Stop the presses? No way, say staff of largest New Orleans newspaper

When dozens of journalists from the New Orleans Times-Picayune boarded a fleet of delivery trucks and abandoned their newsroom to rising floodwaters Tuesday morning, the newspaper's future seemed in doubt.

But Louisiana's largest daily returned to print Friday morning, thanks to the pluck of hundreds of journalists and the willingness of a neighboring newspaper to share its printing presses, the Times-Picayune's top editor said.

Jim Amoss described his journalists' rocky ride to safer quarters and their determination to cover the disaster in New Orleans, even as many worried about the fate of their own homes and loved ones.

"It's extraordinary, the willingness of all of these people to continue working under these conditions," said Amoss, 57, the paper's editor for 15 years. "They are putting incredible hardships aside and ignoring the fact that their families need them."

Most, but not all, of the newspaper's editorial staff of 270 has been accounted for.

Missing is Leslie Williams, a veteran reporter who was last heard from Sunday, as he made his way to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, to cover a hurricane shelter. "We have not heard from him and it's just inconceivable that someone as resourceful as him would not have found a way to contact us by now," Amoss said. "That's the most worrisome case we have."

Times-Picayune staffers hunkered down in sleeping bags in the newspaper's offices for two nights — along with family members who also sought refuge — to ride out Hurricane Katrina.

They made it through the initial storm, but when a couple of reporters ventured out on bicycles Monday afternoon, they found the water in the city rising.

The situation painfully mirrored a scenario drawn by the newspaper in a series of stories three years ago, which predicted that a flooding disaster in New Orleans was inevitable. While some criticized the project as alarmist, it proved prophetic.

"It was a very hard kind of thing to get right," Amoss said.

By Tuesday morning, a "moat" of filthy water surrounded the news offices near the Superdome, where the 269,000-circulation paper maintains its printing presses.

"The realization began to dawn on us that our plant was about to be engulfed," Amoss said, "and that if we stayed any longer, not only would we be trapped but we wouldn't be able to get out to report on the news."