Hello there. Reading Dave Egger’s Zeitoun was a weird experience, to put it bluntly. The narrative feels like it is a fiction novel, told so intricately and reserved; yet there is a voice in the back of my head that keep telling me that this novel is a non-fiction book with descriptions of real people and real locations. I forgot whether someone said to me or I read it on somewhere, but I remember someone saying that Egger’s Zeitoun writes like a fiction book and uses that to take advantage of the limitations of being a non-fiction book. I’m not quite sure what that means, but after reading through the novel, I’m starting to see what that means. What I find most intriguing about the novel is how reserved the first part felt; nothing feels forced and everything flows so well. The call-and-response feel to the flashbacks of Zeitoun and his wife Kathy resembles the inevitable but slow coming of Hurricane Katrina, mirroring the gradually increasing category of Katrina and Kathy’s growing concern in the first part of the novel.

However, I’m not going to talk about Zeitoun in today’s blog post. I will be talking about the role of the media in America in general–but more specifically, in the New Orleans area. It is interesting to note that initially, reporters and journalists coming to report on the aftermath of the hurricane were the one of the channels of communication and information for the victims. As conditions started to become better for the victims, Hurricane Katrina became noted as one of the factors that forefronted online community journalism; and by online community journalism, I mean blogging about the event through NOLA.com, an online news website dedicated to New Orleans. The effects of the blogs written through NOLA.com were so great that Mark Glasser deemed it a “watershed moment in journalism.”