There’s been a lot of navel gazing by local newspapers over the last year as they’ve rightly wondered what their place in the media universe will be.  Well I think the Times-Picayune and it’s website NOLA.com have shown what that role is: community glue.

Rex Hammock, the owner of a custom-publishing company in Nashville and an influential blogger to boot, has called for the NOLA.com blog to be awarded a Pulitzer because of its role during the Katrina disaster and continuing in the aftermath.  (I agree.)  Today Rex linked to an article in Online Journalism Review (OJR) that includes an interview with Jon Donley, the editor for NOLA.com. Here’s an excerpt:

NOLA.com is known more for its MardiGras.com
site and its live webcam, but now has become Exhibit A in the
importance of the Internet for newspaper companies during a disaster.
When the newspaper couldn’t possibly be printed or distributed, the
NOLA.com news blog became the
source for news on hurricane damage and recovery efforts — including
updates from various reporters on the ground and even full columns and
news stories.

The blog actually became the paper, and it had
to, because the newspaper’s readership was in diaspora, spread around
the country in shelters and homes of families and friends. The
newspaper staff was transformed into citizen journalists, with arts
reviewers doing disaster coverage and personal stories running
alongside hard-hitting journalism. In a time of tragedy and loss, the
raw guts of a news organization were exposed for us to see.

And it wasn’t just about newsgathering. NOLA.com editor Jon Donley turned over his NOLA View blog
to his readers, who sent in dozens of calls for help. Those calls were
relayed onto the blog, which was monitored constantly by rescuers, who
then sent in teams to save them.

"The site has been fantastic — and quite a life saver — and I
truly mean a life saver," said Eliza Schneller via e-mail. "I listed a
friend’s mother, who needed rescuing, on the site and between me and
the numerous caring people who responded — she and her daughter where
picked up by the National Guard. Bless everyone that had a hand in
keeping that site up and running!"

According to Donley, the calls for help came via text messaging, since cellular voice services and landlines were down.

"It
was weird because we couldn’t figure out where these pleas were coming
from," Donley told me. "We’d get e-mails from Idaho, there’s a guy at
this address and he’s in the upstairs bedroom of his place in New
Orleans. And then we figured out that even in the poorest part of town,
people have a cell phone. And it’s a text-enabled cell phone. And they
were sending out text messages to friends or family, and they were
putting it in our forums or sending it in e-mails to us."

And later in the article:

"We’ve been checking the NOLA.com blog religiously," Lien told me via
e-mail. "We were checking it literally almost every hour. They had so
many small details and covered nooks and crannies of New Orleans that
an Associated Press or major network person would NEVER have known or
gotten right. (Emphasis mine)

Please read the whole story as it is a testament not only to the power and influence of a local newspaper within a community, but also to its absolute necessity for the well-being of the community.

Local newspapers are the only organizations that traditionally have the depth to do the kind of work that is vital to a community.  TV and radio outlets simply don’t have the staff or the medium required to cover the community in-depth.  Broadcasters are ephemeral compared to local newspapers that are the mortar for the community’s bricks.

What the NOLA story shows is that whether or not the information is printed on paper or screen, the "newspaper" and the people who produce it are vital to the community’s health.

Last point: how about the ingenuity these folks showed in utilizing all available technology to do their jobs?  Amazing.