Providing accurate coverage of the New Orleans rebuilding process is a daunting task for even the most talented and principled media professionals. Competing issues and storylines run the gamut from racial and political representation to economic and social justice to urban and environmental sustainability issues. Untangling that web of agendas and concerns, which have ensnared so many New Orleans rebuilding efforts thus far, is, indeed, essential to ensuring that the Crescent City is rebuilt in the most equitable and thoughtful fashion possible. And that’s where the Fourth Estate—a new 21^st century breed of multimedia professionals—is morally obligated to give voices to the voiceless while fishing Red Herrings and obvious conflicts of interest out of the diverse gumbo of powerful stakeholders and powerless citizens seeking to retool and restore their New Orleans.

 The Un-representational Rub 

There is widespread agreement that New Orleans should be rebuilt in a manner that honors its cultural roots, which drive deep into the American pantheon of art and ideas. And who should be responsible for making the many decisions to direct such a process? The answer may, at first blush, seem obvious. An individual unfamiliar with the well documented political and social upheavals occurring in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could likely opine that the city’s reconstruction should adhere to a process that addresses the needs of its diverse citizenry—approximately 460,000 residents before the levees failed. But such an assertion belies the reality that one year after Katrina, only half of New Orleans’ residents have returned.[1] Moreover, some of the city’s below-sea-level communities may never be rebuilt due to possible safety concerns and inadequate funding and government assistance, which some press reports and civil liberties groups claim to be racially motivated.

Further compounding matters is that many of New Orleans’ approximately 230,000 displaced residents—a sizeable amount of them African Americans who have called the Big Easy home for generations—can’t go home. Members of this black Diaspora scattered throughout the country face the grim prospect of losing all representation over decisions related to the mending of their beloved bayou city. Roughly one year after Katrina, the New Orleans population is, by almost all accounts, whiter than it was prior to the storm. (Given the city’s new demographics, some would go so far as to call the Big Easy an emerging republican stronghold.) African American neighborhoods like Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Ward are unpopulated apparitions of their pre-hurricane occupancy levels, making those communities prime targets for demolition via eminent domain to redevelop into park space.[2] The Urban Land Institute, in concert with other urban planners and developers, contends low-lying sections of New Orleans, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, are unfit for redevelopment given their likelihood for future flooding. Such views, however, fail to address the cultural and racial drain on the New Orleans legacy through bulldozing communities that have anchored the city’s African American backbone for decades. Just ask Fats Domino. He’s proudly called the Lower Ninth Ward home for years.

Racial concerns are, without question, confusing and complicating the already monolithic challenge of rebuilding New Orleans. If urban planners, engineers and scientists were assigned the challenge of rebuilding the city without concern for its rich racial and cultural legacies, they would simply embark on a process of building and fortifying levees (capable of withstanding category five or greater storms) and then redesigning the bayou metropolis according to an environmental logic that would only permit new construction and restoration of existing structures on sites that would not be susceptible to chronic flooding in the event of a future hurricane. But any attempts to extract the cultural and racial elements from the rebuilding process are at best Pollyannaish and at worst racist. Simply put, New Orleans without its rich multicultural fabric would no longer resemble the city people round the world have loved for centuries.

 Connecting the Disparate Dots Through Katrina’s Lessons 

Faced with the dire conditions created by Hurricane Katrina, media professionals were forced to innovate and adapt in unforeseen ways. The Times-Picayune, a local daily newspaper published since 1837, redefined itself when it transmitted online news coverage as a proxy for its print coverage that was impossible to produce in the days following Katrina’s destruction.[3] The Times-Picayune website www.nola.com contained forums where people who were dispersed to different parts of the country could post messages in hopes of communicating with family, neighbors, and friends. The website also provided forums for missing persons, an “I’m OK” forum, pet rescue and other online tools related to the hurricane recovery. The website was undoubtedly very helpful to individuals recovering from the storm—providing a point of reference in a time when most forms of communication were unavailable. It’s important to note that pages on NOLA.com that averaged 80,000 page hits a day before the storm, averaged 30 million hits a day after Katrina. It became the local newspaper for the world as people round the world felt themselves drawn into a community through images of extraordinary suffering. 

