When Hurricane Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, the newsrooms in New Orleans became lifelines for scattered residents. Reporters and photographers from The Times-Picayune spread out across the flooded city. Even after the paper’s headquarters was evacuated, coverage continued, first online, and then, three days later, in print from borrowed presses in Houma, Louisiana, about 55 miles away..
Meanwhile, WWL-AM had reporters and anchors embedded in emergency operations centers. Every radio station in New Orleans broadcast its signal. WWL-TV likewise never went off the air, the only station in the city to do so.
But that model of local crisis coverage, born in the age of print dominance and a few powerful well-staffed broadcast outlets, may no longer be possible.
“It would be a huge challenge to cover Katrina the way we did,” said Dave Cohen, who has been news director for WWL Radio since 2000. “There are just not nearly the numbers there were 20 years ago.”
The WWL-AM newsroom had 15 people during Katrina, for example. Now it has five.
“Not only did we have a relatively large staff, but we called on resources from corporate holdings around the country to help cover Katrina’s arrival and aftermath,” Cohen said. “But today, newsrooms are not what they used to be on any level, from print to television to radio.”
In 2021, the Pew Research Center estimated that U.S. newsrooms lost 26% of their jobs from 2008 and 2020. Newspaper newsrooms saw the biggest cuts,with employment falling by 57% That number has likely grown even bigger in the past five years.
In 2005, the Times-Picayune was at the center of New Orleans media. Legacy outlets, such as The Louisiana Weekly, Gambit Weekly, CityBusiness, the Clarion Herald and a handful of other community papers orbited around it.
Twenty years later, the Picayune no longer exists as an independent paper, having merged with The Advocate in 2019. The local media ecosystem is now populated by nonprofits such as Verite News, The Lens and the Louisiana Illuminator, alongside hyperlocal newsletters and neighborhood sites.
“I think people relied on the big newspapers to give them information in 2005,” said Terry Baquet, editor-in-chief of Verite News, a nonprofit outlet launched in 2022. “People no longer rely on newspapers.”
For Baquet, who was Page 1 Editor at the Times-Picayune in 2005, Katrina was the shift.
“Katrina sort of foretold the demise of newspapers,” he said.
The Times-Picayune’s coverage earned two Pulitzer Prizes — one for breaking news and another for public service, shared with the Sun Herald in Gulfport, Mississippi. It also revealed the growing power of the internet.
In the city itself, the printed paper was gold, with stranded residents at the Superdome and Ernest N. Morial Convention Centersharing limited copies delivered by reporters and editors. “You would have thought we were handing out pizzas or Po Boys because people were grabbing for these papers to try to find out what was going on,” Baquet recalled.
But for residents who had evacuated, the printed paper was of little help. The paper made the transition in real time, prioritizing its breaking news coverage online and finding ways to engage residents who had evacuated to places all over the country. “The only way you could find out what happened to your family was through people contacting each other on Facebook,” Baquet said. “We set up this sort of page or list where you could find people. It revealed the greatness of the Internet and how helpful it could be in situations like that. We were still putting out newspapers, but the newspaper would come out the next day, and people were trying to find out information about their families. They could get it in real time.”
In addition to the Internet, the role of social media has significantly changed how journalists distribute and how people consume local news, particularly in a disaster.
Social media gave Hurricane Ida coverage a dimension Katrina never had, allowing viewers to ask questions directly or send video from neighborhoods reporters couldn’t reach.
What really helped us was the use of social media,” said Charisse Gibson, who grew up in New Orleans and joined WWL-TV as an anchor in 2019. “TV wasn’t always accessible. Using social media helped to get the word out.”
Ida made landfall in 2021 on the very same day that Katrina had, Aug. 29.
WWL-TV staff camped inside their newsroom, sleeping on air mattresses on the floor in the sales department and working 12-hour shifts. A security guard cooked their meals with food staffers had brought from their abandoned refrigerators at home.
