"It has been a month now since you last heard from us. Much of that month was spent doing what many of you have been doing, trying to find normalcy in a world steeped in chaos. But the Tulane community is strong, and we are united."

With that staff editorial opening, The Tulane Hullabaloo went back online last week, trying to provide students at Tulane University yet another step back to the lives they knew before the devastation of Hurricane Katrina affected the New Orleans college.

While students and faculty try to piece together their lives from all over the country, staffers at the Hullabaloo have shown their commitment to providing at least one way those at the abandoned school can keep their sense of community. And if you ask the editors, it was never even a question.

"I asked the staff, and they all agreed that we want to keep the university together as best as possible and we wanted to help," said Kate Schafer, the paper's editor in chief, in an e-mail. "We all miss Tulane so much, it was for our own morale as well as the students'."

The process hasn't been easy, said Schafer, who is actually now based in Philadelphia. The staff was split apart when Tulane University president Scott Cowen canceled classes (and eventually the entire fall semester) and closed the school back in late August. Many of the staff members left for multiple reasons. The rest, while preoccupied with helping family and friends deal with the aftermath of the storm, literally found themselves scattered throughout the country and even overseas.

Nevertheless, where there's a will, there's a way.

Using phones was going to be a problem because the New Orleans area code still wasn�t fully operational and nonstop conference calls can get to be a hassle. So Schafer got the process started by using Facebook, an online community website, to get everyone together. The site is designed specifically to connect people at schools. Schafer said she arranged for a chat room program so staff members all over could participate in virtual meetings. They then set up a chain of command for editing stories so reporters and editors knew where to send their e-mails.

The Hullabaloo outsources their website, which actually worked to their advantage since the Tulane server is still down. They have also received help from Digital Partners (now College Publisher), who set the staff up with a message board and other online services. With all this in place, it didn't take that long for the paper to get back up and running.

"It's quite an exciting experiment in college journalism and I hope we can keep it up," Schafer said.

It appears as if the paper already has the support. After just three days online, the website had about 1,200 hits. The paper's launch mainly featured stories about the closing of the school and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina because, like any good university paper, the Hullabaloo focused on the main issue affecting the community.

Editors know there will be plenty to report due to the storm and the huge toll it took on not just the university, but also the entire area. There will be stories filtering in from all over the country of people affected as well as features on how Tulane will forever be changed. Still, the return to normalcy also means addressing some of the other issues, more commonly found on other college campuses throughout the country...like the success of the football team, university politics and the entertainment that is so important to university life. As the university struggles to fix itself, The Hullabaloo will be right there to cover it, and that has media sources throughout the country extremely impressed.

"This is a great story," said Mike Hiestand, an attorney with the Student Press Law Center. "A student newspaper often holds a community together. And this is a situation where these editors have an opportunity to connect people at this university to the lives they had before."

For the editors at the Hullabaloo, as well as the students and faculty at Tulane, that's a big first step to recovery.