After distributing this week's issue one day early, on Saturday, so readers fleeing Hurricane Gustav could grab a copy on their way out of town, about half of Gambit's staff are back in the office today, publisher Margo DuBos tells AAN News. The entire staff of 35 are expected back tomorrow. Much of New Orleans is still without power, but Gambit is running on a generator purchased after Katrina, furiously working on next week's issue, which will see the light of day on Monday, just one day after the paper's unusual Sunday street date. The alt-weekly also kept a steady pace of blogging over at the Blog of New Orleans before, during, and after the storm.
Tom Piazza's new novel City of Refuge, released yesterday by Harper books, features an editor of a fictional New Orleans alt-weekly named Gumbo who evacuates to Chicago after Hurricane Katrina. As the Times-Picayune points out, that character "certainly bears a resemblance to Michael Tisserand, former Gambit editor." But Piazza explains that all the characters are fictional. "Even if a writer is writing a novel about his or her best friend, in the course of that writing, the friend turns into something else -- a character," he says. When asked about the resemblance, Tisserand tells Gambit that "the scaffolding [for the character] is in part me, but the building is all Tom's."
Gambit won a total of 12 awards at the 50th annual Press Club of New Orleans awards competition, including four first-place finishes. The paper took the Ashton Phelps Sr. Memorial Award for excellence in editorial writing, and finished first in column, general news, and headline writing. In addition, former Gambit intern and current contributor Lauren LaBorde was one of three students to receive a journalism scholarship at the ceremony.
Both Gambit Weekly and The Independent Weekly went home last month with awards from The Louisiana Press Association. The Independent won a total of 38 awards in the editorial and ad/design competitions. These included first-place finishes on the editorial side in Community Service/Service to Readers Website; Continuing Coverage of a Governmental Issue; Continuing Coverage of a Single News Event; Editorial Cartoon; Feature Story; Lifestyle Coverage; and News Coverage. On the ad/design side, the Independent won first in Ad Campaign; Black and White 1/2 Page or Under (Staff-generated); Black and White Over 1/2 Page (Staff-generated); In-Paper Promotion (Color); and Multiple Advertiser Page. Gambit Weekly took home a total of seven awards in the editorial competition, including a first-place finish in Regular Column.
Ronnie Virgets and his loved ones stomped the competition and will return for tomorrow's episode of the TV game show, according to Michael Tisserand, Virget's ex-editor at Gambit. "The whole family wore crawfish beads and the host (John O'Hurley) announced that they were from New Orleans, 'America's most resilient city,'" reports Tisserand, who also touts Virgets latest book, "Lost Bread," which includes his account of being rescued from the top of his house after Katrina. "I think that account is the best descriptive writing about Katrina that's been published anywhere," says Tisserand.
After safely evacuating from his home near Lake Pontchartrain last year, Gambit Weekly Editor Clancy DuBos found a friend with a boat and headed back to New Orleans to help his neighbors. Baton Rouge television station WAFB describes his good deeds as part of its Hurricane Katrina anniversary coverage.
Brooke Gladstone interviewed several New Orleans media notables for the April 28 edition of "On the Media" (transcript here; MP3 here) and concludes that since the disaster, residents have been consuming "barrels of information supplied by a reinvented media like a tonic." Gambit Weekly Managing Editor David Lee Simmons tells Gladstone that he has been asked, "How does it feel to compete with the daily newspaper when the daily newspaper is acting like an alternative newsweekly?" He interprets this as a "reenergizing" of the local daily, the Times-Picayune, but adds that "the challenge for them is to maintain that level of energy, and it's going to be interesting to see how they do that."
After more than five months exiled in a cramped temporary office in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, the Gambit staff is thrilled to move back into their building in Mid-City New Orleans. "Some things still don't work, but we don't care," says Publisher Margo DuBos. The paper is continuing to build toward its pre-storm ad sales and page count, even as the desperate situation in the city makes Gambit's reporting vital.
Gambit's bittersweet anniversary issue includes reflections from a number of notable former staffers on the history of the paper and of New Orleans. "There could not be a time when the mission we imagined 25 years ago could be more relevant, or more urgent," writes Gambit founder Gary Esolen. AAN and its members who helped out in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina are given thanks in an article by Eileen Loh Harrist on Gambit's role in the alt-weekly world. And Publisher Margo DuBos says that the Gambit's current small staff and tight temporary quarters remind her of the paper's early days in "a wonderful way": "Everyone here is doing the work of three people and doing it with such strong feelings and emotional ties to their jobs."
