Part of the J School Travels trip to the Gulf Coast region affected by the British Petroleum explosion included a return visit to the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans.
Six members of The Ranger staff and three advisers from the journalism program traveled along the Gulf Coast from Texas to the Florida Panhandle to report on recent recovery efforts. The team of student journalists focused on the aftermath of the April 20 explosion at British Petroleum’s offshore drilling site, Deepwater Horizon, which killed 11 people and caused an oil spill that has surfaced throughout the Gulf affecting hundreds of communities.
Photographs of houses in the Lower 9th Ward left in disrepair five years after Hurricane Katrina were shot by D.A. James, veteran photographer and current web editor of The Ranger Online.
More planning could have made the final product better in my opinion. Cutlines on the photographs were repetitive in that 11 were exactly the same.
Perhaps copy about the Lower 9th Ward could have been included to give the reader/viewer more information.
And an introductory slide with a title could have eliminated the need to include the photographer's name in all the cutlines.
Copy, spread over the 17 photos could have begun this way:
Katrina was the most destructive and costly natural disaster in U.S. history, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This is what the Lower 9th Ward, one of the hardest hit areas, looks like today.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) reported that the Category 5 hurricane killed a total of 1,833 people across five states, damaged more than 420,000 houses and forced 1.2 million people to evacuate their homes.
Winds up to 135 mph tore off rooftops and four breached levees sent water gushing into the surrounding cities.
And so on.
Another option could have used sound, a voice-over reading the copy and melancholy or thoughtful music to set the tone of the tragic circumstances.