Indeed, out of the chaos of the storm surfaced two essential journalistic and communications tools that could now serve as vital elements in the New Orleans rebuilding process: local media and the Internet. Old and new knitted together a web of information to link people even as the storm severed families and communities. That same web of technology, filtered through local and national connections, also holds the potential of providing the infrastructure needed to ensure that all constituent groups—who call New Orleans home regardless of where they live now—can weigh in on how their city is rebuilt.

Though he was referring to the Times-Picayune, for which he serves as editor, Jim Amoss offered up a comment that applies to all media: “[… it] now has unusual dual roles; to cover the news about the devastation and reconstruction, yes, but also to heal the cities soul and advocate on its behalf”[4].

The potential for small scale, local interaction through the largest communications tool ever available was foregrounded during Katrina. Rumors became stories and were challenged in the blogosphere, leading to speedy, public self-assessment and correction by writers in all media.[5]  There was no “fixed” truth of the situation; readers were forced to continually compare stories and evaluate their relative accuracy and the agendas that fueled them. Out of this dizzying cycle of reporting and revision it became clear that the Internet is the only tool capable of communicating the complexity of a city struggling to re-form on this scale. Mayor Nagin announced in November 2005 that his office would deliver city-wide free wi-fi to residents and city agencies within a year. Despite protests from the local broadband provider, that plan is still in effect. In contradiction of state law, the city was able to offer free wi-fi to some areas immediately after the storm, under the terms of the state of emergency in effect since Katrina, but will have to resolve the legal issues in order to continue to provide free Wi-Fi access to the city. Online continuation of classes, reconnection of lost family members and friends, public safety announcements, news reporting, information about access to public services, as well as emotional and spiritual comfort are among the uses of the internet as New Orleans moves towards recovery, not just to the level of August 28, 2005, but to tackle longer-term issues that surfaced into national consciousness after the hurricane.

Free wi-fi can create a digital infrastructure to help citizens, businesses, schools, hospitals, and community organizations rebuild; it can also address the city’s problems of education, poverty, housing, and inequality that existed long before Katrina tore away some of the cultural and marketing myths that covered those sores.  No one person or agency can or should be responsible for managing the digital infrastructure.  It must not be stagnated by bureaucracy or commodified out of the reach for some residents.  There is heated discussion of whether the city’s wi-fi should be run by either the mayor’s office or by the local broadband provider.  The answer lies between those polar positions; if New Orleans is to reinvent itself through a digital support system, all stakeholders in the city must be vested in the new infrastructure.  A coalition of leaders drawn from neighborhood organizations, business, local, state, and federal government, health, education, communications, and the media will need to form a multivalent structure to develop and administer the wi-fi network and address the attendant questions of hardware resources, education and training, and integration of local television and radio media into the system to reach demographic sectors cut off from the internet by factors such as preference, age or physical ability.

Despite the offer of free wi-fi, there are those who will still be left out of the loop when it comes to contributing ideas to the rebuilding process. For many of the poorest citizens, a web-enabled computer is a luxury item they may not be able to afford. Others may have lost computers in the storm, and many, particularly elderly, residents may have no prior knowledge of computers or the internet. For these residents, free wi-fi offers little access to public debates on rebuilding. There are, however, many steps that can be taken to insure the widest possible access to information and debate.

Corporate sponsorship could be called upon to either provide individual citizens with PCs or web-enabled devices or to establish neighborhood computer banks in businesses, schools, churches, or other designated community centers. Such a move would not be unprecedented. In the days immediately after Katrina, AMD provided personal internet communicators to evacuees in Texas shelters.[6] Volunteers could be enlisted to educate anyone unfamiliar with computers and the web. The benefit may even extend well beyond the immediate rebuilding period if established computer banks, along with city’s free wi-fi, remained in communities to assist returning residents in finding jobs, filing insurance claims, locating former neighbors, and even in acquiring or extending an education.

