Newspapers, Without Paper

New Orleans' daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune, didn't let the lack of a printing press stop it from publishing. The paper had to abandon the city along with other businesses and residents, but it published a 26-page, Web-only edition in HTML and PDF formats. The paper's staff worked from Baton Rouge, 75 miles north, and Houma, 60 miles to the west, where reporters and editors took up places offered by those cities' newspapers.

The 26-page Aug. 30 edition, the day after the storm, bore the front-page headline "Catastrophic." The next day, the paper published a 13-page Web edition. Normally, the Times-Picayune has a circulation of about 270,000.

Reporters also posted stories, including breaking news, as they were written to the nola.com Web site, which runs on servers in a New Jersey data center. Breaking stories ran in a bloglike section where reporters continued to detail developments, such as the planned move of 23,000 New Orleans evacuees from the threatened Superdome to Houston's Astrodome.

--Gregg Keizer, TechWeb