Read Vanessa Gezari's story from Houston: On the way to Wal-Mart, they passed a mosque and a truck selling tacos. Inside, Jauney wondered at the food on the shelves: the giant taro root, rough-skinned and hairy, the dried chili peppers and lemon-flavored Lays.
"I wish they had crawfish," she said.
It's a shame that, right now on the St. Pete Times Web site, this elegantly written, incisive and timeless piece of journalism is just one of several links overshadowed by a whatever, people-got-sick-on-their-cruise-ship-that-has-docked-in-Tampa article that will be forgotten by the time I watch "Grey's Anatomy" tonight. (Sorry, Gershman, you certainly tried with the material at hand.) So much for stymying the death of newspapers when the Times web handlers can't highlight the best stuff for which the paper is celebrated. And what about the Times' investigation of the Hillsborough School Board? The one that appeared on A1 today? Someone who stops by the Web site won't even know it exists without doing the scroll thing, and picking Hillsborough, and clicking another link, etc.
If the newspaper is going to devote so much editorial effort to this story and others, then hey, let's showcase that good journalism for the online readers. Not everyone will care to read all those inches, of course. But let's make it an option alongside the cruise-ship virus headline that basically screams diarrhea.
Yeah.
Thjis is what I love abouyt this story: obviously, the prospect that many New Orleans residents will not return is a national story. Here and there, tv and papers have been nibbling around it, waiting to see what happens.
THIS story though, looks one of the ugly reasons why right in the face.
Check it:
"He wasn't the only one who had been searching for an exit. His city of pretty shotgun houses and old trees draped with Spanish moss was also a place of persistent poverty, where drugs and crime marred lives. It was a city of violent grudges, where 265 people were murdered in 2004and it was likely that some were your neighbors.
In the Rama apartment complex in southwest Houston, where Warren lived with his girlfriend and the younger brother and sister he was raising, evacuees struggled beneath the weight of Katrina's gifts. The storm had taken much, but it also held forth the chance of a new start. The question now was, how would they use it?"
Peopel will use racism and classism in the next few months to talk about NO's poor blacks never having it so good in some godforsaken (sorry Texas) city to the west or north. Throw this story to them.
It's so rare and so cool when a mediatation on something so universal - who doesn't wish for the chance to start over gaian, somehwere else - comes crashing into the news cycle.
more like this, please.
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