JOHN F KENNEDY IN LOUISIANA

Kennedy with Judge Edmund Reggie and Edwin Edwards

In 2013, the Times-Picayune published a fascinating article on John F Kennedy's political connections in Louisiana, which began years before his campaign for president. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Kennedy wearing a hat, but here he is pictured in a rice hat at The Rice Festival in Crowley, Louisiana. Judge Edmund Reggie is in the center, and a young Edwin Edwards is on the right.

Of his visit to Louisiana:

With the program ready to begin at the podium in the center of Crowley, Kennedy asked his wife to say a few words in French to the gathered crowd of Cajuns. She at first resisted, but Edmund Reggie, who had accompanied the couple throughout the weekend, introduced her anyway at Kennedy's request, according to [Leo] Honeycutt.

"So she gets up there and, in French, she recounts a story about how when she was a little girl, her father had told her that Louisiana was way down south, but it ... was a little part of France, and she had been in love with it ever since," says Honeycutt. "Well, what do you think? I mean, the house comes down."

Kennedy followed his wife with his own speech -- in English -- about various political issues, including the rising tensions between the U.S. and Cuba, but he hardly needed to speak. Following Jackie's story, the crowd was already sold.

When I shared the article on Facebook, a long discussion followed in the comments about JFK and hats, when he wore them, and when he didn't - a very long thread with links and videos. The thread then drifted into whether Kennedy killed the men's hat manufacturing industry. What fun!  You don't know what you're missing by not having a Facebook account, but I admit that at times it is a huge PITA.

TAKE THAT NEWHOUSE!

New Orleans edition of The Advocate

The newspaper pictured above lay in our driveway yesterday morning. The management of the Baton Rouge Advocate stepped into the breach when Newhouse's Advance Publications decided to publish the paper edition of the venerable New Orleans Times-Picayune only three days a week starting October 1.  The Baton Rouge paper, which is also venerable, will cover New Orleans news seven days a week in an edition that will be sold at newsstands and delivered to homes and businesses in New Orleans and the surrounding areas.  The Advocate hired former members of the TP staff who had been dismissed by Advance to run the New Orleans bureau and will continue with its thorough coverage of state politics in the new edition.  The response from people in greater NO and nearby parishes who wish to subscribe has been overwhelming, so much so, that the paper had to hire a call service to help handle requests for subscriptions.

Of course, it's not the same as having the Times-Picayune, which I read nearly my entire life since learning to read the funnies, and I'm still in mourning, but I'm very grateful for daily coverage of NO in a paper version.  Soon after half the staff was fired, we cancelled our subscription to the TP, for the paper very soon became a shell of itself.

To mark the launch of the New Orleans edition, The Advocate is rolling out an advertising campaign across the Crescent City that will involve print, TV, radio and billboards.

“We hope to get as many subscribers as possible,” [David] Manship [[publisher] said.

The Advocate’s coverage and staffing in New Orleans will get “bigger and better” as more subscribers get the newspaper.

I wish The Advocate every  success in its endeavor to give us a daily newspaper which covers the New Orleans area. 

ONE OF THOSE DAYS

Yesterday I was in funk for most of the day. In the morning, Grandpère found the notice to the left hanging on our front door. Encephalitis in the neighborhood! On my street?  In my town?  Panic began to rise. Then I read all the fine print.  "Mosquitoes that can carry ENCEPHALITIS have been found in your neighborhood and we need your help."  The local newspaper published the news that West Nile virus had been found in mosquitoes in Lafourche Parish, where I live, and it's a good thing to remind people not to leave standing water around where mosquitoes can breed, but the notice could have been worded in a way that would not frighten people so.  Still, my first panicked questions would not have come up had I read the fine print.

 Here's how West Nile fever works.  Humans contract the virus from a bite from an infected mosquito.  Most people who are infected with the disease either have no symptoms at all or suffer a very mild illness.  However, in rare cases, and we have had a couple around here, the virus "can cause encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) or meningitis (inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord)."  It does not matter where in a community the cases of serious illness develop, because the disease does not pass from person to person.

What the notice did was push me to decide that so long as the threat of West Nile lasts, I will walk in daylight, when it is hot, but when the mosquitoes are not so much on the move, rather than after sunset, when it is cooler.  

Later in the day, I called the Circulation Department of the Times-Picayune to cancel our subscription. I have not been reading the paper since the announcement of the cutback to three days a week for the paper edition beginning in October and the layoff of half the staff.  The newspaper is already turning into a shell of itself, and I don't want to watch the decline until October.   I thought we'd do better to get our refund from Advance Publications now rather than wait for our subscription to run out.  The customer service rep asked why we were cancelling, and I said one word, "Newhouse," and she understood.  I felt so sad after I cancelled, because I've been reading the Times-Picayune my whole life since I could read, starting with the comics, or the funnies, as we called them in New Orleans. I missed the paper for three years while we lived in Mobile, but as soon as we moved back to Louisiana, we subscribed again.

We also subscribe to the Baton Rouge Advocate, which will place permanent staff in New Orleans to cover the news there. Several groups and individuals, the latest being Tom Benson, owner of the New Orleans Saints, have offered to buy the paper from Newhouse, but they refuse to sell.  We will surely support any worthwhile effort to set up a rival daily newspaper, and we will not subscribe to Newhouse's pathetic web version.

As you see, the day was already a downer when I read that Kenneth Roop, the man who shot Nick Rainey, the door-to-door meat and seafood salesman, had been on trial for pointing a gun at a meter reader some years back, but he was found not guilty of improper exhibition of a weapon.  The prosecutor at the trial said Roop was a ticking time bomb.  The bomb ticked for quite a while, but it finally went off.  Not long before reading the account, I saw the meter reader for my neighborhood pass by my window to read our meter. It made me think.  A jury of his peers did not think pointing a gun at a meter reader and terrifying her was an improper exhibition of a weapon, and Roop was permitted to continue to own a gun, with the result that another innocent person is dead from gunshot.

Some days I just want to give up, and yesterday was one of those days.

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.