Support your local non-profit virtual fishwraps

This is a really nice Poynter article today about Karen Gadbois. The implication is that she's (maybe... possibly.. soon.. eventually) planning to step back from regular involvement at The Lens. 

Gadbois said she’s focused on two things: keeping The Lens going by building a better organization and mastering the skill of weaving. By late January, Gadbois said the vision plan for The Lens was “pretty done.”

But when asked if she will be stepping down from staff, Gadbois said she feels like she can’t.

“I really feel like when the time comes, and I know that that time will come, I’ll know what I should do next,” she said.

It’s difficult for anyone involved in The Lens to imagine a future without Karen Gadbois, because in many ways she and The Lens have been inseparable since the day she fired up her laptop from a chemo chair in 2006.

Reading this brought me back a little. I know I don't post here as often as I used to. (Or as often as I'd like to even now.) But I do occasionally click through the old "blogroll" to see if any of those disused sites has happened to pop back to life. Every now and then one of them does and it's a little bit thrilling.  Squandered Heritage used to be on that list but I culled the link a long time ago when it went blank.  Anyway, the Poynter article talks about that a bit. 

On New Year’s Eve in 2005 — four months after Katrina hit — Gadbois returned to Louisiana. Her downstairs had flooded. The upstairs was spared. Other homeowners weren’t as lucky. Demolitions began sprouting all over the city.

“At that point, I felt like I had to do something,” Gadbois said. “It was like wild town — ‘do what you want.’”

She began blogging on Squandered Heritage, cobbling together information on proposed demolitions and attending hearings. “They were crazy. The craziest public hearings ever,” she said. “They’d have like 26 properties on the docket, and the meeting would literally take 10 minutes.”

“I would post daily pretty much,” she said. “And then, occasionally, I would write essays. Sometimes just, ‘Here’s the house. And here’s the proposed demolition.’”

Twenty years later, it can still very much be wild town around here. There's a lot of shitty stuff that goes on that can only be slowed down or stopped (sometimes) if someone happens to get a lot of people to pay attention.  

In some ways, it's actually worse now. New Orleans in 2024 is a more spiritually broken place than it was even then in the wake of the Katrina disaster. Two decades of displacement and gentrification can do that to a place. I'm sure I could articulate this better with time to think it out but there are days when I feel like we've lost a collective sense of what it means to live in a city together.  Karen talks in this article about what drew her here from Mexico City.

She decided on New Orleans. In both cities, she felt, people congregated within their families and celebrated with the larger community. “They were both places that had long-rooted traditions,” she said, “and people weren’t as interested in what you did for a living.”

Insofar as those rooted community traditions even exist today, they aren't nearly as deep as they were before 2005. If there's one theme to the succeeding decades here, it has been the slow squeezing of the humanity out of our home.  Let's put a pin in that for now, though. I'm just trying to say that it's harder to mobilize the fragmented community around civic issues than it was when we had a more natural communion together. 

The state of our media is one symptom (and reflexive cause) of this cultural diminishing. Which brings us to the non-profit newsroom model the Poynter article is attempting to champion. We're meant to get from this article that the non-profits have added more in-depth, textured, "explanatory" news product to the local market than the commercial outlets are willing to provide. In a way, that is true. But it's more true that they're merely filling part of the massive vacuum left by "legacy media" as it dissolves. 

Taken together, I'd say The Lens, Verite, and the Louisiana Illuminator give us about half the reporting capacity one whole newspaper ought to have in South Louisiana. As good a job as they do with what they have, they're still overmatched.  There's enough happening on the New Orleans City Hall beat alone to fill at least two proper daily papers...or whatever the commensurate format is to a daily newspaper today. At least two entities of that size, I mean.  The point is we're not getting nearly enough of what we need. The scrappy little websites get us more than we would have otherwise, but we're not where we need to be.

They've also got their own weaknesses. See, for example, the case of The Lens's "Charter School Reporting Corps" described here.  

Another shining moment came with the launch of the award-winning Charter School Reporting Corps in 2011. Beatty, then The Lens’ publisher and chief executive officer, wrote that the project’s goal was to “provide school news to students, parents and others who are invested and interested in charter schools in New Orleans.” At the time, Beatty wrote, 45 boards ran 65 charter schools — in addition to the Orleans Parish School Board and the Recovery School District, which ran more than 20 schools combined.

“And no one was covering those board meetings, which were public meetings,” said Moseley, who at one point coordinated the corps. “And a lot of times, significant decisions were being made about the direction of the school, or facilities, or other things.”

