ABOUT THIS ESSAY

Earlier this year, Chris Rose was named a finalist in the Commentary/Column Writing category for the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE)  Distinguished Writing Awards. This essay will appear in "Best Newspaper Writing 2006," a collection of stories, photos and interviews that draws from the American Society of Newspaper Editors award winners and finalists. "Best Newspaper Writing," published as a collaboration among ASNE, The Poynter Institute and CQ Press, is due out this fall. Today (Aug. 29, 2006) is the one-year anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast. Poynter Online will mark the event with a weeklong series of articles, resources and remembrances. Scroll to the bottom of this article to see the other stories we've published this week. MONDAY: "Prepping for Disaster: The Lessons of Katrina," by Al Tompkins TUESDAY: "As New Storms Approach, Five Lessons from Katrina," by Keith Woods "Katrina: History is Now," a list of Katrina-related books by David Shedden To see how Poynter Online covered Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, click here.

If you titled an essay "Lessons Learned from Covering Katrina," you'd need a whole book, not a page or two, to tell the story.

The ways in which the natural and man-made disasters of the summer of 2005 turned the city of New Orleans and its newspaper upside down are too many to count.

The story is too big. And it continues today, changing every day, getting bigger every day as we wrestle with the consequences and the future.

I can best address only what happened to me. And here is the formula for success that I learned: Cut your veins open and bleed onto the page. Turns out, people really like that. (And so, it appears, do the folks who give out awards.)

A disaster story like this generally has two means of entry:

A.) The numerical, in which we measure the size of the storm, the number of casualties, the number of homes destroyed, the amount of money needed to fix it, how strong the levees need to be, etc.; stories doled out in mass, weight and volume.

B.) The pathos, the stories of loss and sorrow told by the victims: Meet John Doe, he lost everything, this is his story (with the obligatory photo of him holding a precious and mud-caked memento in his hands).

When I first got back into New Orleans, a week after the storm, the blunt force of the event hit me so hard that I immediately turned into one of the zombies walking around this city, staggering about in disbelief at the endless vistas of carnage and destruction.

Finding my way into the story was an exercise in fumbling and stumbling. Where to begin to document this one? What do you say that even remotely captures this?

Though I never contrived to do so, I fell into a pattern of writing personal stories rather than seeking the stories of those around me. The swell of emotion inside of me was too large to allow me to get outside of myself and go check in with the citizenry at large.

I basically fell into the pattern that every resident who came back to this city fell into: Just try to survive, wing it, improvise, make it day to day, sift through the physical and emotional rubble and come out of it alive and stronger. Put the pieces back together.

In the process, I became the city's poster boy for post-traumatic stress disorder. I documented my break downs, my setbacks, my fears and the minute and often excruciating details of living in a city in ruin. ... [R]eporters spend much of their time cataloguing human suffering and physical destruction, but nothing prepares you to do it in your home town.

Yes, reporters spend much of their time cataloguing human suffering and physical destruction, but nothing prepares you to do it in your hometown.

By trying to find the words to describe this -- and failing often -- it turns out that many readers felt like they were looking in the mirror when they read my stories.

I was not afraid to cry. And not afraid to write about it. I was not afraid to cower in fear nor to document it. I was not afraid to vent barrels of anger and frustration. I howled at the moon with all the ferocity I could muster and it turned out the readers were with me -- all the way.

One of the biggest stories in the Katrina aftermath is the psychological toll on the survivors. The anxiety, depression and confusion. Since I suffered all of that -- suffer it still -- I give voice in the newspaper to the mental state of an entire community.

Our history, our culture, our future, our dreams have all been dissected and laid bare by this. 

To be blunt: Everyone here is whacked by this thing, and they are comforted to know they are not alone.

The story consumed me, consumes me still. There is not a single action one can initiate in New Orleans that is not colored by Katrina and its aftermath. Everything is different. The simplest functions of shopping, having dinner with friends (they moved away), filling a prescription (wow, the line is long!), getting a haircut (where is my barber?), eating out (are they open yet?) or even finding a parking space (anywhere you damn well please; what does it matter?) lead you to reminders, lessons, memories and sorrow.

From the beginning, I just tried to document the truth of what has happened here in the barest human terms. Our history, our culture, our future, our dreams have all been dissected and laid bare by this.

Our hobbies, our pets, our kitchen appliances -- everything is a story. Where is my mail? Is it safe for kids to be here? Are we going to have Mardi Gras? Is crime getting better or worse?

It's all just about living day-to-day and wondering what adventure each new morning brings.

I don't believe I have ever been more honest in my life. I don't even know what objective journalism is anymore. I have approached this "assignment" -- boy, there's a relative term -- more as a resident of the city than as an employee of the newspaper.

I have done my best to try to understand it but I find I ask more questions in my stories than I can answer. But then, that is what the readers are doing.

By putting their fears and anger and occasional comic absurdities in print for them to read, they have felt less isolated in all of this. And they have responded. They tell me -- in 20,000 e-mails, no less -- that they feel like somebody understands, because they see it laid out in print in an institution they know and trust (now more than ever) -- their hometown newspaper -- and they realize that, in the end, we're all in this one together.