The Times-Picayune, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina, announced on Thursday a plan to slash its print publication to three days a week—effectively leaving New Orleans without a daily newspaper.
As part of the move, the New York Times reports that there will be "massive" layoffs at 175-year-old Times-Picayune as the paper focuses its efforts on NOLA.com.
The Newhouse family, which owns Advance Publications, the Times-Picayune's parent company, shuttered the Ann Arbor News in similar fashion in 2009. The print rollback will begin later this year, when a "new digitally focused company launches this fall with beefed up online coverage".
NOLA Media Group will significantly increase its online news-gathering efforts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while offering enhanced printed newspapers on a schedule of three days a week. The newspaper will be home-delivered and sold in stores on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays only.
On Wednesday, according to the website Best of New Orleans, the paper's staffers greeted the impending news with collective shock: Tonight, in private homes, on porches and at least one bar, employees of The Times-Picayune gathered to collectively absorb the shock of a New York Times report that the paper is about to undergo a massive restructuring that will leave New Orleans without a daily published newspaper--just as longtime local publisher Ashton Phelps prepares to leave and be replaced by Ricky Mathews, publisher of the Mobile Press-Register and president of Advance Alabama/Mississippi.
"I had to find this out by Twitter," one staffer told the site. "Do I go in to the office tomorrow? Do I even have a job to go in to tomorrow? I don't know. No one has called me. No one has said anything."
According to a Best of New Orleans source, the editorial staff will be cut by at least a third, "top brass will be fired and reporters who remain aboard will take sharp salary cuts and be expected to start blogging through the day."
Advance also announced Thursday that three other newspapers it owns in Alabama--the Birmingham News, Huntsville Times and Press-Register of Mobile--will move to a three-day-a-week printing schedule, too.
The Times-Picayune won the 2006 Pultizer Prize for public service reporting for its coverage of Katrina, as staffers rode out the storm in its offices, reporting despite power failures that shut down its printing presses.
This story caught my eye because I "grew up" in N.O., having moved there in my late elementary school years and lived there until married, working and the father of the first of two children.
So, I feel a certain "hometown" attachment to the Crescent City.
(Enough of an attachment, while we're at it, to know that "Crescent City" is, and always has been, a genuine city nickname as opposed to "The Big Easy" which, hand to God, I never heard until the Jeff Bridges / Ellen Barkin movie appeared in 1987, perhaps the first recorded instance of a city acquiring a nickname as the result of some stereotypical scripting being foisted upon the town by a Hollywood screenwriter....tail wagging the dog and all that).
But, I digress.
Ya'll.
The demise of the daily published print edition of The Times-Picayune, while a little sad and, to the folks who made their living with it, more than just a little painful doesn't qualify for inclusion as a topic on that most perennial of cultural presentations, "The Blame Game."
Younger, more self absorbed types might offer up a simple "shit happens."
The more mature, more compassionate among us might contribute a "that's the way it goes."
Technically, both points of view are correct.
But both, essentially, miss the point.
Time marches on.
And things change.
And just as it was a little sad and, to the folks who made their living with it, more than just a little painful when the local blacksmith had to shut down to make way for the new local tire dealer, the local eight track tape player factory had to shut down to make way for the new local cassette player factory (and that one continues to play itself out with each new daily updating and/or rebooting), it is a little sad and, to the folks who made their living with it, more than just a little painful that the Times-Picayune has to "stop the presses" to make way for the digital news sources that are available on a laptop, PC and/or smartphone near you.
While it's, at best, a little tasteless and, at worst, blatantly rude to make light of one's loss of livelihood, it is, at the same time, not inappropriate or inaccurate to offer that the end of the Times Picayune is not so much about social and/or economic revolution as it is, simply, about cultural evolution.
Time marches on.
And things change.
And whether it comes to us folded up in a rubber band, tossed on or near the front porch or from a few clicks of a mouse, that shouldn't come as news to anybody.
No comments:
Post a Comment