“We did that for days,” recalled Gibson, president of the NABJ chapter in New Orleans. “The hard part about it was – it was the same situation as Katrina – my parents had to escape. They all left. The very story you talk about, you are essentially living it. You’re thinking about your mom and dad and your grandparents.”
That kind of round-the-clock commitment, Gibson admitted, isharder to imagine now. “It’s fair to say across the board whether it’s digital, print or television, newsroom staff have significantly reduced.”
As the 20th anniversary approached, she was busy working on special reports for the TV station, whose changing ownership also reflects what is happening more broadly in the broadcast news industry.
During Katrina, the CBS-affiliated WWL-TV was owned by Belo Corp., which was acquired by Gannett in 2013. Two years later, Gannett spun off its broadcasting division into a separate company called Tegna. Then on Aug. 19 of this year, 10 days before the Katrina anniversary, Nextstar announced that it had purchased rival Tegna in a $6.2 billion deal that still has to be approved by the FCC.
“Unfortunately we are in a space where we no longer have infinite resources and infinite talent,” Gibson said. “We don’t have the amount of people we once had. We don’t have the people to shoot the kinds of stories you’ve seen me cover. The stories are turning a little slowly, slower than I would like.” But, she added, “we’re still keeping up with the demand.”
In many ways, as the legacy media has become smaller in the city, the nonprofit model has become central to New Orleans media, though it is much more fractured.
Karen Gadbois, who co-founded The Lens in 2009, began blogging about demolitions and housing policy after Katrina.
“Our policy is we do the after,” she said. “We don’t have the capacity to be at every flooded street corner. But we can hold officials accountable for the promises they make in recovery.”
For storm coverage as it happened, she said much of the city would probably turn to radio. “I think WWL would be that landing place. Whether they’re prepared for it, I don’t know. But in a disaster, people who’ve been through it before — that’s still where they turn.”
Baquet said if Katrina were to happen in New Orleans again today, the small non-profits would cover the story, although it would be different.
“I think the coverage would wind up being what it ultimately became after we learned how to cover it,” he said. “We’d jump on why this happened.”
That orientation reflects a broader shift: whereas the Times-Picayune once served as an all-purpose institution, today’s outlets specialize in community engagement, investigative depth and neighborhood service journalism. Each covers a piece of what used to be centralized.
“The one thing we knew when we started Verite News is that it wouldn’t be everything to everybody,” Baquet said. “We weren’t going to be the paper of record. We had a niche, which was covering communities that had long been ignored by the big media organizations.”
New Orleans faces the next storm with a patchwork of smaller, more specialized newsrooms. The voices are still there, more diverse, more rooted in community, but fewer in number and stretched thin.
When the next Katrina comes, as scientists warn it inevitably will, the city’s residents may again find themselves not only battling the floodwaters but also searching for where to turn, and who to trust, for the story of their survival.
“All the news exists electronically, and our electric grid is not reinforced,” said Vicki A. Mayer, professor of communication at Tulane University. “After Ida and we sat in the dark for two weeks, nothing local was online. If you could get the Internet through your phone, then you could go somewhere for news. But these stories were not local.”
Like many outlets in New Orleans, Verite, which focuses on the city’s majority Black population, published anniversary coverage in the months leading up to the 20th anniversary.
The series, “What was lost,” invited readers to submit stories of the little things they lost that trigger the most vivid memories: a job at the nation’s oldest public hospital, a record collection, pianos that once belonged to Fats Domino. It includes Baquet’s own reflection on the Japanese koi pond that he and his family lost when their historic Creole cottage in the 7th Ward flooded and then was looted.
The news outlet also is reporting stories that examine whether New Orleans is prepared for another natural disaster.
“A Katrina should never ever happen again to New Orleans, but it will,” Baquet said. “I don’t think the fixes they put in place are going to be enough to really protect us. I think explaining why New Orleans is still vulnerable is an important story to tell.”
Jackie Spinner is a professor at Columbia College Chicago and the editor of GJR.
