I've set up a page with all the Times-Picayune front pages from last Monday on. I'll get one up for the Biloxi Sun Herald tonight.

The New York Observer weighs in today with a Times-Pic story, probably the best of the lot so far. Not only was the paper a lifeline of information for those in and around New Orleans, it became the voice of the city to the rest of the nation.

On the afternoon of Monday, Aug. 29, a pair of reporters from the Picayune had ventured out of the paper’s wind-lashed headquarters after the eye of hurricane Katrina had passed some 70 miles to the southeast of the city.

New Orleans had skirted the worst; television reporters stationed in New Orleans were quickly shuttled eastward along the gulf coast to the parts of Mississippi and Alabama where it was judged the storm took its heaviest toll.

These two local reporters were assigned to the local story, but found the national one: water, from neighboring Lake Pontchartrain, cascading violently through a breach in a broken levee along the 17th Street Canal.

The paper’s printing plant was incapacitated. And it was impossible for the reporters to find any official from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to comment on the breach. When The Times-Picayune put out a preliminary report on its Web site documenting the levee breach, it was without any comment from the federal government. It was clear to the newspaper staff that New Orleans was about to fall prey to the worst natural and humanitarian disaster on American soil anyone there could remember. It wasn’t clear who was listening.

“Normally,” Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss said by phone Sept. 5, “you’d expect there to be a press conference or a broadcast from FEMA. But here, journalists without any kind of officialdom backing them up were observing something firsthand and informing the public.”

In the teeming Superdome a day later, it was not uncommon to hear people complain that the thing they needed most was for someone to come in with a bullhorn and tell everyone what was going on. In 10 days of devastation following the hurricane, The Times-Picayune was as close as they would get.

As FEMA and Washington’s relief efforts sputtered, The Times-Picayune’s critical dispatches, including the prescient Aug. 29 report of the levee breach and the paper’s boosting editorial page, filled the void left by the sheer absence of any kind of government presence.

While national papers including The New York Times deployed scores of reporters — even Boldface scribe Campbell Robertson and sportswriter Jere Longman — The Times-Picayune told the local story by local reporters whose own homes and families were imperiled in Katrina’s devastating aftermath.