Free registration may be required to read the story. “With their offices and presses flooded, news media outlets in New Orleans mostly abandoned newsprint and television broadcasts yesterday and set up shop on the Web.

The Times-Picayune, whose daily circulation is 270,000, put out only an electronic edition yesterday with a one-word headline summing up the impact of Hurricane Katrina: “Catastrophic….

The Internet, as a decentralized communications network, can be more resilient than traditional media when natural disasters occur. “Owning broadcast towers and printing presses were useless,” said Jeff Jarvis, a consultant to online media companies. “The Web proved to be a better media in a case like this.”"

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