Posted: April 21

Paula won a Pulitzer

(New Orleans) This week's highlight came when I learned that my friend Paula Devlin won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. Well, actually, she shared in the two Pulitzers won by the Times-Picayune newspaper, where she is copy editor. She and the rest of the paper's staff were honored for public service and for breaking news coverage of Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast last August. The Pulitzer Prize citation noted the Times-Picayune's "heroic, multi-faceted coverage" to "serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant."

I discovered the paper's determined dedication to getting news out in the middle of the disaster when I went to its web site in the middle of the hurricane and discovered up-to-the-minute news and stories. By chance I was back in the United States in August since we were working on editing the AMDG movie. I was transfixed by the televised accounts of the approach of the storm across the Gulf as it aimed at New Orleans. Once it hit, though, the television coverage drowned in an astounding repetition of the same few facts. I have friends in New Orleans from the year I spent working at the Jesuit university there, and I really wanted to know what was happening to them. Even though the New Orleans paper could not print an edition they never stopped publishing news online and I found myself glued to the computer screen reading about the city and the hurricane as I looked for news about my friends. Paula and I worked together on university publications, she as a writer, myself as a designer. Sometime after I moved to St. Louis to work for my province, Paula returned to the Times-Picayune where she became copy editor, a central post in the daily production of the news.

In January, Paula wrote me about her experiences in Katrina. She described what happened to the paper's features editor, who took off on his bike right after the hurricane itself passed to see what had happened to the city: "He and his riding partner came upon a bridge on the edge of Lakeview where a group of firemen, without any orders to do so, were running a rescue operation in our neighborhood, pulling people out of second-story windows and attics and transporting them in boats to this small concrete bridge, surrounded on both sides by water. There were at least 30 people on the bridge. Having figured they had survived the storm, they then had lived through the horror of watching water rise rapidly into their homes, fearing for their lives, narrowly escaping, and then having to contend with the fact that they’d lost everything. And when my two colleagues arrived on the bridge and identified themselves as reporters for The Times-Picayune, these folks were quite simply overjoyed. They smiled and laughed and told my friends how glad they were that they were there. My friends offered them neither food nor water nor shelter nor escape. But they were going to tell their story. They were going to tell their story. And that, to these people, was the most important thing of all. And it crystallized for him – and me upon hearing his tale – in an instant why we do what we do, why reporters rush to danger when others flee, why a newspaper needs to be there in force when its community faces its greatest challenge."

I am proud to know someone with that idealism, and glad she shares in the Pulitzer. It is worth remembering why all of us in communication do this work.