As Filipinos brace for the possible arrival this week of a third powerful typhoon — just weeks after two earlier storms killed more than 850 people and destroyed infrastructure and crops worth hundreds of millions of dollars — a museum curator in Marikina, a suburb of Manila, is doing all she can to preserve one symbol of the country’s history: hundreds of pairs of shoes once owned by the former first lady Imelda Marcos.

According to Dolly Borlongan, who runs Marikina’s Footwear Museum, flooding caused by Tropical Storm Ketsana last month did possibly irreparable damage to about 20 of the 800 pairs of shoes Ms. Marcos donated to the museum before it opened in 2001. A museum security guard waded into knee-deep water to save the rest of the collection.

Ms. Marcos amassed her infamous shoe collection during the reign of her husband, Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines as a dictator for two decades until he was driven from power in 1986. Weeks after the Marcoses fled the country that year, Fox Butterfield reported in The New York Times that people visiting the Malacanang Palace in Manila were shocked by evidence of the family’s opulent lifestyle. Mr. Butterfield wrote:

Representative Stephen J. Solarz, Democrat of Brooklyn, who was on a visit to Manila, said the most striking sight was the dozens of racks of shoes laid out like a department store. Mr. Solarz, head of the House Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, said after a tour of the palace today, ”Compared to Imelda, Marie Antoinette was a bag lady.”

The comment by Mr. Solarz, who left Manila today, came after he viewed the palace basement, which is stocked with hundreds of dresses and 3,000 pairs of shoes for Ms. Marcos. On one shelf were four identical pairs of black-and-silver shoes from Charles Jourdan. Arrayed above and below them were rows of footwear with labels like Gucci, Ungaro, Beltrami, Pancaldi and Walter Steiger.

Over a decade later, our colleague Seth Mydans reported from Manila that the first estimate had been high and Ms. Marcos had in fact left behind just 1,220 pairs of shoes — along with 508 floor-length gowns, 888 handbags, 65 parasols and 15 mink coats. But no matter what other indulgences were uncovered after the dictatorship ended, the shoes became the most enduring symbol of the greed, corruption and decadence of the Marcos era.

Still, there are Filipinos who remain entranced by Ms. Marcos. Some of them turned out to help her celebrate her 80th birthday earlier this year. Others make the pilgrimage to the Footwear Museum in Marikina. Ms. Borlongan acknowledged that tourists often visit the museum to sample the “flair of Imelda” rather than to celebrate her efforts on behalf of Marikina’s shoe industry.

The fascination with Ms. Marcos is not limited to the Philippines. In New York, a new musical called “Imelda,” opened this month at the Pan Asian Repertory Theater, featuring the song “3,000 Pairs of Shoes.” A review by our colleague Anita Gates appeared in The Times under the headline: “The Woman (and the Politics) Behind All Those Shoes.”

In 2007, David Byrne — a performer known not just for his music but also for his distinct stage outfits — appeared at Carnegie Hall with a new song cycle called “Here Lies Love,” described on his Web site as a look at “Imelda Marcos meditating on events in her life, from her childhood spent in poverty and her rise to power to her ultimate departure from the palace.”

At the Footwear Museum in Marikina, Ms. Borlongan said that the remaining 780 pairs of Marcos shoes are being elevated to prevent further damage from flooding that could be caused by the storm expected to hit the Philippines on Saturday.

The shoe industry is a key part of the economy of Marikina. The banner across the top of every page of the suburb’s Web site, boasting that Marikina is “Home of the World’s Largest Shoe,” is an obvious clue. According to Ms. Borlongan, the Marcos collection is important mainly because of the attention it draws to local shoe-making. “The shoes of Imelda do not represent her flair,” she told The Lede. “The shoes represent the contribution of Imelda in promoting the shoe industry of Marikina.”

The recent storms have also led to the cancellation of an annual shoe festival in Marikina. The event, celebrating Marikina’s importance to footwear production in the country, was scheduled to occur over a few weeks, starting in October. It typically attracts roughly 50,000 visitors and includes parades, fashion shows and design competitions, Mayor Marides Fernando said. She estimated the cancellation would mean a loss of $2 million, and that overall the city had been hit with roughly 10 billion Philippine pesos, or $214.6 million, in damages.