The Lens hired a corps of stringers and part-time reporters to attend and cover the meetings.

“It’s probably one of the best ideas The Lens has had, in my opinion, and I was privileged to manage it,” said Moseley.

It was! It was a fantastic and quite necessary project. But sufficient resources were never mustered to fully realize its potential. The reason for that is only mildly stated here. 

Gadbois said people loved the project, but it was “a beast to maintain” because of issues with funding and working with freelance reporters, some of whom would skip out on the meetings at the last minute. Gadbois said the corps also came early in the charter schools movement. She recalled some animosity from people who felt what The Lens was doing was anti-charter schools. In 2017, the project was placed on hiatus due to funding.

It turns out that the elite donor classes in New Orleans can have just as much veto power over the content produced by "independent" non-profit newsrooms as they do over the corporate newspaper owned by a billionaire if they really want it.  But, until we figure out a better model, by all means, support the non-profits if you can because they're still the best thing we've got going right now.

The Advocate uses its manufactured crime panic narrative to aid Starbucks' war on workers

Much of this is copy/paste of a long tweet thread. But it, like most long tweet threads, seems like something that should have been blogged. So I'm blogging it.

Yesterday, the Advocate presented a long story about the closure of one of the two Starbuckses on Canal Street. The story touched off a bit of a row on Twitter over several points. The story's writer, business reporter Anthony McCauley got involved in some of the back and forth. I don't like to fight with reporters on Twitter. McCauley is actually one of the more thorough and informative on staff at the TP/Advocate. Generally, I think most of them are just trying to do a job.  The problem with most New Orleans commercial media (particularly at the Advocate and at our local TV stations) extends beyond the individual reporters. Rather, all of these companies are beset with an institutional right wing anti-worker bias that has worsened as the pandemic crisis has heightened irreconcilable economic tensions between labor and ownership. I don't think most reporters have a lot of control over that. But they do shape what the public sees of their work and this article is a prime example of that.

One complaint from readers about yesterday's article was that it did not sufficiently interrogate the company's dubious assertion that the closure was caused by "security concerns."  Instead it gathered statements from business ownership and real estate aligned figures whose biases and interests would appear to confirm the Starbucks point of view such as the Louisiana Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Development District, and haberdasher David Rubenstein. Readers pushed back on this point.  Was this really a "high incident store" to use Starbucks's terminology? What does that phrase even mean? Is there any data explaining it? As a result, the article has been updated. It now says we don't actually know what any of that is based on. Starbucks isn't telling us.

After publication of an earlier version of this story, Jefferies said that Starbucks did, in fact, keep an incident log at the store but the company declined to share any data on the number or types of threats faced by staff. But he said the decision to shutter the location was taken after consulting with staff, managers and "local leaders".

"This is certainly, unfortunately, a high incident store," he said.

Another issue raised by readers was the greater context of Starbucks's ongoing national campaign against organizing efforts by its workers.  Among the company's union busting tactics has been sudden and unexplained closures of stores all over the country so it's natural to wonder how the Canal Street closure might fit in. Starbucks's Maple Street location voted to unionize earlier this year.

Starbucks's reaction to union activity has been shockingly aggressive. There is even speculation that the company's strategy is to push the legal limits so far that we could eventually see the whole National Labor Relations Act scrapped by the right wing Supreme Court.  Here is an In These Times article describing  the sort of confusion and intimidation Starbucks has subjected its workforce to in order to discourage unionization.

That response fits a pattern of new initiatives Starbucks has rolled out in the wake of the organizing wave, which includes benefits that the company says it cannot guarantee for its unionized workforce. In May, the coffee chain announced wage increases for workers, but said that it was prevented from assuring raises in stores that were in the process of unionizing or that had successfully done so. Last month, Starbucks also hedged on offering abortion access benefits, including out-of-state travel expenses, to workers in unionized stores, citing contact negotiations.

SBWU has demanded that these benefits be extended to all employees, including those at unionized stores. ​“Starbucks is permitted by law to offer these benefits to workers at unionized stores,” the union wrote. ​“Our bargaining committees will demand that these modest improvements be given immediately to all the partners.”

See also this recent Chapo interview with three Starbucks workers who talk about their experience organizing and the constant bad faith and retaliation the company has subjected them to. Given this context we should automatically assume any action taken by the company, such as a store closure, and the reasons the company cites, are probably happening in bad faith or should at least be heavily scrutinized. As you can see from the ITT article, concerns over safety have been a point of contention between workers and management in Starbucks stores nationally.