Similar steps could be taken to form satellite communities in places with large concentrations of Katrina evacuees, such as Houston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The same technology that has allowed Iraqi and Mexican citizens living in the United States to participate in their national elections could give displaced Katrina victims a voice in decisions concerning the rebuilding of New Orleans. [7]

Katrina showed us a model, an understanding of the beginnings of a system with which New Orleanians can communicate with each other and with the outside world, to:

• Rebuild families and communities
• Spur economic recovery
• Allow a more inclusive, more complex history to be told
• Simplify and reduce the cost of government, and
• Help overcome the digital divide

Rebuilding Project: Wi-fi communication system and access to technology needs to be made available to residents, businesses, and institutions in New Orleans

Assumptions:  This analysis is based on Mayor Nagin’s November 2005 pledge to provide free wi-fi to the city.  The system is being built on an existing Tropos metro-scale Wi-Fi mesh network originally used for city functions, including police surveillance.  Part of the network will be secured so that it can be used exclusively by the city to provide communications for municipal agencies like police, fire, and building inspection departments. The additional bandwidth on the network will be opened to the public to provide free Internet access to all citizens.  In addition to internet access, the system will also be able to deliver phone service, local media access (newspaper, television, radio), national, state and city information/services, and access to voting for the New Orleans diaspora.

Constraints:

1. Phone companies, such as BellSouth, are fighting the plan, invoking laws that limit municipalities’ abilities to offer free Wi-Fi service, except in a state of emergency.  These legal issues will need to be addressed or an agreement must be reached with a commercial provider.
2. In the event of power failure, alternative power sources are needed to keep the system running during an emergency.

Conditions: 

1. In order for Wi-Fi to be useful in New Orleans’ recovery, the digital divide must be bridged.  Potential users of the system will need access to free equipment and training, and, in some cases, a warm invitation to join the online community.
2. To insure maximum beneficial use of the system, a commission will be convened with representative stakeholders from throughout the city.   This group will develop the long-term strategic plan for on-going use of the Wi-Fi system by New Orleans residents, groups, and institutions, during the second and subsequent years of the program.  The plan will address not only the immediate needs of recovery after Katrina, but also seek to address problems of education, poverty, housing, and inequality that existed long before Katrina. 

Comparison of costs and benefits:

• The major nonrecurring costs of developing a free, city-wide Wi-Fi system are significantly reduced by using the Tropos system that already exists in New Orleans.  The city had invested in the hardware and planned to support the maintenance of the system for its own police surveillance program, so the benefits of expanding the system to offer an infrastructure to the recovery process appear to outweigh the costs.

• Similarly, the system can build on existing community sites to develop a comprehensive network of access to computers for residents.  Libraries, schools, colleges, and other community sites (with or without existing computer banks) can be integrated into the citywide access system.

• The cost of settling litigation with the phone companies that object to New Orleans’ plan to offer free Wi-Fi service will be an incremental expense to the plan.  If the city believes that this cost outweighs the benefit of administering the system internally, it may be mitigated through an agreement with a phone company to provide some part of the services.  In that case, the city would incur an additional cost if they subsidize the phone company’s fees in order to continue to provide the service at no cost to residents.

Ethical Choices:  Media and Communications

As headlines turned rumors into facts, news reporting during Katrina exposed the dangers of reporting stories that were not substantiated before going to press.  Providing accurate coverage of the New Orleans rebuilding process is a daunting task for even the most talented and principled media professionals. Untangling the web of agendas and concerns, which have ensnared so many New Orleans rebuilding efforts thus far, is, indeed, essential to ensuring that the Crescent City is rebuilt in the most equitable and thoughtful fashion possible. And that’s where the Fourth Estate—a new 21^st century breed of multimedia professionals—is morally obligated to give voices to the voiceless while fishing Red Herrings and obvious conflicts of interest out of the diverse gumbo of powerful stakeholders and powerless citizens seeking to retool and restore their New Orleans.

More than half of the previous residents of New Orleans have not returned back to the city after Katrina.  Many of those dispersed by the storm are poor and African American, making New Orleans demographically a whiter, wealthier, and some are suggesting, a more republican city.  Should the voices of dispersed residents be heard in the rebuilding process?  How can that be accomplished?

Who is to be responsible for running the communications system, including wi-fi?

There is heated discussion of whether the city’s wi-fi should be run by either the mayor’s office or by a commercial broadband provider.  If New Orleans is to reinvent itself through a digital support system, all stakeholders in the city must be vested in the new infrastructure.  A coalition of leaders drawn from neighborhood organizations, business, local, state, and federal government, health, education, communications, and the media will need to form a multivalent structure to develop and administer the wi-fi network and address the questions of use and access for all residents, across the digital divide.