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 owners are trotting out across the country like McDonald’s with a new chicken sandwich. They unveiled the “constantly updated blog, which gives equal play to impaled cyclists and rabid skunks as it does to politics and crime,” in Micheline Maynard’s words, in Ann Arbor, expanded it (in a somewhat less radical model) throughout Michigan, and are now launching it in the South.

In September, New Orleans will become the biggest American city without a daily newspaper, but Advance will also turn three of its Alabama papers into non-dailies (including The Huntsville Times, where I interned back in 2001). I’m guessing wood shavings are en route to The Oregonian and Plain Dealer as we speak.

I’m all for whatever we can do to support the biggest, most robust newsrooms we can get, mind you. If that means not printing money-losing Monday and Tuesday editions of the print paper, so be it. If that means shutting down the presses entirely, go for it.

But what Advance looks like it’s doing here is disinvesting in journalism behind a digital smokescreen. Here’s The Gambit a couple of weeks ago:

According to sources who were in meetings with editor Jim Amoss, the reporters/content providers have been told to gather information and post it online as it comes in, rather than filing traditional long-form stories. They will be providing updates throughout the day on NOLA.com and other platforms such as Twitter, and expected to take photos and video as circumstances warrant to augment the content they file online — though this information-gathering will supplant, not replace, the paper’s photographers.

The Times-Picayune and Co. will just have to do more with less, as newsroom bosses like to say. Actually, the bosses at Nola.com or the Times-Pic or whatever it’s called now are saying that explicitly earlier this week:

When the NOLA Media Group launches this fall, we plan to produce more content for our print readers and online users than ever before.

That was one day before the ax fell on nearly half of its 173-person newsroom, reducing it to 89 journalists. The Times-Pic reports that forty new people will be added (presumably lower-wage, inexperienced types).

If so, it would leave a newsroom of 129 or so cranking out more content than 173 had been producing, the newsroom will have lost much of its institutional memory, and the quality of the journalism will be far lower than it is today. At least the Times-Pic brass was self-aware enough not to promise “more and better” content.

What will this new “digital-first” focus mean for Nola.com/Remains of the Times-Picayune?

John McQuaid, who worked there for 16 years, has has had some of the best takes of anyone on this mess, and he writes this in The Atlantic:

While the local controversy has focused on the loss of daily publication, something more disquieting has been overlooked: Advance’s Internet strategy has never been about journalism or news. It’s about clicks.

Nola.com is one of a bunch of regional web portals Advance has created. They’re like local versions Yahoo.com or MSN.com. All have the same generic design template. They are run independently of the affiliated local newspapers, sometimes by non-journalists, and it shows. They are generic, ugly and notoriously hard to navigate. They share DNA with Parade.com (the website of Parade Magazine, the newspaper insert) another Advance property whose former boss now runs Advance’s local digital strategy. They present news in a rolling blog format, as it is fed to them, without regard to its importance or community interest. In this framework, news is primarily a click-generating engine, featuring movie listings, weather forecasts, or the doings of the Kardashians.

That sounds about right to me, but the proof will be in the (bread) pudding.

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