The Times-Picayune, the hometown paper of Hurricane Katrina’s most long-suffering victims, will be honored with the George Polk Award for Metropolitan Reporting.
The Times-Picayune, the hometown paper of Hurricane Katrina’s most long-suffering victims, will be honored with the George Polk Award for Metropolitan Reporting. With only a skeleton staff whose members themselves were displaced from their homes, the paper persevered, covering the disaster and serving as a critical and accurate source of information for the battered New Orleans community and the world. Although the paper’s offices were forced to move from its headquarters in the flooded city, its reporters remained on the streets working. Without access to its printing presses, the nearly 170-year-old paper stepped up its online editions and blogs, generating more than 30
million hits a day. When operations resumed four days after the storm, the paper’s first headline read: “Help Us, Please”.