For the shoe museum, which has been closed for a month and is scheduled to reopen on Oct. 26, the festival’s cancellation will mean fewer visitors, further cutting into ticket sales, Ms. Borlongan said. But given concerns about more basic needs — housing, infrastructure repairs and more — the absence is not registering as particularly pressing.

“Everybody’s busy trying to restore their area, restore their lives,” she said. “Nobody’s really thinking of the parade right now.”

Christian Albin, Four Seasons Head Chef, Dies at 61

It’s called Duke City Fix , and even though Perry enjoys the group blog about Albuquerque, he says it can’t supply news like the other three traditional news sites he visits.

That has him worried as the news industry faces declining revenues and staff cuts.

“Bloggers, we get a lot of information from the media ourselves,” he said. “If the news media is not really reporting that, how are we going to find out? There are a lot of interesting stories I’ve only gotten from The Tribune and nowhere else.”

The closing of The Tribune is the Albuquerque example of a news industry that’s in turmoil nationwide. Local news junkies, independent online journalists and bloggers say they’re concerned about a growing information void, even as some of them are taking steps to fill it.

“We’re going from newspapers to the Internet, and we’re not there yet,” said Heath Haussamen, an independent journalist who reports on and analyzes New Mexico politics at nmpolitics.net.

“Newspapers are hurting, and Internet sites, on local levels, aren’t quite making it yet. Some are, but it’s not common.”

Haussamen, who also wrote a column for The Tribune, began his site in March 2006 while a reporter at the Las Cruces Sun-News. Advertisers began contacting him, and he quit his job with the newspaper two months later to work full time on the Internet. His site’s daily traffic has increased tenfold since launch to around 800 unique visitors a day, and he estimated $1,700 worth of monthlong ads are running on the site now.

“In a small state like this, I don’t think this kind of site can make the kind of money to support a family,” he said. “That’s one of the difficulties.”

But money isn’t the main appeal for Haussamen. It’s the freedom to do the in-depth work he enjoys.

“One of my big frustrations was that hard news or investigative stories weren’t getting done,” he said. “I was told, ‘There’s no time for this.’ ”

But there was time for lighter stories like covering popular ice cream flavors during the summer, he said.

“I thought,” he said. “it was a waste of my time to be doing stories like that.”

Those are the kind of stories Perry, who runs a blog focusing on Albuquerque mass transit big-abq-things.blogspot.com, expects that newspaper or newspaper Web site readers might see more of as journalism organizations shrink.

“It’s essentially just stuff to make ratings,” he said. “Car crashes, a murder. It’s not really stuff I’m interested in like, say, city government — kind of smaller things, which are admittedly less interesting to most people.”

A news world full of popular-ice-cream-flavor or car-crash stories might sound harmless, but with less investment in difficult, investigative, time-consuming journalism, Chantal Foster, the founder of Duke City Fix, sees serious threats.

“The deep work, the deep thinking, data analysis — that’s one of the things I particularly see as the greatest loss for civilization,” she said. “Our best work as humans comes from the times in which we’ve objectively looked at what’s going on around us.”

It’s the kind of work she and other Duke City Fix users, who volunteer their contributions to the site, typically don’t have the time to perform, she said.

Paying people to do that type of work for Duke City Fix is a possibility but not a goal, she said. It would only happen if it helped accomplish the site’s core mission: creating a socially constructive online community that expresses Albuquerque’s identity.

“It would be a means to an end,” she said.

Foster said she has received requests to sell ad space on the site, but she has not done any serious estimation of potential revenues, nor does she plan to any time soon. She recently began accepting a small number of Google ads to help pay for the cost of running Duke City Fix.

Looking to the future, she sees online newspapers evolving into a mix of the hyper-personal, opinionated approach of blogs and journalism that strives — but can’t, she notes — to be objective and opinion-neutral.

“It will be some compromise between that hyper-personal and obviously biased voice we’re used to from bloggers and what I call the false screen of journalistic distance,” she said. “It will be a shift, but it will be a welcome shift.”

