NEW ORLEANS — To New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, the front porch gatherings felt like an extension of his work -- another way to talk with his neighbors about everything that had happened since Hurricane Katrina.
A collection of old and new friends arrived on the stoop of his Uptown home most nights following the storm. Their stories flowed, along with the cold bottles of Abita Amber, the local brew.
"Even the people who usually watched ESPN and 'Sex and the City' were flushed out of their houses," recalled the newspaperman, whose neighborhood escaped serious flooding. "We all sort of bonded together."
So it was with considerable pain that Rose recounted in his column this month how one of the regulars on his front stoop lost her fiance. He killed himself, apparently in despair over innumerable losses that the hurricane delivered.
"The most open, joyous, free-wheeling, celebratory city in the country is broken, hurting, down on its knees. Failing. Begging for help," Rose wrote. "Somebody turn this movie off; I don't want to watch it anymore. I want a slow news day. I want a no news day."
Four months after America's costliest disaster, Rose and his colleagues at the Times-Picayune have made their front porch the world's. They have become the definitive news outlet for myriad journalists trying to understand this city, and an essential read for its displaced and far-flung denizens.
Set against the cacophony of bickering local, state and federal officials, the 168-year-old newspaper's voice has been clearly heard.
The Times-Picayune exposed poorly constructed levees, picked apart obtuse FEMA policies, debunked overblown claims of evacuation center violence, and traveled as far as the Netherlands and Japan to show how other communities have coped with flooding and disaster.
The newspaper's success in the face of disaster raises a question: Are objectivity and dispassion in journalism overrated?
Some observers of New Orleans' daily newspaper say they are, and that the Times-Picayune's work in recent weeks evokes the best advocacy reporting of the Progressive Era a century ago, or even of the American Revolution.
"Objectivity is a fairly new construct in this business that has little to do with the quality of reporting," said Jay Perkins, a journalism professor at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. "Sometimes you need to tell people not only what is really going on but how it feels."
