From WNYKRs in New York, this is NPR's on the media. I'm Bob Garfield. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. A complete tally of casualties from Hurricane Katrina is probably months away. But for the New Orleans Times Piggyune, the process of reckoning has already begun. In part, that's because after the September 11th terrorist attacks, the New York Times

unwittingly created a new model for remembering those lost in a disaster by quickly

publishing what it called portraits of grief. Biographical sketches, shorter than an obituary, but

containing at least one anecdote supplied by the victim's family or close friends.

Ultimately, the series presented more than 1,800 portraits.

For many readers, it was the way to comprehend some of the individual losses incurred by nearly 3,000 dead.

Certainly, the New York Times series posed many challenges to the reporters assigned to it,

but the New Orleans Times Picayune series that launches next week will likely be even tougher to write.

Jim Amos is the editor of the Times Picayune, and he joins us from his temporary offices in Baton Rouge.

Jim, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Glad to be here. Why did you choose to go the

portraits of grief route? What did you want to do with this form that you didn't think you could

do any other way? Well, I think you want to explode whatever it is behind this number of casualties.

It keeps being bannied about, you know, whether it's 1,000 or more, and it becomes sort of a numbing statistic.

And this is a project that will last over months, I presume, and it will constantly remind people,

remind readers of the culture and the lives behind the statistic.

So what sort of resources will you be devoting to the series?

The best way to approach it, we felt, was to concentrate heavily at the very outset

on finding people in a difficult situation and relying after that on readers by word of mouth.

Our online version of the newspaper, we get an excess of

30 million hits a day, and we think that that means that a lot of people will either see

or hear of what we're doing.

Where else do you expect to get information?

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