OXFORD — As the wind and rain of Hurricane Katrina started to subside, newspaper publishers all across Mississippi were scrambling.

Gathering facts, writing stories, processing photos, laying out pages, rolling presses and making deliveries are daunting challenges when phones don’t work, roads are blocked and there’s no prospect of power being restored for days, perhaps for weeks.

Mississippi publishers rose to the challenge back in 2005. It wasn’t to protect their advertising revenue. After all, businesses that no longer exist no longer advertise.

The motivation was this: Printed words on paper are affirming. Holding a newspaper makes the abstract real. It’s why sports champions and elections victors rush to get a paper the next morning, or sooner if possible. It’s why a family assembles to read a newspaper with a loved one’s obituary. They “know” their mother or father or sister or brother has died. Seeing it written adds a hard-to-define dimension.

A major part of that dimension is internalizing the scope of what has occurred. People are kind of lost, for lack of a better word, until facts can be and are accepted. As it happens, the moment of acceptance is also the moment recovery can begin.

The Sun Herald of Biloxi and Gulfport is among the larger newspapers that 10 years ago this month prepared for Katrina and then rallied its resources. Within hours of the storm, people who had lost everything were able to sit on steps leading to the slabs that once supported their homes and read about it. This was the moment they could stop feeling alone, and they could start thinking about their next steps.

The storm killed 167 people on the Gulf Coast and 238 total statewide, inflicting $125 billion in property damage. Mississippi — the whole state — was declared a disaster area. Those, however, are abstractions. The names and life stories of victims brings reality home. Trembling voices of survivors say, “This really happened.”

The Sun Herald, along with the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, were lauded with journalism’s highest honor — Pulitzer prizes — for putting commitment to their communities way ahead of any consideration of profit in the days and weeks after the storm.

Truth is, for several years after Aug. 29, 2005, every edition of every newspaper in this part of the world had the word “Katrina” in a headline somewhere in the paper.

But now that a decade has passed, coverage can be more reflective. The Sun Herald has accomplished this with the “app” it launched a few days ago.

As it happens, technology has been on the march, too. The Coast isn’t the same; neither is journalism.

The Internet was certainly available 10 years ago and every media company, broadcast or print, had rushed to create a website. Most were static, low-maintenance and centered on offering digital versions of their news stories and features.

Tools for online media are much more advanced today. With the advent of smart phones, tablet computers and wireless connections, it’s possible for skilled journalists to take storytelling to a new level — blending words, still and video images, actual sounds and voice recordings to provide information with unprecedented precision, clarity and interactivity.

A 2005 newspaper could provide the transcript of a stranded person’s 911 call. An app can let you hear it. A newspaper or 30-minute newscast in 2005 could provide a smattering of “before,” “after” and “today” photos of coastal landscapes. The app can provide many.

Unfortunately, some have taken the fact of unlimited space on the Internet to absurd ends. That is, if the newspaper had 20,000 photos and 5,000 stories related to the storm, they could all be uploaded — one big mish-mash. That’s stockpiling, not journalism. The Sun Herald app illustrates the difference. Katrina is beautifully broken down into manageable bites. The idea is to layer, not overload.

The app is not free. It costs a whopping $3 to download, but given that it is a book, a documentary, a movie, a statistical resource, a soundtrack, a diary and an image gallery of the worst natural disaster in American history, that’s certainly not an unreasonable price.

When Katrina made landfall, the media’s duty was to help people know and accept truth. To do this, they used any and every resource available.

On this anniversary, revisiting the horrors and the heroism is certainly worthwhile. And it speaks well, again, of this news organization, that effective use of the newer tools of storytelling has been coupled with the longstanding duty to inform.

Charlie Mitchell is a Mississippi journalist. Write to him at cmitchell43@yahoo.com.