The Louisiana newspaper war just got a lot more interesting.
It’s been a poorly kept secret in New Orleans media circles that the Baton Rouge Advocate’s owner-to-be, businessman John Georges, was in discussions with Dan Shea and Peter Kovacs to run the paper for him. Shea and Kovacs are the respected former Times-Picayune managing editors memorably frozen out when Advance Publications rolled out its plan to sack half the paper’s staff, move to a three-day publication schedule, and go all in on clicks with its free website Nola.com. Seeing a market opportunity, The Advocate launched a daily New Orleans edition in September to fill the void.
So it’s surely no coincidence that earlier in the day, NOLA Media Group/Times-Picayune/Nola.com announced that it would return to quasi-daily publication with a new tabloid paper on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays—the days it no longer prints the Picayune. It’s a measure of the rolling disaster that is Advance Publications’s strategy in New Orleans that its announcement of a return to print—one of the primary reader outrages, along with its seriously reduced newsroom— was greeted with such widespread derision.
Gambit’s Kevin Allman just filets NOLA Media Group in his blog post on the news:
The digitally-focused NOLA Media Group, which cut back print publication of The Times-Picayune to three days a week last year, continued to innovate today by announcing a new plan to print on the days it doesn’t produce a print product, bringing the company up to 7-day-a-week publication, according to an announcement by NOLA Media Group Vice President of Content Jim Amoss.
The report, which is not from The Onion, says the new product, to be called “TPStreet,” will launch this summer in newsboxes around the city and cost 75 cents, just like the daily paper, which it will not be, because it is more innovative than that…
The innovative publication is in response to “a repeated request” from home-delivery subscribers to get a delivered daily paper, but it will not be home delivered, Mathews said:
No mention by Mathews of his market competition, and how it was about to get more serious.
The Advocate’s then-owner David Manship told me in December that the paper already had picked up a circulation of 23,500 in New Orleans. But the new New Orleans bureau lacked the resources to truly compete with the Picayune.
Will The Advocate compete head on with the Picayune? Dan Shea tells me that’s the intention. “We’re going to staff it up to the point where we’re producing a truly local newspaper,” he says.
“They’ve done a great job. David Manship should be lauded and Sarah (Pagones) and all of our colleagues in the bureau. We’re going to provide the resources.”
It will take a lot of investment by Georges to make a true run at the Picayune, which despite its enervation, still has a newsroom of roughly 130. But it throws another roadblock up for what I’ve argued is the Newhouses’ liquidation strategy in New Orleans, and the family has already squandered much of the enormous goodwill the Picayune had in New Orleans with their actions over the last year. The Advocate has a big built-in advantage in state politics and in LSU sports. It will also not have a hard time poaching talent from the Picayune and its layoff pool.
The backdrop to all this is the dismal state of the newspaper industry. We’re all for healthy competition, particularly when it means more journalists on the streets and in the newsrooms. But a war of attrition that bleeds both owners would be the worst case scenario for New Orleans, a city that needs good journalism as much as any in the country. The Newhouses have the deeper pockets, but it’s unclear how much they’ll be willing to spend to protect their declining asset and to send a warning shot to competitors elsewhere.
Launching its new tabloid, and its launching of a Baton Rouge edition of the Picayune last year in response to The Advocate’s encroachment, signals that it will not go quietly. But it also raises questions anew about why Advance killed the daily Times-Picayune while continuing to print (though not deliver) daily elsewhere.
Go Advocate! Show 'dem invaders that we still want to read a real newspaper.
#1 Posted by Priscilla Vayda, CJR on Wed 1 May 2013 at 10:21 AM
JUST A THOUGHT !!! News papers thrive on advertising. Local businesses should support a local paper. I'm for a boycott of any local business that advertises in the TP. You don't even have to contribute 75 cents for a copy of the TP to identify the businesses you're NOT going to visit. There's always a copy laying around with the rest of the TRASH !!!
#2 Posted by BOBEG, CJR on Wed 1 May 2013 at 11:48 AM
You say that Monday’s street-sale edition of The Post-Standard in Syracuse “ran more editorial copy from The Oklahoman (320 words), of all papers, than it did from Syracuse (0 words).”
“Editorial copy” generally refers to all non-advertising text in a newspaper. All news and commentary, that is, as distinct from “editorials” only. To conflate the two and leave the impression that we ran “0 words” of editorial copy from Syracuse is false and dishonest. It seems willful given the rest of your comments.
Had you bothered to read more than one day's street edition, you would have noticed that we have not run any display ads to date. Had you bothered to call or email, you would have known that this was by design. We chose not to do so at the start but plan to bring them in toward the end of the second quarter.
Had you looked at just a week's worth of street-sale papers, you would have seen that local news dominated the front-page headlines on half of them.
Had you put an entire week's newspaper output in context, you would have seen a greatly expanded news hole in the home-delivered papers.
Had you considered how we served all readers on that Monday when you looked only at the street-sale paper, you would have learned that syracuse.com was loaded with local news updated throughout the day, and that the audience for it was 15% greater than a year ago.
No context. No reporting. No balance. No honest seeking after any explanation for what we're doing here. Just snide judgment based on a look at one day's single-copy paper plucked like a cherry to place atop your argument.
Even by the immiserated standards of journalism reviews these days, that's pathetic.
Michael J Connor
VP of Content
The Post-Standard/syracuse.com
#3 Posted by Michael Connor, CJR on Mon 6 May 2013 at 08:02 AM
I just saw Michael Connor's comment, which is nonsense.
Here's what I said two sentences before the one that Connor says implies that his paper produced zero words of content from Syracuse: "The entire paper had about 2,300 words of original content, including briefs." But I've added a note above to clarify that I was talking about the editorial page.
I know that none of your street-sale papers have ads. I also know that your home delivery papers have bigger newsholes and that you have a website. We've written many times about the Advance model. I was very clearly talking about what New Orleans can expect for its street-sale papers based on the experience of its sister papers--and that's not much.
#4 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Mon 13 May 2013 at 01:15 AM