Jim Amoss Quotations

If the (Super) Dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle-class white people, it would not have been fertile ground for this type of rumor-mongering.

We're both covering the story and we are part of the story. One of our roles that was thrust on us was to make sure the story is told as accurately as can be.

Our group stood in the parking lot, debating the right thing to do. They had three options, take the items, take them and pay for them later, or put them back.

Our celebration today is tempered by the knowledge that we lost so much -- more than 1,000 people dead and our communities so deeply wounded. If there is a saving grace here, it's the love that tragedy lays bare -- our love for each other, our love for this newspaper, our love for this community. We must love it back to life, and that's what we celebrate today.

Over the years, Mark's colleagues had grown numb to his warnings of the swamped-bowl scenario. But that afternoon his voice and his pallor made me listen.

Our publisher is an incredibly determined guy. He saw it as a symbolic thing. He sort of willed it to happen.

Like our readers, we're also the ones to whom the events happened, at once narrator and subject. The intersection of these two roles has been excruciating.

At this point, James put down his notebook. He stood frozen on the bridge for several minutes as it dawned on him that his house was drowning, that there would be no coming home when this was over. Then he shook himself back into reporter mode, grabbed his pad and continued writing.

We have an extraordinary team of journalists and employees in this company who are absolutely dedicated to getting this paper out, no matter what the conditions are, people who lost their homes, who didn't know what had become of their families and who kept on working.

When a group of reporters and editors showed up at the New Orleans Convention Center with a bundle of those first papers, people grabbed for them as if they were food.