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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Advance Publications

1. July 26, 2012 11:36 PM

   Audit Notes: more NOLA rumblings, Journatic, well-squawked

   A new buyer emerges in New Orleans, Quick and Sorkin did good, etc.

   By Dean Starkman

   —Can we agree at this point that Advance Publications’s attempt to sell its plans for dramatic newsroom cuts and ramped up online news production at the Times-Picayune as a bold leap into the future—in effect, putting digital lipstick on a hamster—is not going over so well down in the Crescent City? First, there was the generalized uproar. Then, the...

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2. October 8, 2012 11:27 AM

   Facing up to the high cost of free news

   Is there a quality argument to support the digital ads-only model?

   By Dean Starkman

   Pretty soon, proponents of free digital news will have to own up to the implications of their model. The structure is flawed. To rely on online ads as the sole source of revenue is both unsound in theory, and in practice it's having disastrous consequences in regional newsrooms, mostly notable at the Times-Picayune and other Advance Publications papers across...

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3. June 14, 2012 06:50 AM

   New Orleans meets the Hamster Wheel

   The fall of the Times-Picayune

   By Ryan Chittum

   The gutting of New Orleans beloved Times-Picayune and Advance Publications' plan to turn it into a sort of major market AnnArbor.com looks set to bring journalism built on "motion for motion’s sake... volume without thought" to a city built on doing the opposite. For the Newhouses, who own the Times-Pic, the Hamster Wheel is a business model—one the absentee chain...

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4. June 15, 2012 06:50 AM

   The Times-Picayune’s front-page press release

   Advance Publication's Alabama papers take even worse hits than New Orleans

   By Ryan Chittum

   You know the backlash is serious when the Times-Picayune wraps itself in Katrina and puts a press release/editorial by the editor on page one of the paper: Great journalism not bound by medium Katrina shows promise of digital age in New Orleans The headline and deck are bad enough, but the text is worse (emphasis mine): In the aftermath of...

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5. September 14, 2012 07:22 AM

   The hamster wheel vs. the quality imperative

   The real problem with JRC/Advance free model and the unappreciated benefit of a paywall

   By Dean Starkman

   …The great is rare; the dull quite common. But — and this is the genius of the online format — that doesn’t matter, not any more, and certainly not half as much as it used to. When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll...

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6. September 21, 2012 03:00 PM

   The Newhouses strike back

   The Times-Picayune goes to war with the encroaching Baton Rouge Advocate

   By Ryan Chittum

   After Advance Publications announced it would gut the still-profitable New Orleans Times-Picayune's newsroom and slash publication to three days a week, the Baton Rouge Advocate's Manship family saw an opportunity. The Advocate, which killed its New Orleans bureau a few years ago in cutbacks, said it would open a new bureau and print a New Orleans edition of the paper...

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7. June 6, 2012 06:50 AM

   The Sometimes Picayune

   Want to damage New Orleans (again)? Decimate its newspaper

   By Harry Shearer

   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...

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