This NYT story tells how the Times-Picayune of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast newspapers kept going after Hurricane Katrina tried her best to put them out of business.

An excerpt:

Jim Amoss, the editor of The Times-Picayune, faced an ugly decision on Tuesday morning. About 240 employees and some members of their families, including one 6-month-old baby, had spent the night in the corridors of the newspaper building at 3800 Howard Avenue in New Orleans, just over a mile northwest of the Superdome.

The floodwaters were rising at the offices and printing plant of The Times-Picayune on Tuesday when the staff was told to evacuate.

They seemed to have survived the hurricane: the building was still standing, though a full sheet of glass from one window had been blown out of its casing, slicing through the general manager's office.

Outside, however, the parking lot was submerged and water was rising up the steps to the entrance. And there were reports of a jail break nearby. As the water crept up another riser, he made his decision. "We needed to leave while the leaving was possible," he said.

What followed was an odyssey for Times-Picayune workers as they looked for a new home outside New Orleans while managing to publish their paper - initially online and eventually in print.

The paper, which normally has a circulation of 270,000, had to report the biggest story in its history with no electricity, no phone access and no place to work.

With its readers scattered across the South, the paper turned its affiliated Web site, www .nola .com, into a release valve for the accumulating tales of misery from the city, providing news, crucial information and a missing persons forum that now contains more than 17,000 posts.

The pilgrimage has already joined the lore of The Times-Picayune, which has served New Orleans since 1837 and whose history includes the writers William Faulkner and William Sidney Porter, better known by his pen name, O. Henry.

Other newspapers in the hurricane zone also struggled to publish. The Mississippi Press, in Pascagoula, took refuge in The Mobile Register's offices in Alabama, and used its presses. The Sun Herald, in Gulfport, Miss., managed to print a paper each day last week with the help of The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in Georgia.

But The Times-Picayune became an example of a private business in New Orleans that was able to function, even thrive, through the disaster. At the same time, employees there were coping with the loss of their homes and relocation of their families, just like their neighbors.