Web is bulletin board for Katrina victims

SAN FRANCISCO: While broadcast media has helped outsiders appreciate the scale of the Katrina disaster, the Web has acted as a bulletin board for the missing, a source of moving personal narratives and a sounding board for frustrations over the pace of relief.

Some of the more immediate coverage of looting in New Orleans came from video footage and accompanying text commentary on a Web log called "The Interdictor."

"Right now we're trying to show you all the looting," the Web site author wrote. The webcam was set up several floors above ground level near an intersection in downtown New Orleans.

The video showed shallow water covering part of a street, with debris around deserted sidewalks. A few pedestrians and vehicles would occasional walk through the scene.

"Looting guys pushing shopping carts with 40 Nike boxes in them. People breaking into cars. Assaulting ATM machines. It's hard just to sit by and do nothing," the blogger wrote.

For a broader sense of the unfolding disaster, many sites linked to NOLA.com, home to New Orleans' local paper, The Times-Picayune, when it stopped publishing a print edition on Tuesday.

Instead of a traditional stand-back narrative of events, NOLA consolidated reporting into minute-by-minute blog entries by Times-Picayune reporters, with wire reports, and photographs and stories contributed by local readers.

NOLA, run by the online arm of Advance Publications Inc., also created a "Missing Persons" message board to help locals find lost friends and relatives.

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A similar effort by the Web site GulfCoastNews.com serving the Biloxi, Mississippi region was unavailable due to heavy traffic to the database.

WWL-TV in New Orleans offered ways for viewers to supply information to the television station. It also set up discussion boards that drew hundreds of queries about missing relatives.

But citizen-contributed coverage varied in quality and scope because of the evacuation ahead of the hurricane.

"What we're seeing is some eyewitness accounts. The next thing you'll see is charitable outreach," said Jeff Jarvis, an online media consultant to the New York Times and Advance Publications and author of media criticism blog BuzzMachine.

"Unlike other big global events, we had warning, so people got the heck out of Dodge," Jarvis said in a phone interview from New York.

Flickr, the photo site owned by Yahoo, posted personal photos showing damage to boats and coastal areas, which invited comments from viewers. The following is a link to photos connected to Katrina and Mobile, Alabama.

"Well say goodbye to the Big Easy and hello to Lake New Orleans," wrote a LiveJournal blogger with screen name of Girl Goddess. In a post entitled "The joy of being online again," she vents her fears about floating sewage, dead bodies and possible disease and whether historic New Orleans can recover.

The details she describes of her own experience of being evacuated from her neighborhood suggest that her wider fears were settling into resignation. "We'll fix our roof and pull our chimney out of our pool. Things will be fine," she writes.

(Additional reporting from Washington Newsroom)