Rockaways Newspaper Is Back in Ink After Weeks Only in Cyberspace

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times The Wave, the weekly newspaper in the Rockaways, has resumed printing after Hurricane Sandy ruined its offices. On Wednesday, Susan Locke, the publisher, worked on the computer, while Sandy Bernstein, the general manager, tried to keep the phone lines working.

Never has the name of The Wave, the weekly newspaper of the Rockaways, seemed so apt.

“Wa ve Of Fire, Wall Of Water,” read the headline atop The Wave last Friday, its first printed edition since Hurricane Sandy sent more than four feet of water crashing through its offices on Rockaway Beach Boulevard five weeks ago. It had been the first time the paper failed to publish in its 119-year history.

Like everybody else fighting to recover from the storm, the paper and many of its employees lost almost everything, lulled into complacency by their experience with Tropical Storm Irene. Like everybody else, they needed cars, electricity and a dry place to sleep.

Like other local companies, The Wave has been forced to cut back on labor. It may be in the news business, but it is also a small business, and the staff knew it would live or die by how quickly they were able to start putting out a newspaper again.

“Right now, we're trying to stay alive and do what we do,” said Howard Schwach, the editor, who has worked at The Wave since 1982. “I knew I couldn't do every story, but I wanted to keep The Wave alive.”

So, relying on scraps of luck and good humor, that is what they did.

The lone full-time reporter, Nicholas Briano, happens to live in an untouched part of Brooklyn. He could drive, and when he ran out of gas, he could make calls and update the newspaper's Web site and its Twitter account, which has doubled its number of followers since the storm.

Mr. Schwach, whose extended family lost three apartments and five cars in the hurricane's aftermath, fled the cold and dark to his daughter's house in Long Island. “It was very frustrating to be at arm's reach when so much was going on,” he said.

As limited as The Wave's reporting had to be, its readership in the days after the storm was even more so, as Rockaway residents could neither charge their ele ctronics nor find Internet or cellphone service.

There were fortunate breaks. The general manager's son, who works on the business staff, happened to be in New Rochelle the night of the storm, which saved his car from the flooding. His great-aunt, the publisher, Susan Locke, had an intact house, so she could offer the general manager, Sandy Bernstein - whose house and cars were gone - a home. And the empty second-floor room above The Wave's offices proved to be just big enough for a makeshift newsroom, where the staff worked until midnight Thursday. (The staff calls it the “Wave Cave.”)

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times The Wave is operating out of a crampe d space that once housed a church.

The devastation downstairs was almost total. The bound archives, spanning 118 years of Rockaway history, were destroyed. So were furniture, kitchen appliances, an expensive copy machine and a mail labeler, and the computers that Mr. Bernstein thought would be fine if they were on top of the desks. That was not high enough. Among the few things to be spared were two wall-mounted clown heads - memorabilia from the old Playland amusement park - that now stare over a room stripped down to wall studs and concrete.

Before Tropical Storm Irene hit, the newspaper's staff had taken everything to the second floor, but this time it decided the storm threat did not merit the trouble.

As the downstairs was being cleaned out in the first weeks after the hurricane, the upstairs space, which once housed a tiny church, began to fill up. A medical center donated computers. New tabletops from IKEA, mildly damaged shelves from down stairs and wooden bases were turned into temporary workstations. Mr. Bernstein reinstalled software.

“A bunch of things went wrong last week, and I'm sure a whole bunch of things will go wrong this week,” he said.

He does not have a solution to the biggest problem of all: the future. The Wave is likely to become a barometer for the pace of the Rockaways' economic recovery, as its finances rise and fall alongside the small businesses that advertise in it. Not all of them will reopen. Not all of the subscribers will return. And Mr. Bernstein is not sure he will be able to bring back all of the paper's freelance artists and part-time reporters.

Before the paper's distribution resumed, Mr. Schwach went through the new issue and crossed out the ads scheduled well in advance for each business wiped out by the storm. Then bundles of free copies went out to churches, open stores and warming stations. People grabbed them by the handful, delighted to see a neighb orhood institution back in business.

The front-page article told readers that The Wave was born of a disaster (an 1892 fire that inspired a local printer to start his own paper) and that the papers' staff had ridden out the storm just as they had, and it ended with hope that the edition would serve as a commemoration of the storm. “Rebuilding Begins,” a photo caption said.

Ms. Locke, the publisher, has not yet made plans to rebuild the newsroom, but she is adamant about one thing.

“This time,” she said, “we'll put everything up high.”