A Doomed Romance With a New Orleans Newspaper

May 27, 2012

Newsprint sentimentalists are part of a shrinking club. Plenty of people care about news, but the fetishists who want it to be imprisoned on paper? We are like Shriners, once a proud, powerful bunch who now meet in little rooms and exchange secret handshakes.

Nothing gets print romanticists more dewy-eyed than The Times-Picayune, which we learned last week will no longer be a daily presence on newsprint in New Orleans.

I was in the city right after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the role the newspaper and its Web site played cannot be overestimated. Many of the women and men who work at the paper stayed and filed articles even as their families dispersed and their homes went underwater. It was the kind of journalism that won Pulitzers, but more important, reunited families, gave people critical guidance and brought order out of incredible chaos.

Since then, the newspaper has prosecuted coverage that has kicked up federal investigations and helped bring rogue cops to justice. In a city where not much of anything works, the newspaper does.

I return to New Orleans often — to fish, eat and dance. But it is a particular pleasure to sit in one of the city’s many coffee shops and watch plain old folks jaw over The Times-Picayune, brandishing it like a weapon when they want to make a point.

After the news broke that The Times-Picayune would no longer publish daily, far-flung fans of the city and its newspaper gathered on Twitter — just consider that irony for a moment — and had a collective sniffle. The Times-Picayune will be subsumed into a new company called NOLA Media Group and will come out three days a week (Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays), with most of the resources — fewer after the layoffs — devoted to the Web.

Continue at the NYT

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Filed under: times picayune