It was night No. 9 of his vigil, the balcony turned into a makeshift watch tower, with five borrowed shotguns, a pistol, a flare gun, an old AK-47 and loads of ammunition strategically placed next to the blankets and pillows where Stubbs, Vinnie Pervel and Gregg Harris have slept every night since Hurricane Katrina slammed into Southeast Louisiana.


When the Times-Picayune first decided to abandon its New Orleans building on that frantic morning of August 30, the initial plan was for everyone to be trucked a few miles out of the city to the paper’s West Bank office, but, like all emergency plans, there was a glitch. After bumping and sloshing through the deepening water to reach the far side, the convoy somehow got separated, (stories differ as to how, why and when), and in the end one group ended up in the town of Houma, with the rest going to LSU. At the same time, there were still reporters stuck inside the city who were unaccounted for. And, as soon as the main group got out, a small number of them decided to turn around and plunge back into the chaos for the simplest of reasons — to report to the outside world what was happening in a city become a watery graveyard.


It’s hard not to recognize this as pure journalistic instinct at its finest. At no point during this whole ordeal has the Picayune staff abandoned their posts. During the storm itself, the paper continued to post on its NOLA.com site right up until employees ran out of their office on Tuesday morning and piled into the backs of trucks that usually hold newspapers, not human beings. And as soon as they were out, they began strategizing about how to get their stories to the public. The edition planned for Wednesday was never printed (the presses were out and new ones hadn’t been found yet), but was posted on the paper’s site as a PDF, just as Thursday’s was.


You would have to be tone deaf to the advantages of familiarity with the battleground not to understand that, in a very real way, the staff of the Picayune were exactly the people one would want covering the story from its earliest hours. This is their city, and they know it’s quirks and corners better than any airlifted out-of-towner ever could. While I was still in Baton Rouge on Wednesday, a reporter for the New Republic who was in Mississippi and Louisiana for several days, told me that the Times-Picayune reporters seemed to be treated with more respect, and possibly given more access, by the authorities because they knew they were locals, and were writing about the destruction of their own backyards. Once I saw them in action in New Orleans myself, I came to agree with this assessment.


In the first hours and days after the storm, it was difficult to get in touch with the reporters in the field, Kovacs said. Cell phone service was spotty and land lines were almost completely down. Reporters in the city would call a staffer in Baton Rouge and, when they could get through, rapidly dictate their stories, since an Internet connection was still a pipe dream. But as time goes on, he says, things get a little bit better. Cell phone service is slowly improving, and the paper is rustling up satellite phones for its staff in the field. Also, after jumping around from place to place for much of the first week, the staff on the scene in the city has finally put down some roots, setting up a command post powered by a gasoline-fueled generator in a staffer’s house. They have one land line, and after writing their stories on laptops, take turns emailing them in. And the paper’s layout is coming together more easily as editors and production staff rely on instant messaging to communicate.


Despite this, of course, it’s still rough going on the ground in New Orleans. Reporters stay in the city for varying amounts of time, as “people have different thresholds for what they can take,” according to Kovacs. Whenever a reporter or photographer comes back to Baton Rouge, Kovacs calls them in to his office to ask what it was like in the city — and more importantly, to see if they’re okay. He has just begun forcing individual staffers to take some time off, so they can reflect on what they’re going through, and take a breather.


During those first violent and uncertain days last week, reporters did with what they had. One thing that helped them was a custom among some hurricane-tested citizens of the city who, to keep their cars away from the rising rain and floodwaters, leave them in elevated parking garages during storms. As a result, the staff in the city used some of their absent colleagues’ undamaged cars to drive around to hotspots. They even confiscated Kovacs’ son’s truck, which he just got back on Wednesday.


Since Friday, the paper has been putting out print editions as well as NOLA.com, each clocking in at about 17 pages. The paper’s September 1 edition, which was printed on The Courier’s presses, ran about 50,000 copies, while starting last Monday it bumped its run to 60,000, a number Kovacs says will have to start rising. Already, trickles of people are beginning to move back into certain pockets of the city’s surrounding communities, and displaced residents upstate are demanding to know where their hometown paper is. At this point, it’s still unclear as to how the Times-Picayune will print more to keep up with increasing demand, as it already seems to be pushing the 20,000-circulation Courier’s production capacity as it is.