March, 2009

Steve tweeted me about how I must have some great scenery on my running routes. Just that morning, I had streetcars, universities, St. Charles mansions and a girl doing the walk of shame in an XL t-shirt and men’s flip flops.

Yesterday I ran past more mansions and heard the rattle of streetcars. I also raced a barge on the Mississippi (I won) and cruised by the giraffes at the Audubon Zoo, which are visible on the backside of the zoo.

Giraffes!

For the next few weeks, my morning jogs will be the only time I’m guaranteed to spend outside. For those following: I’m up to 4.5 miles, which is the longest distance I’ve run in my entire life. I don’t love running and I can’t do it inside. The last time I ran that far was when I was on the crew team and 4.5 miles of hills was preferable to 75 minutes on the rowing machine.

Will I keep jogging after the 10K on April 11? I don’t know. I probably will here. There’s never a shortage of things to see.

[yes, that is a $1.25 Keystone Light tallboy special on the sign]

My cousin Camille turned 21 on Thursday, so her older sister and I decided to visit her in Thibodaux where she goes to school. A friend of hers drove us to the bars, about a mile from campus. He parked along the bayou, toward the end of the downtown area. His girlfriend complained about the walk, but us out of town folk were surprised when “the walk” turned out to be four blocks, just about how many bars there are in Thibodaux. After the first bar was pretty empty, we made our own party at another. The locals and college kids poured in and I swear everyone smoked an entire pack of cigarettes while they enjoyed their drinks. The crow was a mix. We heard everything from Garth Brooks to Soulja Boy on the jukebox. Our songs never played.

On Friday I drove along the bayou to Houma, passing refineries, mobile homes and trucks selling strawberries by the side of the road. I had lunch with two reporters from the paper there. Lots of fun stories to tell, such as the time a naked man jumped on top of a cop car windshield. Or the guy who posted a sign asking a reward for the crackhead who stole his generator. Or the fisherman who’s been catching alligator gar, popping the big ones on the head with a hammer before pulling them into the boat. Only an hour outside of New Orleans, the climate and the culture change so much.

They said they experienced their own mini-Katrina, camped out in the newsroom during Gustav. During the storm, Houma was a tiny blip on the cable news radar as one of the hardest hit cities. Beyond that, there wasn’t much coverage. If I had more time, I would revisit it, expand some of the themes I’ve found. As it is, I’m worried about having time for what I need to do.

I have interviewed 10 journalists at the paper: editors, front-line reporters, reporters who joined staff post-Katrina. Each interview lasted an average of one hour and 15 minutes, time that flew by too quickly. These people tell stories for a living. Telling their own stories is something they rarely have an opportunity to do. Each has a different story to tell, but each story contains common threads.

They not only answered my questions but also gave fantastic insight to what it means to report in a place like New Orleans when newspaper journalism is threatened. Although some acknowledged the sliding state of the industry, their passion for what they do strengthened my own optimistic view that journalism will be around for a while.

I could have listened to and talked with them all day, but that’s not the best for my project. It’s also no good for me in time spent transcribing all those interviews. (BTW, transcribing feels like taking a timed spelling test for two hours: you race and race to get it done as quickly as possible and there is little to no thinking involved. I was good at spelling tests because of the whole photographic memory thing and knowing they’d be over soon. I still can’t spell guarantee right on the first try…)

I’m at the point in my research where I revisit each of these interviews, listening and looking for what I missed before and thinking about what I’m still missing. Time is running out, and although I’m farther along than some of my colleagues, I still feel behind.

If there was a silver lining in the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe,, it was the boost of civic involvement and sense of community. Young and old, rich and poor, albeit in different ways, all went through Katrina. Some New Orleanians who didn’t experience extreme damage or loss, like reporter and now city editor Gordon Russell, felt somewhat guilty that they had been spared the worst. Russell dealt with the guilt by helping colleagues who weren’t as fortunate. He let coworkers and other journalists stay in his untouched house. When the Times-Picayune set up a program to help gut houses of staff members, he joined.

David Hammer’s survivor’s guilt brought him from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans. Hammer grew up in New Orleans but went away to college and stayed out east. His parents and brother evacuated New Orleans. After helping his parents clean their damaged home, he returned to D.C.
“I felt like this emptiness in me when I couldn’t be there to help them and be on the scene,” he said.

His political reporting job didn’t seem important, meaningful. There was an opening at the Times-Picayune and he took it. He was a little nervous to enter a newsroom with Katrina survivors but fit right in. Staff and sources didn’t treat him differently. If he thought he needed to have “comfortable conversation” with sources, he had his time growing up in New Orleans to draw on. He said he tried to get around that he wasn’t there for Katrina, but when it came up he stressed his decision to come back.

He felt a need to help, which drove him to go to work every day. It wasn’t forced on him by anyone. People have been pretty open with sharing their stories. If you’re a New Orleanian now, he said, you’re committed to rebuilding and it’s not important whether you were here for Katrina or not.

The Creole town house story I wrote last month made it into the March issue of New Orleans Homes and Lifestyles.

You can pick up copies at local Robert grocery stores or read it online here. Don’t miss the photos at the bottom of the page!