Here, for your reading pleasure, are two familiar cliches: 1. New Orleans is a unique city. 2. The newspaper business is changing. Several days ago, when it was announced that The Times-Picayune would get out of the daily print newspaper business, the second cliche kicked the first one’s ass. This makes no sense to me.
There’s more to that first cliche. I’m a New Orleanian, by adoption, and I can attest to the uniqueness of the place. Not just for the reasons visitors might think—the beads, the boobs, the music, the food—but for the most important reason of all: New Orleans is a genuine community. Not a “community” in the sense of like-minded gamers connected by the Internet, but in the sense of an urban space where the residents have deep connections to the place, to each other, and to the past.
Prior to the 2005 disaster, New Orleans had the highest level of “nativity” among America’s major cities, meaning the highest percentage of people living in the city who were born there. Often, they lived in houses mere blocks from where their parents and grandparents lived. I can see that tightly knit structure, so grievously ripped apart by the flood, gradually being rewoven.
The city’s calendar is unique, too. Days which are ordinary weekdays elsewhere have special meaning locally—from Monday being red beans and rice day to St. Joseph’s Day being the occasion for a Mardi Gras Indian street festival. I’ll never forget the day Bill Clinton was acquitted by the Senate of his impeachment charges. That story was front-page news in every paper in the country, except New Orleans. It was Fat Tuesday, so the front page of The Times-Picayune was devoted to a portrait of the King of Rex, who rules the city on Mardi Gras.
A strong community has intense ties to its institutions, too. That includes the Krewe of Rex, the Catholic Church, and The Times-Picayune. People love them or hate them, but New Orleanians tend not to be indifferent about them. (I compare this to my birthplace, Los Angeles, where a massive shoulder shrug ensued when two—two!—NFL teams up and left town, and where the steady, two-decade-long decline of the downtown daily leaves most folks not even partially whelmed).
New Orleans, before and after the disaster of 2005, was a hard place to find national chain retailers. They tended to shun the city, not finding in its compact blocks sufficient acreage. And after the flood, the businesses that were most tentative about returning were the chains that did have stores there, while the locals were back, shoveling, gutting, rebuilding, as soon as the city, in the Corps of Engineers locution, was “unwatered.” Neighborhoods still have corner groceries, corner bars, corner juke joints.
So: a city of tightly knit neighborhoods, of varying classes, with mainly local retail. Yet, the model for Advance Publication’s demotion of the New Orleans Times-Picayune metro daily into the Neverland of thrice-weekly print publication—gee, what day is it? Is there a paper today?—was based on, wait for it, a college town in Michigan. Ann Arbor, to be exact. And this plan is being applied to three papers in Alabama, as well—the Press-Register in Mobile; The Huntsville Times; The Birmingham News. All quite similar to New Orleans, of course. This is the kind of cookie-cutter decision-making that gives absentee ownership a bad name.
The Times-Picayune is not Starbucks or Rite-Aid or Winn-Dixie sitting on the sidelines waiting for the recovery. It is the paper people in New Orleans love, or love to hate. You’ve probably read the relevant stats: the TP enjoys the highest rate of print penetration of all dailies in the 50 biggest metro areas.
And 36 percent of New Orleanians are not connected to the Internet. Consider also that nola.com, the website to which Advance Publications now assumes people seeking news in the city will drift, is widely recognized as one of the ugliest and worst-designed such sites—aside from the others in the Advance newspaper stable, all of which are forced by Advance headquarters New York to use the same digital template.
Great article, Harry. I am sorry to hear this news. Although I live in Phila, PA, I read the Times-Pic when I am in New Orleans and it is one of the best U.S. newspapers. I do read nola.com occasionally and it is better than the above description. My family lives in the Detroit suburbs and the Detroit News and the Detroit Free press first merged and then dialed back to printing 2-3 times a week and on-line the other days. It is confusing and probably not good a good way to keep subscribers.
#1 Posted by Gretchen Bell, CJR on Wed 6 Jun 2012 at 01:47 PM
I admire the sentiment Harry, but the TP's circulation is half what it was before Katrina. Don't blame the owners - blame the apathetic public who abandoned a great newspaper. The paper was putting out a great product, but the loving, well connected community of New Orleans stopped buying it for seemingly no good reason. Hence, you don't get what you don't pay for.
#2 Posted by Joe, CJR on Thu 7 Jun 2012 at 11:02 AM
The metro area lost about 100,000 people. That's why the subscription rate went down. The money aspect of this decision is based on advertising dollars. The paper was successful enough to give bonuses last year. You don't give bonuses in a downturn. You give them in good, banner years. This is a very bad business decision. I hope a competitor will arise to fill in the gap the other 4 days a week. I think people would pay for the service, and that ad money would flow into it to support it. There is definitely the market for it. People "swear by" their daily paper here. It's the main source of our news. I can't imagine knowing what's going on here from the Internet. That's just not going to happen.
#3 Posted by Stan, CJR on Thu 7 Jun 2012 at 12:49 PM
Greetings from Hollywood! Great article! I grew up on the Times-Picayune as a child in Slidell, LA. In fact, it was my template for learning to write as a journalist. I had the pleasure of interviewing TP sports editor Peter Finney at a Saints game three years ago. I used to rewrite his stories as practice for what was to come for my own career.
While my local LA Times is good, to me the Times-Picayune is the BEST!~ It captures the Soul of the City like no other newspaper in the nation. I always look forward to reading it when I return home and I usually bring one back to LA with me. It covers the Saints like no other NFL city's newspaper.
I hope there's a way to save it as a daily. It's an institution in The City That Care Forgot. As for the cookie-cutter Advance websites, you are so right! They all look the same. I've seen individual's sites look much better! While it's not awful, I just believe it can be much better. And it would be nice if each city had their own identity on a website.
When America made the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon Bonapart and France in 1803, New Orleans was the centerpiece--although the 800,000 square miles stretched from N. O. to the Rocky Mountains. Like then, there is no city quite like my birthplace--The Crescent City, The Big Easy--New Orleans!
Geaux Saints! Geaux Times Picayune!
#4 Posted by Eric J. Chambers, CJR on Thu 7 Jun 2012 at 02:06 PM
"And so it goes, and so it goes..."
With the benefits of the the light-speed advancement of technology must come those things that some find objectionable. I tend to sympathize with Mr. Sheerer in his lamenting the shoving aside of the personal for the profitable.
Our generation, the one that thought it was the naz for all its revolutionary, self-righteous movements, has settled into, dare I say it, a contemplative horde of middle-aged idealists whose ideals are not exactly being appreciated or embraced by the new generation of
revolutionaries.
Hm, I wonder if our moms and pops, be they still with us, are releasing a little "tut-tut and tisk-tisk" as we complain, as they once did, to deaf ears about the "evolution" of our society?
#5 Posted by Larry Cataldo, CJR on Fri 8 Jun 2012 at 09:29 AM
Newspapers have a notoriously high profit margin. I don't know about the Times-Picayune but I would assume it's no different. While many businesses operate on a less than 10 percent margin, newspapers are often more than 20, even up to around 40 I've heard for some Gannett papers. Why they can't take a smaller piece of the pie I don't know. Greedy owners I guess.
#6 Posted by Greg Charles, CJR on Fri 8 Jun 2012 at 12:04 PM
If everyone cancelled their subscriptions maybe the new owners would sell and we could get owners who "give a damn".
#7 Posted by Margaret Wall, CJR on Fri 15 Jun 2012 at 09:16 AM