It is reasonable to assume, given that Starbucks in fact says in the T-P article that the New Orleans store closure is among several they are deciding to do across the country for the same reason, that this move is related to their ongoing labor issues.

New Orleans is not the first nor the only city to see Starbucks closures because of security concerns. Shortly after the letter to staff was written in July, the company said it would be closing 16 stores for security reasons: a half-dozen each in the greater Los Angeles and Seattle areas; two in Portland, Oregon; and one in both Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Management does this sort of thing all the time and Starbucks is no exception. They make moves to intimidate workers, to confuse them, to divide them if possible, and to gaslight them with ham-handed draconian solutions to valid complaints.  Workers feel unsafe and ask for support. Instead the company just haphazardly messes with schedules, or transfers staff or closes a bunch of stores to show that they can. It's pure intimidation and it's very typical behavior

Meanwhile the T-P/Advocate's initial approach to this situation was to ignore the unionization angle entirely even though it may in fact be the central issue. In response to online criticism, they have grudgingly added it to the story today. However, in doing so, they've also attempted to reduce the matter to a mere question of whether or not the Canal Street store has a pending NLRB petition filed.  Surely we can see that the answer to this question does not change the overarching context. At the very least, we understand that most organizing activity happens prior to and outside of the NLRB process. Do we understand that? Maybe the paper doesn't want us to.

Ultimately, the problem here is the TP-Advocate aspires to function as a company newspaper in a company town. This week, for example, its "Virtual Panel On The New Orleans Economy" featured this lineup. 

The panel, sponsored by AARP, will feature Anne Teague Landis, CEO of Landis Construction Co.; James Ammons, Chancellor of Southern University of New Orleans; Lynette While-Colin, Senior Vice President of small business growth at the New Orleans Business Alliance; and David Piscola, General Manager of the Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel.

When the paper doesn't think a discussion about "the economy" deserves even a single voice representing labor or advocating for the poor in any sense, it follows that its reporting will default away from those perspectives as well. 

Which is how stories that are really about the economic hardship and sense of precarity visited on the city's most vulnerable populations as a result of the bosses having won the pandemic, are so easily converted by commercial media into crime panic sensationalism. Because from the point of view of those who hold power in New Orleans and seek to extract profit from it (and to the media institutions in their employ) the way to address these traumas is to remove and/or suppress their victims with a more brutal police state. Please see, again, this month's Antigravity for much more on that. Note, as well, this week the Wall Street Journal has jumped in to make New Orleans the latest exhibit in a national media crime panic narrative. I'm sure we'll hear more about that this weekend.

Just as I'm sure we'll be subjected to another round of dishonest and deranged reactionary filth from the Advocate editorial page.  But that's what we've come to expect there.  As readers who still rely on the paper to cover the public affairs of our city, we are most injured when that hostility infects and diminishes the quality of the reporting as well.  

Gettin' cancelled

In the summer of 2020, Americans took to the streets in droves to express their anger at a criminal legal system that makes perpetual victims of the poor and allows police to brutalize and murder people, especially black people, with total impunity.  In response to this massive national wave of protest, police everywhere took the streets and punched people until they went home. This resulted in mayors, councilmembers, congresspeople, and the President all demanding that those police be given more money.  

Somehow all of this gets filtered through our political media discourse to read as "The tyranny of Cancel Culture has come for our beloved cops and institutions!"  I thought Atrios, as is often the case, had a nice succinct way of explaining where that comes from.   

Lots of things can be said about the "cancel culture" nonsense from the most privileged people with giant microphone sinecures, but one simple way to see it is as a contest between those who think normal people having some freedom to engage in "punching up" is the important part of any concept of "free speech" (very broadly defined, not just 1A), and those who think that, ACTUALLY, it's punching down (by them) that's important.   

Journalists who think their role is to hold the powerful to account versus those who see their role as holding the public to account.

There's nothing I love more than journalists holding the public account when it "goes too far" in criticizing the powerful for doing things like, say, sending a bunch of cops into the streets to punch people. Or maybe I love it more when the courts do that.  

A ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court on Friday adds to a string of developments following 2020’s George Floyd protests that threaten demonstrators with harsh penalties for the actions of others.

The court ruled that an advocate who helped organize a Black Lives Matter rally could be sued for events that took place during that rally, even though he was not involved. The case arose after a police officer was injured during a protest in Baton Rouge in 2016 and filed a lawsuit against DeRay Mckesson, a national advocate who had amplified and joined the demonstration. Mckesson rejected liability, saying his actions were protected by the First Amendment, but the court ruled against him in Friday’s 6-1 opinion. 

