Above the Fold: The History of Newspapers in Louisiana

Terry Baquet is editor-in-chief of Verite News in New Orleans. He is a twenty-eight-year veteran of NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and a lifelong New Orleanian. He served as Sunday editor and was the page 1 editor during the paper’s Katrina coverage, which won two Pulitzer Prizes, in breaking news and public service. In 2012 Baquet was named managing editor / director of print, a role in which he essentially oversees all editorial decisions for the newspaper’s print edition. He has served on the boards of Lede New Orleans and Spaceship Media. Baquet has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror twice, and he chaired the jury that decided the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. 

Dr. Shearon Roberts is associate professor of mass communication and faculty member in African American and diaspora studies at Xavier University in New Orleans. She is the director of the honors program Xavier Exponential. She earned a PhD in Latin American studies from Tulane University’s Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies. Her forthcoming book Media Discourse in Haiti examines the last decade in Haiti through the lens of Haiti’s media as the country recovered from the 2010 earthquake. She is co-editor of HBO’s Treme and Post-Katrina Catharsis: The Mediated Rebirth of New Orleans (Lexington, 2017) and co-author of Oil and Water: Media Lessons from Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (University Press of Mississippi, 2014). She studies the impact of digital media and social movements and is the editor of the 2020 book Recasting the Disney Princess in an Era of New Media and Social Movements (Rowman & Littlefield). She has worked as a reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean, and she holds an MMC from Louisiana State University and a BA in mass communication with a double minor in Spanish and French from Dillard University.

Mark Roudané is the great-great-grandson of Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez, founder of the South’s first Black newspaper, L’Union, as well as the New Orleans Tribune, America’s first Black daily. The author of The New Orleans Tribune: An Introduction to America’s First Black Daily Newspaper, Roudané’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic and 64 Parishes. Through his writings and collaborative public history initiatives, Roudané has helped foster greater understanding of and appreciation for the Black freedom movement born in New Orleans over 160 years ago. 

Follow his work at www.facebook.com/roudanezhistory and www.roudanez.com. 

Jari C. Honora, a Certified Genealogist®, works as Family Historian at the Williams Research Center of the Historic New Orleans Collection. He is a native New Orleanian and graduate of St. Augustine High School and Tulane University. He also does historical and genealogical research professionally, including previous research for the TV programs “Finding Your Roots,” “We’ll Meet Again,” and the Georgetown Memory Project. He is a trustee of the Board for Certification of Genealogists and board member of the Louisiana Historical Society and Genealogical Research Society of New Orleans.

Dr. Michael Ross is a professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. He is the author of numerous prize-winning articles and two prize-winning books: Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Civil War Era (LSU Press, 2003) and The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era (Oxford University Press, 2015). The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case received favorable reviews in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other periodicals; was a selection of the History Book Club; and won The Historic New Orleans Collection’s Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History and the Library Choice Award for Non-Fiction by the New Orleans Public Library Foundation. He serves as associate editor of the Journal of Supreme Court History, has served as the historical advisor to the United States Mint, and has twice delivered talks in the Leon Silverman Lecture Series at the United States Supreme Court. He holds a JD from the Duke University School of Law and earned a PhD in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Michael Tisserand is former editor of Gambit newspaper and is the author of Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White (HarperCollins, 2018), the Eisner Award­–winning biography of New Orleans native George Herriman, creator of the comic strip Krazy Kat. Tisserand’s other books include the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award–winning The Kingdom of Zydeco (Arcade, 1998); the Hurricane Katrina memoir Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember (Harper, 2007); and My Father When Young (Sager Group, 2021), a collection of 1950s-era photography by his father, Jerry Tisserand. Tisserand’s work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Oxford American, the Nation, Daily Beast, and Lit Hub. He is currently working on books about Bunny Matthews (forthcoming from The Historic New Orleans Collection) and Charlie Chaplin.  

Alison Fensterstock has worked as a music critic for the alt-weekly Gambit and the daily Times-Picayune. Along with Michael Tisserand, she is the coauthor of The Historic New Orleans Collection’s forthcoming biography of cartoonist Bunny Matthews. She is also the editor of NPR Music’s collection Turning the Tables: How Women Made Popular Music (NPR, 2024).

Dr. Andrea Miller is professor and dean in the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas. Prior to that, she served as associate dean for undergraduate studies in LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication. Miller received her doctorate from the University of Missouri–Columbia School of Journalism and was an award-winning television news producer for a decade. Miller has published articles on television news and crisis coverage in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Media Psychology, Visual Communication Quarterly, and the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management. Additionally, Miller has three books with co-authors and co-editors: Oil and Water: Media Lessons from Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (University Press of Mississippi, 2014), News Evolution or Revolution? The Future of Print Journalism in the Digital Age (Peter Lang, 2014), and Public Relations and Journalism in Times of Crisis, A Symbiotic Partnership (Peter Lang, 2019).

David Hammer is an award-winning investigative reporter at WWL Louisiana with more than twenty-six years of experience as a TV, print, and wire-service reporter. Hammer has won five regional Emmy Awards for his television investigations, including two environmental news Emmys. He also won national awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and from the Scripps Howard Foundation for his investigation of what caused the BP oil spill in 2010. As a seventh-generation New Orleanian, Hammer is proud to expose the governmental corruption, environmental pollution, and other abuses of power that damage our local communities.

Dr. Vicki Mayer is professor of communication at Tulane University. Her research encompasses media and communication industries and their political economies, infrastructures, and organizational work cultures. Her critiques of mass media informs her own work in digital innovation and publishing, most recently on ViaNolaVie and New Orleans Historical. In 2021, she won the Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Gordon Russell has been reporting in southeast Louisiana since 1999. The stories he has covered include Hurricane Katrina and its grim aftermath; the downfall of former mayor Ray Nagin; the brazen self-dealing in Louisiana’s prison system; and the online-commenting scandal at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He was part of the team that produced “Tilting the Scales,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 2019. Before moving to Louisiana, he worked as a reporter at the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Florida, and at the Dominion Post in Morgantown, West Virginia. 

Jack Davis was a reporter, columnist, and editor for three New Orleans newspapers—Figaro, the States-Item, and the Times-Picayune. In 1983, he became metro editor at the Chicago Tribune and then editor-in-chief of Tribune Company’s newspaper in Virginia, moved back to Chicago as president of Tribune Interactive in 1998, and then moved to Connecticut as editor and president of Hartford Courant, America’s oldest newspaper, when it was purchased by Tribune. He became vice president of Chicago Metropolis 2020, a non-profit planning group and joined the boards of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Congress for the New Urbanism. Living now in New Orleans, where his wife and son are natives, he is chair of the executive council of WWNO radio and served as acting executive director of the Preservation Resource Center. He is a graduate of Harvard College, attended the University of Rajasthan in India in 1971, and was a professional journalism fellow at Stanford.