Sad times continue in the Big Easy. Layoffs of print media staff at the Times-Picayune are looming and there’s apparently little actual reporting on the blog that’s been hyped as the plan to pick up the news gathering slack when the print edition is cut to just three days a week. One reporter let her frustrations out on management this weekend in a scathing memo.
“Sometimes I just want to scream about what is happening around me” at the newspaper, she writes.
Despite efforts by advertisers, city officials and citizens, who formed The Times-Picayune Citizens’ Group last month, hoping to negotiate with the papers’ owners and maintain a seven day print edition, the paper seems doomed to follow others owned by Advance Publications and operated by Newhouse Newspapers, such as the Ann Arbor News, that ceased daily printing in 2009. Other Advance Publications owned organizations scheduled for similar cutbacks are The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and The Press-Register of Mobile. The business model reminds me a lot of the purchase and gutting of local AM/FM radio and I sometimes wonder if Bain Capital is involved. I also wonder if, in the end, anyone will be left to write the obituary of the Times-Picayune.
If an obit is necessary, Journatic can source it for a few bucks from one of its freelance content providers in the Philippines. Although Journatic would likely that the Times-Pic keeps publishing with all the content sourced from Journatic.
Maybe I’m just old and sentimental about the whole thing. I keep thinking that if a little college town like ours (pop. 80,405) can support a daily, then why the hell can’t NOLA (pop. 343,829)? To me it seems like another smack in the face to the residents, who have suffered so much and are trying to rebuild their city.
And from your link above, why not just outsource everything?
“Outsourcing everything” is the plan. Fill up a bunch of pages with local “data” and the readers won’t notice they’re stuffing their brains with straw.
Reporters collecting the straw, sifting and analyzing it, and presenting the story that citizens need to know is expensive. The age of DIY “data” journalism should make the public about as well informed as Faux news does. IOW — nothing is better.
But…but…
Where is the difference between the straw of which you speak and the straw with which the major media stuff people’s brains?
Where is the difference except in terms of polish and volume?
There is none.
Lies are the same whether they are about dogcatchers or drone murders; inaccurate, sloppy reporting is the same whether it’s local, national or international and mental chewing gum is the same whether it’s about high school sports heroes or national “celebrities.”
Marshall McLuhan was wrong. The media is not “the message,” it is the problem.
Up and down the line.
AG
The MSM may abstract the most titillating straw (data)– little of which has any conceivable relevance to the average person — but even in today’s much debased journalistic culture, some important stuff does slip through their filters and if the public were astute enough and cared, those nuggets could empower them. As it is there is too much straw making its way into blogs and news outlets. Seems to me that this has already put the average person, that has poor critical thinking filters, on overload and causes the retreat into pootie/junk diaries. i.e. a real scammer at dKos garnered significant reader support for the past few weeks whereas a long-term participant (since 2002!) such as myself was banned, apparently permanently, for one comment that others (a few of whom had long stalked and bullied me) objected to.
Dkos is, has been and will be lame on every level, Marie. It is a perfect representation of why the so-called “progressive left” in this country doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Iraq of getting anything of real interest done in this country. It’s just a bunch of lockstep, zombiefied leftinesses all baaaing and bleating the Kosian/mainstream DemRat talking points in unison. Step out of line with even one original thought and you are immediately shunned by the head KosKids. Eventually you either shut the fuck up or you are banned.
Welcome out.
And welcome in.
AG
It wasn’t always a culture of me-me-me whining and daily outrage freakouts over minutia or the irrelevant. Not all readers and contributors there are as you’ve described them, although they are in the minority. What’s sad is how few have any expertise in political/governmental/economic/public policy matters but have a seemingly inexhaustible supply opinions on all of that. OTOH, too many are single issue types with zero interest in understanding/appreciating a larger whole. Bloomie’s ban on big-gulp sodas and California’s ban on foie gras exemplify the well-meaning but unnecessarily authoritarian liberalism that drives me nuts. Not that the world wouldn’t be just fine without sodas and foie gras, but the consumption of neither rises to a level where banning for the good of the populace as a whole is the only and best response. Guess that liberal authoritarian streak is why it’s been so easy for so many that view themselves as being on the left to support US military interventions, domestic government spying, prosecuting whistle-blowers, and supporting a right-wing faux solution of the crisis in US healthcare.
Still resent being banned — if was, after all, people like me that showed up early and contributed for years that facilitated the success of dKos.
Yes it was, Marie. At least by the spring of 2005 it was. Go here and here to read a post that I wrote about it (Daily Kos. Business as usual and the fall of the Obama Empire.) and some comments for more info.
By 2005 it had degenerated into an almost “Lord Of The Flies” bully system. On July 4th, 2005 Kos banned any number of non-clomp clomp clomping original thinkers and demanded that they essentially kiss the hem of his robe and promise eternal fealty to his rule in order to return.
And that was that.
Every few months I check in just to make sure that all the good little boys and girls are still behaving themselves.
And of course…they are. It’s either that or the old heave-ho.
No change.
The upshot of that system? In part, at least?
Our lovely Preznit O’Bomber.
Bet on it.
And Kos made a fortune doing it.
Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG
The thing is that most of the dailies ARE profitable as solo operations.
But they’re NOT solo operations any more.
Back in the late 80’s, early 90’s, a bunch of newspaper chains (McClatchy, Hearst, Newhouse, Cox, some others) went on huge buying sprees – they’d buy local midsize papers that were reasonably profitable and then try to either suck enough money out of them to pay the interest on the purchase, or try to squeeze enough extra out of their existing large dailies to finance it. Essentially the same kind of takeover stuff that was going on in every other corporate world.
But then came the Digital Revolution… and most of those little papers went from + to – , and the big dailies went from +++ to +/-, and plundering the rich to pay for the poor stopped working. Debt service basically killed them.
And now… if the papers were local rather than corporate, they’d be better off. They can’t carry everyone, though.
Yes, the new Gilded Age and more corporate raiding by our “captains of industry and investment”. I thought Oui’s post on Newhouse being let off the IRS hook to slither quietly away was quite interesting too.
Another one of those regulatory/New Deal goodies that Democrats like Bill Clinton decided were obsolete.
Media conglomerates, interstate banking, TBTF financial “services” institutions, and a permanent war machine were demonstrated bad ideas before “we” chose to give them yet another chance.
.
From a multitude of sources …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."More outsourcing hijinks:
“Newspaper columnists jump on Journatic controversy over outsourced news”
And in other news, confidence is slipping for both TV and print.
Arthur, it looks as if more people may be getting your message.