Joe Monahan, the man behind New Mexico Politics With Joe Monahan, doesn’t see objective news going out of business, but he does see it getting smaller and becoming one of many niche information products on the Web.

“That top-down model — here’s your newspaper; here’s what you get — is coming to an end,” he said. “That doesn’t mean professional journalism is coming to an end. It’s just going to be transformed.”

He guesses readers might see an evolution of the model seen now: A traditional news organization, along with others, provides the initial information, while journalists — or bloggers — provide analysis, reaction and additional, original reporting.

“I do see people like me doing it full time and making a living off it,” he said. “I’ve had a successful financial model. It’s just a question of how many people want to do it. It’s a tremendous amount of work.”

Monahan described his site as “significantly profitable” but said the money is still less than what people will want to make.

Still, with the affordability and ease of Web publication, he sees many opportunities for young journalists willing to strike out on their own.

“As this new generation takes over, they’ll find the model that fits,” he said. “The key is to have the freedom to publish.”

On this piece, I edited footage from a freelancer around voice over supplied by Seth Mydans, the author of the story, which can be found here.

On nytimes.com.

I shot and edited the video while a producer for the International Herald Tribune. I also performed all of the interviews, and provided the voice over. Jonathan Magee refined the voice over script, and provided insight into the overall assembly of the story; he also shot footage that we ended up not using for the sake of brevity and focus.

It ran on The New York Times in addition to the International Herald Tribune. You can’t see it on the IHT’s Web site since it has been folded into nytimes.com at global.nytimes.com.

She had to do something to help with the family’s monthly medical bills, which were running in the thousands of dollars.

She had to do something about the family’s house payments as her employee, who preferred to remain unnamed, shifted money to health care.

“They’re wonderful people in a situation that’s awful,” said Campbell, co-owner of Campbell & Campbell Real Estate Services in Albuquerque. “We’re just trying to do everything we could do.”

Campbell helped organize a fund-raising barbecue, raffle and donation drive that, with the generous assistance of her staff, had collected $4,500 as of mid-December.

Campbell isn’t the only one in the Albuquerque area making an extra effort to help those in need, especially around the holidays. Stories of generosity are too numerous to track down, but a few can serve for the rest.

Some people are sharing food and belongings to set an example of generosity for their children. Others want to repay the favor of being helped themselves.

Some, like Campbell, want to help create a world of goodness where they would be treated with the same sympathy and kindness.

“If something happened to one of my kids, I’d look at it like the same thing,” Campbell said. “I would hope people would step up and help.”

She expressed amazement with the number of people who have helped.

“There are a lot of big hearts out there,” she said. “Sometimes I think we just don’t hear of it all the time in the news; the majority of which you’re going to get is negative.”

Classmates who care

Jana Henton, a fifth-grade teacher at S.Y. Jackson Elementary School, also says a lot of good gets missed.

Take the students at her school who have raised about $37,000 so far to help pay the medical bills of their classmate, Lane Cuthbert. The 10-year-old fourth-grader has Wegener’s granulomatosis, a potentially fatal disease that inflames blood vessels and can damage organs, and his classmates wanted to lend a hand.

“We want to help him because he’s really nice, and it’s really nice to help someone who is nice,” said Megan Schoepke, a fifth-grader who serves on the Student Council. “I hope he feels better, and I hope they find a cure for him so he can get better.”

The students have held a pickle sale and benefit dinner. A growing collection of donated books will be sold Jan. 30. Funds from the school’s annual St. Patrick’s Day bake sale will also go to Lane.

Robert Foster, Lane’s father, said he wasn’t surprised by the community’s reaction, but by the extent of it.

“It is just amazing,” he said. “The people coming up to you and saying, `I live right here, this address. If you guys ever need anything, just come on over.’ That just helps us deal with it and get through it.”

Henton gives credit to Lane’s classmates.

“The ideas and energy behind it have been generated by the kids,” she said. “Kids have good hearts.”

A mother’s hopes

Good hearts are made, not automatic, warns Placitas resident and mother Kathy Goldsmith.

“If all the children grow up thinking you’re not supposed to help, what’s going to happen to the people who actually need it? If everybody stops helping, it’s just not going to work. Life won’t work,” she said.