Of course it might be too early to decide which of these we love most. Probably need check back on this once we've been held accountable by vigilantes with the tacit approval of the state legislature. That's a whole new level. 

HB 101, filed by Republican Danny McCormick, would justify homicides committed by people under the guise of protecting property from being damaged “during a riot,” and critics stress that this is a term with a low threshold. “A riot is three people under Louisiana law,” Landry said. “That’s a wide open hole for someone to kill people, like teenagers and children who might be just trespassing or breaking into a car.” McCormick did not reply to a request for comment on the bill, which echoes laws passed in recent years that grant immunity to drivers who run over protesters who were blocking a public street.

So there's all sorts of new and exciting ways to get cancelled. We've really barely scratched the surface.

Did Sinclair buy WWLTV?

Yesterday morning we learned via the Times-Picayune that the conglomerate that owns Channel 4 has been bought by a private equity firm. 

Tegna Inc., owner of WWL-TV in New Orleans, its digital affiliate WUPL-TV and 63 other U.S. television stations, is being sold to a private equity firm in a deal valued at $8.6 billion, Tegna said Tuesday.

The buyer is Standard General L.P., which will take the publicly traded Tegna private.

"After evaluating this opportunity against Tegna's standalone prospects and other strategic alternatives, our board concluded that this transaction maximizes value for Tegna shareholders," Tegna Chairman Howard Elias said in a company statement.

“As long-term investors in the television broadcasting industry, we have a deep admiration for Tegna and the stations it operates and, in particular, for Tegna's talented employees and their commitment to serving their communities," Soo Kim, founding partner of Standard General, said in the statement.

This NY Post story says the deal might still be blocked by FCC because the combination of companies it involves could leave Standard General in possession of more than 39 percent of the nation's TV audience. But there are moving parts to that might get them back within compliance. Here is a Bloomberg article that goes into more detail.  

In 2020, Soo Kim acquired the Bally's casino brand partly in order to get in on the booming online sports betting business which, you may have noticed, pushes a lot of advertising and even straight up content through local media these days. He tells Bloomberg that he's going to fix "uncertainties" in the casino and media businesses by "injecting a level of technology and evolution."

“Bally’s and Tegna have one very common denominator, which is their core businesses throw off a lot of earnings today. Whether it’s gaming or TV, they’re both license driven and there’s limited competition in every market,” Kim said. “But both of them face a little bit of uncertainty due to the internet.”

Tegna shares were nearly flat Wednesday at $22.43 while shares in Bally’s were up 1.3% at $25.72. 

For Bally’s, it’s an aging customer base and online gaming, he said. For Tegna, it’s that those in the younger generation aren’t watching the 11 p.m. news the way their parents did, he said.

“So, how do these very strong but old franchises actually survive in the internet era?” Kim asked. “We think that injecting a level of technology and evolution into the business will be amazing.”

Can't wait to place all of my bets directly over the WWLTV app. 

Anyway, here is another detail about Kim's acquisition of Bally's. His partner is that deal was Sinclair Broadcasting. 

PROVIDENCE, R.I. and BALTIMORE, Nov. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Bally's Corporation (NYSE: BALY) and Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: SBGI) today announced that they have entered into agreements for a long-term strategic partnership that combines Bally's vertically integrated, proprietary sports betting technology and expansive market access footprint with Sinclair's premier portfolio of local broadcast stations and live regional sports networks ("RSNs"), STIRR, its popular Tennis Channel, and digital and over-the-air television network Stadium. Bally's and Sinclair will partner to create unrivaled sports gamification content on a national scale, positioning Bally's as the premier omni-channel gaming company with physical casinos and online sports betting and iGaming solutions united under a single brand. The transaction is expected to position Bally's to capture a significant share of the fast-growing U.S. sports betting and iGaming market.

This is how it came to be that fans of the New Orleans Pelicans watch games over a channel with the Bally's branding. (For now, anyway.) 

It's not clear to me what Sinclair's role in the Tegna deal is. But if it does mean the Tegna stations purchased by Kim are going to be run like Sinclair stations, that's not great news for local viewers. 

Critics have claimed that Sinclair — a company with close ties to the Trump administration and conservative politicians — is pushing its stations away from local coverage and toward a partisan brand of political reporting on national politics.

In new research, we find evidence that that appears to be the case. Stations bought by Sinclair reduce coverage of local politics, increase national coverage and move the ideological tone of coverage in a conservative direction relative to other stations operating in the same market.

