Katrina's Lesson for the Press
CJR Daily:
One of Katrina's lessons for the press, perhaps, is how such crises offer newspapers a chance to recapture the position of civic leadership that they once enjoyed. The Sun Herald spearheaded and served as a forum for the recovery effort. It managed to print a paper every day during the disaster, keeping intact the legacy of 121 years of uninterrupted daily reporting. During the height of the crisis, the Sun Herald distributed the paper for free. Without going into much detail, Tiner explained that the paper's staff raised about $325,000 among themselves, which was matched by Knight Ridder (the paper's owner at the time), enabling it to distribute approximately 80,000 free papers a day for six weeks.
Many Sun Herald reporters stayed behind when the storm was at its worst, reporting on the paper's blog in real-time. To Tiner, real-time blogging was one of the paper's greatest achievements. While the national media were preoccupied with the devastation in New Orleans, the Sun Herald blog enabled people across the country to grasp the true scope of the disaster.
