RELATED RESOURCES

Yesterday (Aug. 29, 2006) was the one-year anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast. Poynter Online is marking 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. Here is a sampling: MONDAY  (08/28/06): "Prepping for Disaster: The Lessons of Katrina," by Al Tompkins TUESDAY (08/29/06): "As New Storms Approach, Five Lessons from Katrina," by Keith Woods "Katrina: History is Now," a list of Katrina-related books by David Shedden "Lessons Learned: On Being Laid Bare," reflections from Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose "American Behemoth," A year after Katrina, have we restored the social contract?  by Roy Peter Clark WEDNESDAY (08/30/06): "After Katrina: A Clickable Landscape," by Poynter staff "The Joy of Small Things: Leading to Recovery," by Gregory Favre "Katrina One Year Later: Essays & Epilogues" "Photos Find New Purpose," by Matt Stamey "From Seeking to Rescuing," by Arthur Lauck To see how Poynter Online covered Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, click here.

There is an axiom that good newspapers reflect the character of their home communities. A year after Katrina, that scenario appears to be playing out for the Times-Picayune and New Orleans broadcast outlets. Hard data on advertising revenue is lacking, but it's clear that, even though rebuilding is underway, the recovery has been partial and agonizingly slow.

Picayune publisher Ashton Phelps says the paper is distributing 181,000 copies daily and 203,000 Sunday, up 5,000 and 7,000 respectively from figures that The New York Times reported in April. But the latest figures represent a 30 percent drop from pre-Katrina levels, and the paper is choosing not to be audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) during the recovery period.

On the TV side, Nielsen Media Research and the Claritas consulting firm last week released an estimate that television households in the New Orleans Designated Market Area (DMA) are down from 672,150 last year to 566,980, a drop of roughly 16 percent. That means New Orleans has fallen from the 43rd to 54th ranked DMA.  Post-Katrina Nielsen TV ratings are not expected until February, Ad Week reported this week.  

Neither the circulation declines nor the household decreases are as great as the population drop within the city, estimated at more than 50 percent. As Phelps pointed out in an e-mail interview, the city is only a fraction of the market. Four of the six parishes the newspaper serves experienced only minor damage.

The Times-Picayune's own report on the city's recovery, published August 25, was headlined "Wounded N.O. economy remains in coma." A companion story noted that the city has become a far more expensive place to live.  

Phelps' take on the newspaper's business was more positive. Overall, revenues are down, though he declined to specify by how much. "The advertising environment ... has been very different post-Katrina," he wrote. "In classified, for instance, we are way up in employment ads and service ads. But we're way down in rentals and merchandise because apartments are snapped up right away and much of the used merchandise was lost in Katrina flood water."

A bright spot for the Times-Picayune has been the performance of NOLA.com. The Web site was a go-to source of news in the days immediately after the hurricane and remained the most practical contact with home as evacuees trickled back. Audience growth has been sustained, according to NOLA general manager Mark Rose, increasing "from an average of 500,000 unique visitors per month to more than 975,000 per month." Frequency of use and number of pages viewed online have increased considerably too, Rose said.

General manager Vanessa Oubre of WVUE-TV, a Fox affiliate, said advertising is back to about 80 percent of pre-Katrina levels. As at the newspaper, construction and contracting have a much bigger role in the mix. The station took five feet of water during the storm and is undergoing re-construction, she said, but there have been no cutbacks in news programming or staffing levels.

Indeed, speculation in the days after the storm that some of the stations would dismiss staff or even suspend news broadcasts never materialized. But the stations, like the newspaper, have had a degree of turnover from staffers who packed up and moved on. WGNO-TV, the ABC affiliate, has nine job openings posted, including one for an evening anchor. WDSU-TV, the NBC affiliate, is looking for three account executives, an assignment editor, two news producers and two weekend anchor/reporters.

All four of the stations with news departments are owned by public companies, but they do not break out television division revenue and earning results by market. Three of the general managers did not return calls from Poynter Online seeking a business update.

Despite the devasting impact on individuals, many hurricanes produce a net economic gain for regions as a result of insurance payments and construction. That was the case with Hurricane Andrew in Miami in 1992 and in the case of four storms in Florida in 2004. The Times-Picayune's assessment of the local economy predicted that a boom might still happen if the pace of rebuilding picks up.

"I'm not a predictor," publisher Phelps wrote in his e-mail note. "The devastation of Katrina was unlike that of other hurricanes."