T-P THE BELL TOLLS FOR THEE

Since Thursday, I've been trying to write the story of the death knell sounded for the Times-Picayune, the 175 year old newspaper that serves New Orleans.  Oh, the powers say that they will produce a paper version three days a week, but they're just prolonging the agony, because the paper version will die, and I believe it's quite probable that the online version will eventually wither and die.  I hate to make such a statement in the face of the staff members who will not not lose their jobs in the cuts, but I believe it to be true.  So, New Orleans will be the largest city in the country without a daily newspaper.  How special.

The online version, produced by NOLA.com is pathetic.  The search function is useless, so I go to Google to search for articles on the NOLA website.  We subscribe to the paper version, and I cannot imagine reading the online version in it's present form.

The Times-Picayune won two Pulitzers, including the prestigious Public Service award, for its coverage of Katrina. The paper was forced to evacuate its offices and publish online for three days. As the only major newspaper in the city, it was heralded as the most vital source of information for besieged residents.

No matter.  The once proud newspaper is going, going, gone, and I am grieving.  I grew up with the Times-Picayune, and I've read the paper as long as I've lived in Louisiana, with a only a three year hiatus when we lived in Mobile, Alabama, many years ago.

I'll let Athenae at First Draft, who has worked as a journalist for a good many years, speak for me.  She lives in Chicago, and she cares!

Paywalls have nothing to do with what happened to the Times-Picayune. I saw a lot of carping last week about "how many people bitching about this on the Internet actually subscribe" and whatnot, as though commenting on Twitter was itself an act destructive to Noble Print. I saw a lot of whinging about how "people don't read" anymore. I saw a lot of eulogizing about newspapers being a dying form, as if the Times-Picayune wasn't profitable.

Make no mistake here: The Times-Picayune is not the victim of the Freedom Loving Internet or changing times or reading habits of the young'uns or anything other than a rapacious corporate desire for profit over the public good, and that's a problem that afflicted journalism long before the Internet came into being. Speaking as someone who worked in newspapers when we went from cut-and-paste to actual computer layout, who saw two newspapers create their very first web sites, both before and after the same problem existed: The people in charge were greedy, venal, lazy and stupid, and liked playing with matches.

They liked fudging circulation numbers and screwing up distribution routes, undermining newsroom budgets when they weren't outright stealing. They liked telling reporters there was no money for journalism while buying drinks for their parties. They liked firing people who had been in place too long, hiring young cheap college grads, and then telling the older folks still left that it was the younger folks' fault for taking a job that was offered to them. They liked changing what was covered from one day to the next. They liked letting minimum-wagers "sell" their subscriptions and they liked delivering so inconsistently that even if people wanted the paper, they couldn't find or get it.

And they could get away with all this because even with TV and radio, they were still the dominant form, and there was enough money to cover up all but the most catastrophic of their mistakes. When the dot-com bubble burst and American manufacturing went into a death spiral and the economy started to tank, the money started to dry up and people started seeing fire where before there'd only been smoke.

The idea of that "industry" (really a disparate collection of corporations that have no incentive to cooperate in any way and in fact share little beyond a medium) "swallowing hard" and coming to one conclusion about improving itself is impractical at best, even if you believe paywalls are the answer. Any smart companies will let the stupid, greedy ones burn, and paywalls or no, the stupid greedy ones will end up as charcoal because this isn't about form, it's about managing money and mission, and these people suck at that and have no incentive to change. What incentive is there, when you can gut a company and walk away with millions?

Forever and ever.  Amen.

Photo at top from Wikipedia.

Thanks to Steve Buttry via Paul (A.) for the picture of the Times-Picayune T-shirt.