“A lot of these people might not have come back for a regular funeral, but they came back for this one,” says Rebecca Theim, a former Times-Picayune reporter who founded DashThirtyDash (from the newspaper code -30- marking the end of a story), the organization that held the event as a way to raise money for laid-off staff members. “Everyone’s scattered to the winds. But we came back for this.”

In May, the parent company of The Times-Picayune, Newhouse Media, announced large-scale cutbacks as well as plans to reduce publication to three times a week in favor of an expanded Web site. Sunday’s edition represents the official end of the old publishing schedule, and made New Orleans the largest metropolitan area in the country without its own daily newspaper. Citizens are waiting to see whether or not a streamlined and primarily digital Times-Picayune, together with a collection of blogs, television and radio, can serve the purpose the paper once did.

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