New Orleans is traditionally a highly parochial market. And I mean that in a good way. People in New Orleans are generally very interested in New Orleans. They can spot phonies and don't take well to outsiders who get key things about them wrong. On the other hand, as we've noted repeatedly, the city has changed greatly over the past decade. Gentrification has physically displaced people and disrupted a generation of cultural reproduction.  We're not sure what the long term consequences of that will be but it does often feel like nobody actually lives in New Orleans anymore. At least, fewer New Orleanians live here now. 

Couple this phenomenon with the degradation of local news media that's occurred at the same time and it's hard to deny that New Orleans in 2022 is a smaller, less informed and less locally engaged city than it was before Newhouse started its fire sale at the T-P ten years ago. Maybe you really could just flip all the TV stations to Trumpist propaganda and no one would notice.   

Or maybe it's not as bad as all that and Kim's Tegna deal isn't really about Sinclair programming. Maybe we'll just get more gambling everywhere.

Fast Pass

Kudos to the Times-Picayune/Advocate for polling its stable of "influencers" on the... well.. the kind of things the influencers might think about.  This question, for example, is just not something we'd expect the ordinary non-influential Joe or Jane might have to consider. 

We also asked a speculative question: If allowed, how much would respondents pay to be one of the first people vaccinated? More than half wouldn't bite.

More than half say no!  Well, 58% wouldn't go for it anyway.  Still, consider that a lot of that squeamishness likely has to do with just plain uncertainty about the rushed vaccine itself and it's kind of amusing that many of them said yes. 

Just this week the Governor laid out the state's plan to administer as many as 159,000 vaccinations by the end of the month. That number may be optimistic depending on how many doses become available and when.  The first batch of 39,000 injections could happen as early as this weekend.  But it will take many more months to get the vaccine out to everyone so we have had to prioritize health care workers. 

Between 200,000 and 215,000 people are estimated to be in the first priority group for the vaccines, according to state Health Department figures. That includes 75,000 to 80,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities and between 125,000 and 135,000 health workers.

The T-P Power Poll question doesn't only presuppose that the blessed elect should have the option of skipping this line. It goes straight on past that and asks them how much would they pay to have that privilege validated.  Turns out that's extremely valuable to some of them!

Byron LeBlanc, president of LeBlanc & Schuster Public Relations, said he'd consider it: "I'd probably be willing to pay more than $100 for the vaccine if it meant I could get a wrist band or something that would let me do away with the masks and resume normal behavior and travel."

What is this, Disney World? I just want to ride on the planes again.  Please let me buy a fast pass. Actually, going super-early would not allow you to "do away with masks and resume normal behavior."  Because vaccinations, much like masks and social distance precautions, are only effective when everyone has them.  Until that happens, early vaccine recipients who aren't being careful around others could be even more dangerous. 

Only people who have virus teeming in their nose and throat would be expected to transmit the virus, and the lack of symptoms in the immunized people who became infected suggests that the vaccine may have kept the virus levels in check.

But some studies have suggested that even people with no symptoms can have high amounts of coronavirus in their nose, noted Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, who represents the American Academy of Pediatrics at meetings of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The first person confirmed to be reinfected with the coronavirus, a 33-year-old man in Hong Kong, also did not have symptoms, but harbored enough virus to infect others.

Vaccinated people who have a high viral load but don’t have symptoms “would actually be, in some ways, even worse spreaders because they may be under a false sense of security,” Dr. Maldonado said.

As with so many human problems, no one is really safe from COVID until we all are safe from COVID.  Elites such as those identified by the Times-Picayune as "influencers" tend to think they can buy their way out of that social contract. A lot of the time this makes them suckers.  But mostly it just makes things difficult for the rest of us.

Can't they just write angry letters to the editor?

It was an oddity when Scurlock did it the other day. But it's starting to look now like this politicians-sue-the-newspaper thing is a deliberate tactic. 

Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Jefferson Hughes III has filed a defamation lawsuit against The Advocate’s parent company, alleging that the newspaper knowingly published false and damaging information last year about his actions in a decades-old child abuse and custody case that led to a lengthy FBI investigation.

Ordinarily there are a range of options available to a political figure who doesn't  like what the press was saying about them. You can wait out the news cycle and ignore it altogether. That's usually the smart move. If the story persists a little too long, then you Issue A Statement. This can be a letter to the offending outlet which, most of the time, they will happily publish for you.  Or, if you want an actual audience for your side of the story, just post something on social media.