Goldsmith has been giving away extra food, donated by friends trying to help out her and her two 3-year-old daughters, for about a year to anyone who asked. She expanded her effort by posting a notice on Craigslist.org, a Web site that offers free classified ads, that invited anyone who was hungry to give her a call.

“We just ended up with too much food, and we don’t want it getting wasted,” she said. “We’re trying to help people the best we can, and hopefully karma will shine back on us.”

Over the past year, she said, she has helped about 200 people. Goldsmith also put out an open invitation to anyone looking to share a Christmas dinner. So far one family and one other person have responded.

“I think America was set up to help out people, no matter their race, color, financial status,” she said. “That’s part of being human, too – just trying to help each other.”

Dinner for strangers

After encouragement from her children, Rio Rancho resident Yolanda Sosa advertised a free Thanksgiving dinner on Craigslist. She received 10 responses, far more than she had expected.

“Every one of them asked for it for themselves, except for one,” she said. “She was asking for it for her neighbor.”

The neighbor’s husband had just left her and her three kids, ages 15, 10 and 8, without any money, Sosa said she was told, the result being a canceled Thanksgiving dinner.

“My children and I have been in that situation before where we’ve needed help and somebody came in to help us,” Sosa said. “I was like, `She’s gong to have a Thanksgiving dinner.’ ”

With the clear chance to help someone who saw a neighbor in need; a freezer full of turkeys, purchased during a sale at Smith’s; and her children enthusiastic about sharing meals after participating in a food drive at school, the decision was easy.

The meal was delivered to the neighbor through the woman who originally contacted Sosa on Craigslist. The gift made the neighbor cry, Sosa learned through an e-mail.

“My son, I saw the tears forming in his eyes when he read that e-mail,” she said. “I think more it helped my kids than it did me. They knew they were making somebody else happy.”

The Sosa family plans on giving away a turkey for Christmas.

“I try to do everything I can to teach my kids that it’s not about you, it’s about helping other people,” Sosa said. “It gives you hope to know there’s good people in the world.”

The Albuquerque Tribune published this article Dec. 24, 2007.

With cold weather and snow flurries expected this weekend, they just might. But Public Service Company of New Mexico has a little good news to offset the bad.

The company estimates more natural gas will be used this January than last, but expects the average residential bill to be less than last year’s.

That’s because January’s per-therm cost of natural gas dropped by 19 percent from last year for PNM customers.

This January’s average bill will likely come in around $116, according to PNM. Last January it was $129.

Company spokeswoman Susan Sponar said the drop was due to a warmer winter in other parts of the country driving down demand for gas, thus lowering its price.

The company also estimates that average bills in February and March will be less than what they were last year. They’ll still be in the $91 to $110 range.

PNM encourages its customers in numerous ways to cut down on their natural gas bills.

That includes weatherizing your home, sealing off unused rooms and lowering the heat during the night.

“Being more watchful” is how Benavidez describes it.

He keeps his home’s doors closed. At night, he puts his thermostat at 70 degrees, down from 75.

If those measures don’t cut it, there is help for families struggling with bills, as long as their household income meets certain requirements.

Last year, 5,100 households got assistance through PNM’s Good Neighbor Fund, which gives grants to households fighting high heating costs, Sponar said.

This year’s numbers aren’t yet in, but more than $700,000 has been raised.

Another option – the federally funded Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program – is creating some confusion.

That’s because the grants available through the program are far less than they were last year, said Betina Gonzales McCracken, communications director with the New Mexico Human Services Department.

Instead of households getting one-time grants of about $417 as they did last year, they can expect $127 this year, she explained.

Blame the funding.

Gonzales McCracken said that last year, the state added $23 million in emergency funds to the federal funding, which has held steady at about $10 million for the past four years.

This year, the Human Services Department might get $2 million in state help, she said.

“While the price of gas is going up on a regular basis,” she said, “they (the federal government) have not increased funding for this program.”

Last year, a record number of households received assistance through the program – 71,794, Gonzales McCracken said.

“We’re assuming we’re going to serve the same amount of people as last year,” she said. “With less money, the benefit is going to be a little bit less.”