Category: Uncategorized

Jesus. The news out of New Orleans keeps getting worse. Water still rising. The Ninth Ward and the whole east part of town are, in essence, destroyed. I can’t even begin to think about the long-term impacts of all this. The extraordinarily poor people who live in much of that area will have nothing. Most of them are older homes, and I’d bet good money they don’t have homeowner’s insurance. They’ve become refugees — people without homes and without belongings, wandering.
I mean, Jesus.
Today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune is available online. A few journalistic thoughts:
– First of all, bravo to everybody at the T-P, who did amazing work in impossible circumstances. I know it’s cool to slam the network guys who do stand-ups in their windbreakers by the shoreline. But most of those TV guys skipped town during the worst of it — which is why you saw a lot of Mandeville and inland Mississippi at the storm’s height. The newspaper folks, who have no camera-ego to feed, stayed hunkered down in the city and just got the news.
(Not that the TV guys have anything to be ashamed of. Jeanne Meserve filed this terrific report of the devastation. I hope everybody who thinks it’s cool to reflexively hate the media saw it.)
A particular thank you to the T-P folks since their building is being evacuated at the moment. The “-30-” at the end of that post — the traditional reporter symbol for “the story ends here” — is heartbreaking.
– Reading the T-P makes you realize the strength of newspapers in this sort of situation: All the facts, edited down and synthesized in a useful, communicative way. Look at the photos in the PDFs versus the endless slideshows you see on something like Yahoo News — the photos are more powerful because they’ve been whittled down through the editing process.
– That said, a newspaper comes out once a day. There’s no doubting that a blog is the absolute best way to communicate breaking news in a situation like this. You’ve got a lower threshhold to write, so you end up sharing more information. A blog can have a more personal, human voice — the sort of thing people need and want in a situation like this. (Although the main T-P blog mostly maintained a sort of journalistic distance — not how I would have done it. The posts where the human voice broke through were the most effective. It’s why parts of the T-P’s on-the-scene blog were better reads than their [much more informative and more frequently updated] main blog.)
The other good thing about a blog’s format is that it’s easy to tell what’s new — unlike a wire writethru where you have to search for what’s changed from the last version. (CNN.com has been particularly bad on this front. They keep updating the same main story, drawn from wire and CNN sources. They’re trying to create single summation of all the news — essentially a newspaper model. But the result is that, if you check in on the story again an hour after reading it, you have to rummage for the three new facts buried deep in a 2,000-word story.)
Today’s T-P coverage does fall into some of the story-bunching problems newspaper coverage can bring — like stories broken out for geographic rather than thematic reasons and end up repeating material. (Stories that say, in essence, “By the way, it’s also really fucking wet in this neighborhood too.”)
– At the risk of being picky: The T-P is, for obvious reasons, not being delivered to homes today. It’s only being distributed electronically. With that as a given, it doesn’t make much sense to me that they’re still laying it out in broadsheet form. Reading broadsheet PDFs online is awkward, and you can’t print them out easily without shrinking the text to levels below legibility. If they’re going to go through the process of laying pages for online distribution, it might be worth reformatting them to 8 1/2″ by 11″, or at least tabloid format.
I mention this only because I think online distribution will be the way the T-P gets read for weeks, if not months. So if you stick with broadsheet format, you’re sticking with it for a long time.
– Finally, if you want to see prescient reporting, check out the T-P’s five-day series from 2002 essentially predicting the events of this week. Including this great graphic. I wrote about this series back when it was published.

Best Louisiana-related hurricane quote: In 1992, in the middle of Bush/Quayle vs. Clinton/Gore, Second Lady Marilyn Quayle was visiting Louisiana shortly after Hurricane Andrew. She asked if there was “anything we can do to help you all.”
Edwin’s response: “You can withdraw from the race.”
I miss Edwin. I may have to visit him someday.

“Chad. Chad. Chad.”
“Let me talk, Carol!”

This is the first image I’ve seen online of the damage to the Superdome roof.