But, really, the thing to do most of the time is let it die quietly.  Any other tactic, including filing a lawsuit, by the way, just puts the whole story back in the public eye. So killing the story is never the purpose of these things.  If your purpose is to kill (or at least intimidate) the free press, on the other hand, well, this might be a thing you choose to do.

Okay well thanks for pointing that out

Frank wants everyone to know that he was not arrested but instead only cited for lewd conduct in the back of an Uber in Los Angeles in 2018.  It is very important that we, as we now recall the various other details of that incident which many of had put out of our minds, that we remember this one fact in particular.

The lawsuit does not discuss or dispute the specifics of that incident, instead focusing on the newspaper’s use of the word “arrest” and asserting that he was never arrested. The allegation that he was arrested “is injurious to Scurlock’s personal and professional reputation,” the suit says.

Failed aristocrats

Without looking it up, let's see if we can name the wealthiest individuals in Louisiana. There's  Gayle Benson, Joe Cannizaro, Phyllis Taylor, Eddie Rispone. Probably Lane Grigsby is in there somewhere. Who else? Jim Bernhard? I can't think of a name right now. I'm sure it will come to me... 

The economic impacts of coronavirus have hit Louisiana’s largest daily newspaper. In a company wide email, The Advocate Publisher and President Judi Terzotis announced that all salaried employees and full-time hourly staff would be reduced to working four days a week, resulting in a twenty percent pay cut. The email also announced that “a number of our staffers will be temporarily furloughed.”

“Our world has turned upside down,” the email said. “It is a shame that a terrible economy requires these moves at the same time our importance to the community has risen. More people are reading our journalism, online and in print, than ever before.”

Seems like at this particular moment when the world is on fire and we are ruled by corrupt sociopaths and our city is a major epicenter of the crisis, you wouldn't want to go laying off reporters and cutting back on news production.  Unless, I guess, if you are one of the sociopaths.

I mean it certainly seems like people want to read about that stuff.  According to Kovacs and Terzotis, they do, anyway. 

Louisianians need accurate and unbiased coverage more than ever, and they are turning to us as never before. Online traffic on nola.com and theadvocate.com is running three to four times above normal.

The pace of new digital subscriptions has more than doubled in March, even though we are making our coronavirus coverage available free of charge as a public service.

Of course we know the news business isn't about selling the news to readers.  It's about selling the readers to advertisers.  And selling the readers to advertisers isn't as profitable as it used to be.  It's especially bad during this moment. But the current moment is extraordinary and, depending on what happens in Washington, it remains to be seen how bad and how lasting its effects will be. In the meantime, maybe the patrician overseer of the operation could throw in a little extra to help weather the storm. But that's not how any of this works.

We shouldn't be at the mercy of patricians like Georges.  Not in times like these or any other. 

Why isn't Walt Leger in jail?

Seems like if you write the bill that allows the tourism cabal to continue stealing public money for another sixty years or so and then immediately take a job working for the tourism cabal, that would be the kind of corruption we might want to discourage.

Also on Tuesday, the Convention Center board’s finance committee voted to advance a resolution that redefines how its dedicated taxes are collected and how the money can be spent. The resolution is in large part a reflection of legislation passed by the Louisiana Legislature last year that allows the center to spend tax revenues on the $675 million hotel project and the entertainment district development. The bill was sponsored by then-state Rep. Walt Leger, who now works for New Orleans & Co., formerly the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Not in this city, though. Here we consider that sort of thing "business and economic leadership."  The Advocate invites such "leaders" to summits like this one where they hold forth on the great matters of business in the city for the upcoming year.  Walt was on that panel last week.  He told everybody there that it was time to "get creative."

Walter “Walt” Leger, the former Speaker Pro Tempore of the Louisiana House of Representatives, who now is head of strategy and top legal adviser at New Orleans & Co., said there is a need to "be creative" in terms of raising money for needed education and infrastructure, like implementing a gas tax or public-private partnerships.

That's interesting. Walt's bill "creatively" preserved a public slush fund for the Convention Center to use for its own purposes of handing money over to rich developers for at least the next 50 years.  Meanwhile his advice for funding public transit and infrastructure seems to involve privatization.  How much is New Orleans and Co. paying him now?  And why do we not putting the entire lot of these grifters in prison?   

