But what about the real devastation, the real loss of the past two weeks — the homes and lives wrecked by Hurricane Sandy?  For all of the much-needed early storm coverage on TV — think windblown reporter up to his hip boots in floodwater — it may be newspaper journalism that can tell what happened most fully and most evocatively. It can synthesize and describe the problems; it can find the people affected and examine their lives more deeply; it can return to a troubled situation and follow the progress, or the lack of progress; and it can “comfort the afflicted,” as the saying goes, putting pressure on officials by making the stories of those in distress impossible to avoid.  So, rather than join those who are dissecting the journalistic lessons of the election (Has Nate Silver killed horse-race coverage forever? Will pundits ever thrive again?), I want to recognize some of the Times journalism that I found most important in recent weeks: the tough on-the-ground reporting from places like Breezy Point, the Rockaways, and New York City’s housing projects.  Consider the first four paragraphs of this front-page article last Monday:  Watching the Manhattan skyline shimmer over Jamaica Bay had always been one of the charms of life in the Rockaways. But now, when the Empire State Building winks on each night, those lights feel almost like a punch in the gut.  It felt that way to the two women caked in the sandy silt that still blankets most streets here, as they trudged up Rockaway Beach Boulevard on Saturday, pushing shopping carts they had dug out of wreckage piled beside the boarded-up C-Town Supermarket.  The women, Monique Arkward and her neighbor Eyvette Martin, pushed the carts more than 40 blocks from their battered bungalows to St. Francis de Sales Church, where they had heard — by word of mouth, since phones hardly work here — that they might find bottled water, batteries and some measure of warmth.  “We’re living like cavemen,” Ms. Arkward said. “It’s like we’re forgotten. It’s like they say, ‘O.K., when we get to them, we’ll get to them.’ ”  I talked to the author of the article, Sarah Maslin Nir, who covers Queens regularly. “I kept driving back and forth from Manhattan to Queens, and I felt like I was constantly going between the haves and the have-nots,” she said.  When she first got to Breezy Point, where more than a hundred houses had burned down, she saw “people kneeling next to the ash pits where their homes had been, sifting with sticks for their children’s pottery,” she said. “They were on their hands and knees, and they were sobbing.”  On another occasion, on Beach 66 Street in the Rockaways, “people were so eager to tell their story they were actually screaming.” Residents deeply resented being neglected, she said.  When she first came across Ms. Arkward and Ms. Martin, she thought they were homeless but and then realized they were middle-class people, “filthy beyond belief” with silt.  “It made me realize that a person’s stature could be so completely degraded,” she said. “People were just as destroyed as their homes.”  That’s just one example among many in which Times reporters went to extraordinary lengths to get the stories of ordinary people’s suffering. I was equally struck by Cara Buckley‘s and Michael Wilson’s front-page article about life without power in New York’s public housing projects.  It included this passage: “As light drained from the skies above the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn on Thursday, Sharlyn Marin, 18, huffed her way up 140 steps to visit her godmother, Judith Rodriguez, on the 10th floor. Blind and in a wheelchair, Ms. Rodriguez, 62, relied on Ms. Marin as her sole conduit to the outside world.”  Such articles, involving shoe-leather reporting at its best, are not easy to get. The only way to get those scenes is to be there — in this case, to climb the stairs in a dark and dangerous housing project.  Ms. Buckley told me about her experience in an e-mail: “It’s actually a 14-story building, and the photographer, Ruth Fremson, and I went to the top twice and then worked our way down. No matter the time of day, the stairways were pitch black, windowless and without power.”  Not all of the storm coverage has been of this gritty sort. Much has been made on the Web and on Twitter of a few articles in the features sections about the trials of Manhattan’s affluent, reduced to flushing their toilets with white Zinfandel, or about the horrors of storm-related weight gain. Despite their disclaimers (“a tightening of the waistband hardly counts as a crisis in a region where so many have endured actual devastation”), these articles may seem a little tone-deaf; but they’re harmless enough, and they add to the conversation.  In addition, some readers complained to me last Thursday that storm articles had come off the front page for two days and had become a much-reduced presence on the home page of the Web site, superseded by coverage following the election. The readers make a valid point, though the inside-the-paper coverage has continued to be strong, and storm stories returned to prominent display by Friday.  The important thing is that The Times not let up on its reporting of the many ordinary lives still in chaos and danger — lives that are still far from true recovery.
Some of the most compelling journalism in the last week looked at ordinary lives that were deeply affected by the hurricane.