The New York Times coverage of Hurricane Katrina shows why they are still head & shoulders above everyone else when it comes to the poetry of the everyday news. Here’s just two magic paragraphs of horror description from Robert D. McFadden:
Still officials cautioned that New Orleans faced a long, difficult
climb out of the crisis. Six days after the hurricane decimated the
Gulf Coast in a fantasia of howling winds and towering seas that
weakened and then breached the city’s protective levees, New Orleans
was still a nightmarish town that had endured the unthinkable: 80
percent of its ground flooded, perhaps thousands of its citizens killed
and numberless homes and businesses destroyed by water, fires, looters
and scavengers.*
At dawn yesterday, as a brilliant orange sun rose over the Mississippi,
two huge columns of smoke climbed over the city as major fires burned
unchecked, one apparently at the scene of an explosion that ripped
through a propane gas storage warehouse on Friday, and another at a
Saks Fifth Avenue store. Firefighters were handicapped by low water
pressure and the difficulty of getting around the flooded city.