Probably because the systemic and massive theft of public resources by politically important oligarchs isn't nearly as worrisome to people as their suspicion that some teenagers they read about on Nextdoor might be doing some petty theft and vandalism in Lakeview.  For that, we lock down the schools and call half the NOPD in full body armor to come out and shoot at a 17 year old.  Afterward, the Advocate's opinion page makes certain to heap thanks upon the police and the paranoid residents who called them.

Walt Leger and his cronies are never going to jail. Because the ruling class of this city and their mouthpieces in the media decide what justice even is in the first place.

The only survival skill is flattering power

Here, during the endgame of the collapse of the free press, the only professional journalism that exists anymore is the "polite" kind. Something vital is being lost.

If the news media has no place for journalists and critics and columnists who voice contempt for people like Peter Thiel and Jim Spanfeller and Bret Stephens, then you will read and see no news from people who have these entirely compelling ideas about Thiel, Spanfeller, and Stephens. It turns out that even the bygone, now-lamented golden age of the blog was a diminution of rudeness’s influence. If your local media has no place for people who voice contempt for your city’s police chief, say, or your state’s attorney general, or the publisher of your city’s largest newspaper, all of those people will feel more comfortable in abusing their power. They will grind you down, and in the process, they’ll tell you to be civil about it.

 We're going to miss it. That is if we're even allowed to acknowledge it mattered.

Pragmatism your way out of this

Guess what the latest research on the impact of climate change says.  You will never guess, I am sure.  Go ahead, though, take a second and just throw something out there. Did you say, it's worse than previously thought?  Okay but that seems like a long shot. How could it be any worse? 

Alright alright, yes, it is worse.

Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities. 

The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury.

Yikes! And take a look at the graphics that accompany that story. The maps predict that  Mumbai, Bangkok, Shanghai, several other huge world cities could be submerged in a mere 30 years from now. They didn't publish an infographic map of New Orleans here but I am pretty sure we would hate to see it.

The article does mention us, though. Because, despite the fact that hundreds of millions of people all over the globe are at risk, we are still the world's poster children for this problem.  Kind of makes you almost proud a little bit.  Is proud the word?  

The new data shows that 110 million people already live in places that are below the high tide line, which Mr. Strauss attributes to protective measures like seawalls and other barriers. Cities must invest vastly greater sums in such defenses, Mr. Strauss said, and they must do it quickly.

But even if that investment happens, defensive measures can go only so far. Mr. Strauss offered the example of New Orleans, a city below sea level that was devastated in 2005 when its extensive levees and other protections failed during Hurricane Katrina. “How deep a bowl do we want to live in”? he asked.

So we're either going to have to seriously bulk up our coastal defenses, or start planning to move everybody out of harm's way as safely and equitably as possible. Either way that's going to cost a lot of money.

Who is going to shoulder those costs?  It should probably be the people who have spent the past 150 years or so putting us in this situation in the first place, right?  Not so fast, says the Times-Picayune-Advocate-Georges! This is from their endorsement of John Bel Edwards. They liked his "pragmatism" but disagreed about some things.

Such pragmatism is what Louisiana needs. There are, after all, many problems to solve, and we haven’t always agreed with the governor’s approach to the state’s underlying challenges. Louisiana needs a governor who supports tort reform and will stand up to trial lawyers and teacher unions. Lawsuits against energy companies put our state at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting investment.

No time to mitigate that apocalypse. Not when there's "investment" to attract.

Steve Scalise's script armor

I read this Stephanie Grace column a few times and I still can't figure out why we're supposed to expect there is a difference between Steve Scalise and Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz.

Matt Gaetz is widely considered a camera-hogging fringe player in Congress. The second-term Florida Republican has called the Black Lives Matter movement a “terrorist organization,” and recently accused Democratic colleagues pursuing the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump of acting like “rabid hyenas.”

U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise is the House Minority whip, the second-ranking Republican in the House. That makes him someone whose presence in any situation confers a certain status, an implied assertion of importance and seriousness. Or it would, if Scalise weren’t becoming more and more prone to behaving like Gaetz, his partner in last week’s embarrassing storming-of-the-secure-hearing-room stunt.

What does she mean by "becoming"? Scalise has always been this way.  The self-described "David Duke without the baggage" has addressed gatherings of white supremacists, he has advocated putting guns in schools, he voted against the Martin Luther King holiday.   Why are we surprised to find him working closely with Gaetz on a stunt to defend Donald Trump from the consequences of his many crimes? If these guys aren't cut from the same mold, I don't know

The only difference between them Grace identifies is the "implied assertion of importance" imbued upon Scalise by virtue of his seniority.  But just because an asshole has risen to a position of greater power, does not make that person any less of an asshole.  Isn't that the reason we are considering these impeachment proceedings in the first place?

