In New Orleans, a printline’s survival odyssey

What followed was an odyssey for Times-Picayune workers as they journeyed to nearby Houma town, looking for a new home away from New Orleans. Here they set about publishing once again—initially online and eventually in print—reporting the biggest story in the paper’s history with no electricity, no phones and no place to work.

With its readers scattered across the South, the paper turned its affiliated website, http://www.nola.com, into a release valve for the accumulating tales of misery from the city, providing news, crucial information and a missing persons forum that now contains more than 17,000 posts.

The exodus has already joined the lore of The Times-Picayune, which has served New Orleans since 1837, and whose history includes writers William Faulkner and William Sidney Porter, better known by his pen name, O. Henry.

There’s no telling when, or if, The Times-Picayune can bring its circulation back to the 270,000 that it had a little over a week ago. No one knows the condition of its presses, or how its building has fared.

‘‘We vacillate between utter despair at what’s happened to our city and our lives, and exhilaration at what we’re doing and how our readers are responding to it’’ Amoss said,

—NYT

Katrina a nightmare for Aussies, Koreans

CANBERRA: South Korea and Australia said on Monday that US relief efforts prevented them from rescuing their citizens stranded by the hurricane. South Korea is still trying to account for upto 2,500 South Korean expatriates in New Orleans, while upto 50 Australian tourists in the disaster zone felt abandoned by their government. Some described the city’s Superdome as like being ‘‘in a third world country in a maximum security prison’’. REUTERS