what people we're writing about are experiencing."

Readers, he said, have appreciated the paper's engagement.

"As soon as they know who you are, they'll talk about what the newspaper is doing for them, both for their spiritual well-being and the practicalities of life. That's energizing."

Amoss has worked in New Orleans journalism for 34 years, first at the afternoon paper, The States-Item, which merged with The Times-Picayune in 1980. The hurricane, he said, blew boredom out of the building.

He's lived through periods, Amoss said, where the question, "What content are we going to drum up this week?" has hung over the newsroom.

But — "That's not a question I've asked myself in a long time," he said.

Reporters and editors in communities hit by Katrina could not maintain a detachment from the story, when their own homes were destroyed, their own families displaced. The traditional notion of assigning to the story neutral reporters with judgments unaffected by personal experience was not going to work, said Stan Tiner, executive editor of The Sun Herald.

If the rule, he said, is "You can't report on anything you've been involved in," then "I don't know how we would put a newspaper out."

"But it's not like we say, once we crossed that Rubicon, it's a whole new world. We continue to apply all the tested and tried values of journalism. It really is an enriched form of journalism. ... We don't suspend good journalism to do this other thing. It is a passion and a dedication and a desire to get it right."

Jarvis DeBerry, a three-times-a-week editorial columnist for The Times-Picayune, has played off the notion of his own "journalistic objectivity" in some of his columns about Louisiana's Road Home program, which was set up to provide housing grants to people, like himself, whose homes were damaged or destroyed by the storm.

"If I wrote a report about the Road Home," he said in one column, "believe you me, objectivity would not be your lasting impression of it."

In another column, he promised to limit his criticisms of the program: "Theoretically, I will be receiving a Road Home grant in 2008. ... And when I do get that money, I promise to maintain the same level of restraint: no more than three critical columns a week."

Having a personal stake in the story has been good for their work, several Katrina reporters and editors said, and good for their papers.

"I think we would be lying and we would be fooling ourselves if we tried to give the pretext that we didn't care about the outcome," DeBerry said. "We care about New Orleans."

James O'Byrne, features editor at The Times-Picayune, said the storm exposed the gap between being fair and balanced and telling what he called a real truth.

"Some questions don't have two equal sides," he said. " 'Should the levee have fallen down?' doesn't have two sides. What's the OK side of the levee falling down because it was deficient?"

"We kind of forget how bad it was, how incompetent the response was," O'Byrne said. "What's the other hand of leaving people on the street without food and water for five days? At some point, you just get pissed off."

Personal expertise

Immersion in the storm story — the word Katrina is never not in their papers, said reporters in both places — has given them what Don Hammack, Biloxi's online editor, called "weird levels of expertise."

Emblematic of that expertise, he said, is the work of Anita Lee, a Sun-Herald reporter since 1987 who had been covering politics and government before the storm but has specialized since then in the intricacies of insurance.

The work by Lee and Rebecca Mowbray at The Times-Picayune has been cited for its excellence by Dean Starkman, who writes a business column, The Audit, for Columbia Journalism Review, has covered the Katrina insurance story for The Washington Post and has criticized national coverage of the issue.

"It's really not a question of anybody being smarter than anybody else, or people being in the industry's pocket or anything like that," Starkman said. "They just haven't spent enough time down there."

What he has done, Starkman said, and what Lee and Mowbray do "all the time," is "talk to a critical mass of policyholders."

Insurance is one of the most important stories at this stage of the recovery from Katrina, because collecting on claims is critical to rebuilding.

"The national media totally misunderstood the debate here," Lee said. "The Wall Street Journal has continued to maintain Mississippians were looking for coverage they didn't have. That is not the case. ... They still try to claim we don't understand our policies. We really aren't as dumb as people think."

Many people, Lee said, had coverage for wind damage but lacked flood insurance. Claimants have sought payouts for wind damage caused before the invasion of water, she said, but some stories in the national press have mischaracterized that as an attempt to be paid for damage that wasn't covered.

She herself had wind but not water coverage, Lee said, and filed a claim for extensive damage to her house. But she didn't press hard for the claim after starting work on the insurance story.

"Once I got into that, I backed off dealing with my own claim. ... I just talked to the adjuster now and then."

She did, finally, get her final check from the insurance company last June, Lee said.

"I approached insurance from the start as if I was giving residents vital information that they needed," she said. "And I knew what I needed to know about filing a claim and what your options are. And I find a lot of business reporting is done from an industry perspective. I approached it more from a consumer perspective."

Lee thinks the problems claimants have had with collecting on their coverage and the huge increase in rates after Katrina are big reasons why the southern Gulf Coast still looks a disaster zone.

"I take the beach highway to work every day," she said, "and every day I see empty vacant lots and concrete slabs.

"There is not a gas station on the beach in Biloxi. There used to be 15."

Voice of the people

Dealing with the destruction and displacement caused by the storm was as difficult for local reporters and editors as it was for everyone else.