Well, it’s amazing to think that the level of destruction New Orleans is experiencing could be good news — but compared to the extinction-level event that could have been, it feels like good news.
Apologies to the folks on the Mississippi coastline who took the brunt of Katrina after the storm took an ever-so-slight turn to the east. Good news for New Orleans, bad news for you.
The Times-Picayune web site is not being updated logically (like all Advance newspaper sites, it looks like ass), but here and here are the two weblogs they’re keeping on the storm.
Not to talk sports at a time like this, but I wonder what kind of impact this will have on the Saints’ future in New Orleans. A move to Los Angeles has been the buzz for some time now — in part because team owner Tom Benson claims the Superdome is a piece of crap and in part because he could sell the team to L.A. investors for, oh, a billion dollars or so.
The state has been unwilling to renovate or replace the Superdome, mostly because it’s not the piece of crap Benson says it is. Well, after today, it will be that piece of crap — chunks of the roof are already being ripped off. On the other hand, Benson will soar to All-Time Asshole status if he (a) tries to milk big payments out of the state after a natural disaster or (b) tries to skip town with the city’s beloved franchise at New Orleans’ lowest point. National and local stories about a Saints move to L.A. would have been negative before; now they’ll be downright vitriolic. We’re talking people showing up at his door with pitchforks and torches.

Jesus — I hope New Orleans survives this. That’s battlefront-level destruction they’re forecasting. I can only hope they’re wrong.
(For those who have wondered about my family, they’re farther to the west and almost certainly out of harm’s way. But losing New Orleans — and that’s the sort of phrasing people are using, “losing” New Orleans — would be an almost unmatched disaster. Been watching the Weather Channel, and even their guys are so freaked out they’re already 40 miles inland.)

“Men felt that intercourse was debilitating and male sexual strivings were thought to be a result of eating massive amounts of potatoes.”

Interesting summary of the legal back-and-forth that led to the firing of Bob Huggins, coach of the University of Cincinnati’s men’s basketball team.
I have hated Huggins for a long time. He specializes is recruiting talented thugs with daunting criminal records, telling them they don’t have to attend class, and using them until they were either thrown in prison or drop out.
(From one Internet post about the firing: “My favorite memory is when the player punched the police horse. No, it was when the one player used drugs and never got booted off the team. No, it was when the one player duct taped his roommate to the chair and beat him up. No, it was when the one player beat up his pregnant girlfriend and didn’t get booted off the team. No, it was when the one player stole the University phone charge number and ran up a big bill and never got booted.” Which doesn’t even mention Huggins’ own recent DUI conviction. Nor does it mention his graduation rate, annually one of the worst in Division I basketball. Which is like saying he’s a particularly short midget. Cincinnati went a multi-year span in the 1990s with a zero percent graduation rate.)
John Cheney, the coach of Temple, also recruits a lot of borderline case kids. But he does it with a real eye toward rehabilitation and pushing the kids toward graduation. As a result, he’s beloved by many. (Although he’s getting a little crazy in his old age.) Huggins is the mirror image: a user, a thug who spins through felons to get wins. I’m glad he’s gone.
Oh, wait — Nick Lachey likes Huggins. Didn’t realize that. Never mind, then.

Problem No. 1 with newspaper ombudsmen (this particular one being at The News & Observer, a fine newspaper in North Carolina): They write stupid columns selling out their own staffers for doing nothing wrong.
When are newspapers going to realize that bending over backwards to be avoid being offensive to every last busybody subscriber is the best way to become the most boring publication possible? That the reason newspapers read like thin cream of wheat is that we pay too much attention to hypersensitive readers who complain about anything we do?
And nothing — I mean nothing — makes me madder as a journalist than the ombudsman’s last couple of paragraphs, which essentially argue that the reporter in question is rendered incompetent when writing about children because she herself has no kids.
What complete and total bullshit. What a cowardly way to undercut a reporter. I suppose this means I’m not capable of writing about: black people, Hispanic people, Asian people; women; children; graduates of state universities; the left-handed; people who watch poker on television; vegetarians; and non-Cajuns, non-bloggers, and people over 30 or under 28.
Newspapers will keep circling the drain as long as we keep thinking offending one reader is a sign that a story shouldn’t have been written. More often than not, it’s a sign that it should have been written.
One other thing: The ombudsman endorses this statement from the newspaper’s high school sports editor:
“We go out of our way to accentuate the positive. We would identify the person who recovered the fumble rather than the person who fumbled, the player that intercepted a pass rather than the player who threw the pass, and the guy who scored the touchdown, instead of the guy who missed the tackle.”
If that’s a rule at the N&O, I’ve just lost a measure of respect for their very fine sports section. News is news, people, and keeping the name of the fumbler out of the paper is idiotic.

I’m pretty sure the assassination-is-okay-for-socialists doctrine is somewhere in Leviticus.