Newspaper leader reflects on tough choices covering Katrina’s destruction

Four days after Hurricane Katrina began tearing through New Orleans, Sophie Amoss still hadn’t heard from her father. 

She had left the country just days before the storm and learned it was heading toward her hometown during a brief phone call with her dad. Soon after, the storm cut off the city from the rest of the world and her only updates came from news broadcasts in a language she couldn’t understand. They showed a city submerged.

Eventually her call made it through. Her dad was safe. But desperate for answers, she asked when help would reach the city.

“It still gets me choked up. I’ll never forget it,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Sophie, there is no relief.’”

Her father, Jim Amoss, editor of the Times-Picayune at the time, soon ended the phone call. His attention was being pulled in multiple directions. He was steering the state’s most prominent newspaper through a hurricane and unprecedented flooding that would leave over one thousand people dead and over one million residents displaced, including members of his staff. 

Over the coming weeks Amoss would make hard decisions, struggling between keeping his reporters safe and trusting them to report and write the stories the world needed to hear. He tried to remain calm as the city where he’d spent most of his life was broken and left without aid. Under his leadership, the newspaper staff would win Pulitzer Prizes in the breaking news and public service categories for their Hurricane Katrina coverage. 

When the storm hit in the early morning of Aug. 29, 2005, Amoss and those who hadn’t already evacuated were holed up in the newsroom of the paper’s three-story, grayish brick building, just within view of downtown. They were prepared for strong winds and some flooding but figured they could just hunker down for a while and get to work. 

As floodwater rose, electricity went out and reporters discovered a breach in the city’s protective levee system, it became clear to the paper’s publisher that they would have to evacuate the building. Amoss said he stood on a table and addressed his staff.

“Don’t ever forget this moment. This will be a big moment in your life and your career,” he told them. “And we need to rise to it.”

With water too high for regular cars by then, the publisher and his executive team arranged for the company’s large newspaper delivery trucks to get the employees and their family members out of the building before the water was too deep for the trucks to move. A caravan of the trucks then crossed the Mississippi River and pulled into the parking lot of the paper’s West Bank bureau so that the editors, all a bit dazed and uncertain of their destination, could plan their next move.  

That’s when David Meeks, the paper’s sports editor, approached Amoss with a request. He wanted to go back into the city with anyone else who was willing. This was the biggest story in the world at that moment, Meeks said, and some reporters had to stay. Meeks was counting on the reporter in Amoss to agree.

“I could see the look in his eyes that he knew I was right, but he was going to still put me through the paces that he has to put me through to keep everyone safe,” Meeks recalled. “He goes, ‘How will you be safe? How will you report? How will you eat?’ Rapid fire.”

But Amoss then talked the business manager into handing over the keys to one of the circulation trucks so that Meeks and a cobbled-together team of volunteer staffers could go back into the city to tell the story of Hurricane Katrina from ground zero. The rest of the trucks headed on to Baton Rouge, where a makeshift newsroom would be set up temporarily in the media building at Louisiana State University. 

“He is the editor who made the right decision because it was sort of the culmination of everything he built at the paper,” Meeks said. “He had built this great staff. He has a tremendous eye for talent. He brought in all these great people, and here we are standing around him, and he’s listening to us. That’s the mark of a great leader.”

Amoss had spent his entire career in New Orleans, starting as a reporter in 1974 at The States-Item, an afternoon paper that merged with The Times-Picayune in 1980. After another decade, he rose through the ranks, becoming the paper’s editor in 1990, a position he held until his retirement in 2015. 

Amoss saw the real-time transition from print to digital journalism during his tenure as editor, and much of his job during Katrina was figuring out how to best use the paper’s website, which underwent a total transformation over a few weeks.

“It was a baptism by fire for digital because people were everywhere in the country,” Amoss said of the city’s evacuated residents. “And suddenly, they discovered Nola.com.”

The website changed from a place where people went for light-hearted entertainment stories into a primary source for breaking news, he said. The loss of the city’s cell towers during the storm, though, meant the physical paper was also still vital to those in the metropolitan area. Amoss said he had daily strategy meetings about balancing the paper’s print and digital sides, constantly contending with questions of whether to prioritize big stories going to print or digital first.

He also felt national reporting on the hurricane had turned toward sensationalism, making the website even more crucial for real, ground-level reporting about the city. Amoss said one of his major goals was to report with honesty and sensitivity about the people struggling in the city and what life was like for them. He said national coverage at the time was filled with reports of alleged murders and suicides in the Superdome — claims the paper eventually debunked in an investigative report. He also believed that reports about looting had been co-opted by right-wing national media outlets to demonize the city’s Black population. 

“That was a sensitive topic,” he said. “Reporting on what was actually happening and reporting on the extent to which it was being exaggerated or distorted, I was involved with those stories.”

Another question of sensitivity arose with the paper’s photographers and how they could depict the dead bodies that lay throughout the city’s streets.

“We were not squeamish, but we also didn’t want to be sensationalistic about it. We wanted to respect the dead,” he said. “But we also wanted to show what the city looked like and what the toll had been.”

Amoss said he never had to turn down a photo for publication. He praised his storm team’s commitment and dedication.

“I’d say just about all of them performed incredibly heroically,” he said.