Jean Prescott, longtime reporter for The Sun Herald who writes on food, faith and values, lost her older sister and her sister's husband in the storm. And the storm destroyed her apartment in Bay St. Louis, the community that has nurtured five generations of her family. She found another place a week later but, two and a half years after the storm, she said, she is still "living in the same crappy apartment."

In the days after Katrina, a handful of Sun-Herald reporters, including Anita Lee, stayed in the newsroom, sleeping on the floor at night, heading out into the wreckage of their city during the day to gather stories.

Prescott slept on a friend's living room floor and showed up with the others at 7 a.m. at the newspaper building to get her assignments. The experience made her appreciate her own resilience, she said.

"I think, people who didn't experience it," Prescott said, "would think they'd have died, but they wouldn't."

"I'm a whole lot less attached to stuff now," she said. "I don't save crap like I used to. It changes your perspective about that and a lot of things."

Few journalists suffered losses like Prescott's. But many suffered severe financial setbacks. If your house was destroyed, The Times-Picayune's O'Byrne pointed out, you had to keep paying your mortgage, and your homeowner's insurance, until you sold the house. At the same time, you had to pay rent on wherever you had found to live.

"What Katrina did in the best of circumstances," he said, "was it destroyed assets. It was so expensive to live through it."

But living through the destruction gave reporters authority when they wrote about it.

"We have instantaneous rapport with our sources," O'Byrne said. "We really don't have much of a learning curve. We don't have to ask anyone what it's like to deal with FEMA."

And going through the ordeal themselves has meant the Katrina journalists know exactly what information their readers need.

Lynette Johnson, The Times-Picayune's graphics editor, moved back to New Orleans, where much of her family lived, after the storm. Katrina had destroyed her mother's house, her brother's house and her sister's house.

"Everything we worked on meant something to my family and to everyone in the community," she said. "You have a really good understanding of what people need to know, because you need to know yourself."

And when the Katrina journalists have written about their own struggles, they've done it knowing they speak for many in their communities who have no public voice.

Kat Bergeron, who writes feature stories and local history pieces for The Sun Herald, said writing about her own losses has been cathartic for her and her readers.

"It's not just your personal loss," she said. "It's your loss of community, your sense of place."

Bergeron's house, near the beach, was swept off its foundation and into a neighbor's yard by the storm surge. But she returned to her property often to tend to the five live oaks on her land, which have survived.

And The Sun Herald itself is helping to lead a project called Replant South Mississippi, which has a goal of replanting 300,000 trees in five years to replace those lost to the storm.

"The tree is quite a metaphor for southern Mississippi," Tiner said. "It's one of the few places in the world where big live oaks exist on the shore. ... and the people keep coming back like the oaks."

Writing about herself has been a way to write about the challenges many of her readers are facing, Bergeron said.

"I had to battle with myself - how much do you own up to what you're going through and what you're feeling?" she said. "I can be a voice for victims. I couldn't really help anybody, certainly not financially. But I could do this. That's what kept me going."

More on the storm

Even though they've been writing about what the hurricane wrought every week for more than 28 months, journalists in Biloxi and New Orleans said the magnitude of the story justifies the coverage it has received, and more.

Editors and reporters said they'd like national media to cover the ongoing story of the Katrina recovery effort, although seeking that attention can require a delicate dance between positive and negative.

Especially in New Orleans, journalists expressed a wariness of reinforcing the stereotype of their city as a lawless wasteland.

"I think the national coverage tends to take the easy way out," said The Times-Picayune's Johnson. "I think the recent coverage has tended to take the most sensational bits of what is happening here and throw that up and not explain anything."

New Orleans is far from whole, DeBerry said, but some parts of it, such as the tourism areas, are fully functioning. Conveying both those truths, he said, is critical to the city's recovery.

"There's no reason you can't come to New Orleans and have a wonderful visit," he said, "which is not to suggest that the average homeowner in New Orleans is back in his house or has his life back together again."

Wiping away much of the local architectural history, Katrina left the communities it struck with difficult choices. And the rebuilding effort has given local journalists, flush with goodwill from their work after the storm, an opportunity to get readers mad at them again.

DeBerry, for example, has questioned claims of a "right to return" that assert an absolute right for the restoration of all pre-Katrina neighborhoods.

"I've always thought government should promote resettlement of the higher, dryer areas," he said. "And I've challenged the idea that making the city's footprint smaller will automatically mean excluding some people."

Biloxi's Bergeron has challenged readers to rebuild stronger, smarter and greener. She's an advocate for "smart code" planning, which involves building back the community in a more walkable, "livable" fashion.

"We don't need urban sprawl," she said. "We don't need high rises on the beach."

A newspaper's connection to its community is a "visceral thing," said Editor Amoss, and, in The Times-Picayune's case, that connection has been changed for the long term by the exigencies of the storm.

"We no longer have the kind of emotional outpourings that were commonplace at first," he said. "We've gone back to occasionally ticking people off. But, despite those inevitable episodes of being mad at us, there is an abiding affection, which is quite unusual."