But equating power with dignity often seems like company policy over at the Advocate.  Have they published an "Our Views" on why people shouldn't have booed Trump last night yet?  Buzz me when it comes out. 

Will Eddie Rispone "tort reform" Hard Rock victims out of their fair share?

The city says the demolition, clean up, and recovery operations following the Hard Rock hotel collapse have cost something on the order of  $400,000 per day. That's bound to be a sensitive issue, particularly now that we are heavy into budget season. The mayor assures us, though, that we're going to make sure we're covered.

The presence of police, firefighters and other city workers on the site has been costing taxpayers about $400,000 a day Cantrell said Monday, pledging that those costs would be recouped once the “responsible party” for the disaster is found.

“We’re making sure every step of the way the liability is with the responsible party, and that is not with the city of New Orleans,” Cantrell said.

Determining responsible parties is going to be critical in this case because, unlike many of the disasters we are used to around here, this one won't draw any help from FEMA. The city has also set up a "resource center" at  the Main Library for workers and business owners who were affected by the disruption.  Also there is an intake survey for businesses to fill out online here. Presumably, even the "disrespectful" businesses are allowed to do this.

Despite a week-and-a-half-long interruption to daily life at one of the city’s busiest intersections, Cantrell said displaced residents and many business owners have shown patience. But she also said some businesses had been "downright disrespectful" and impatient in the face of closures and evacuations. She didn't name any of them.

Inevitably all of this is headed to court where the city and various other aggrieved parties will look to hold Hard Rock, the developer Mohan Kailas, and the primary contractor Citadel Builders accountable for damages.  Multiple lawsuits have already been filed.  Because Citadel and its subcontractors had been in the practice of misclassifying workers, many victims and families may not be eligible for healthcare or worker's comp benefits.   In the absence of federal disaster relief, legal action is likely the only recourse for everyone.

Meanwhile, the statewide election is into its runoff stage. Republicans are on the verge of capturing legislative supermajorities and possibly the Governor's office. One of the animating issues for them this year has been "tort reform."

Oil and gas isn’t the only business sector trying to attribute Louisiana’s problems to trial lawyers The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry has long been engaged in demonizing trial lawyers as the bane of Louisiana business, while they’ve waged a campaign for “civil justice reform”, as they’re now calling it. LABI has long been the primary financial backer of Louisiana Lawsuit Abuse Watch, which claims to be “a citizen watchdog group dedicated to stopping lawsuit abuse that threatens local businesses and jobs.”

The remaining Republican candidate for Governor happens to own a large construction industry firm himself.  He has some pretty strong opinions about the rights of injured workers and governments to sue companies who have caused them injury. 

Rispone, who compared himself to President Donald Trump, pointed to Louisiana’s natural resources, including oil and gas, that he said should be bringing the state jobs.

“Lawsuit abuse is killing thousands of jobs,” Rispone said. “You know that better than anybody.”

The soon to be governing power in the State of Louisiana defines the only available path to remuneration for disrupted small businesses, compensation for depleted public finances, justice for injured workers, and reparations for a despoiled environment as "lawsuit abuse" and wants it obliterated. 

Once this radical faction is in office, will it move to obstruct justice for the Hard Rock victims? If so, who will speak out for them? Don't count on the Advocate editorial board.  In its endorsement of John Bel Edwards, the paper offered a few issues on which it continues to disagree with him.

There are, after all, many problems to solve, and we haven’t always agreed with the governor’s approach to the state’s underlying challenges. Louisiana needs a governor who supports tort reform and will stand up to trial lawyers and teacher unions. Lawsuits against energy companies put our state at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting investment.

Once the dust blown about by a building collapsed by criminal capitalism has settled, and the damage incurred by its several victims endures, don't expect much sympathy from the local media monopoly. Not when there is still "investment" to attract and unions to crush, anyway.  

All of this just seems too unreal to take seriously

See this is why I try to stay focused on the local doings nowadays.  All that requires a person to wrap one's mind around is exploding cranes, sewer cars, weekly boil orders, the occasional jaguar rampage, you know, normal stuff.  The national politics, on the other hand, I am convinced is not real. How can anyone take any of this seriously?

Everyone is foreign scum these days. Democrats spent three years trying to prove Donald Trump is a Russian pawn. Mitch McConnell is “Moscow Mitch.” Third party candidates are a Russian plot. The Bernie Sanders movement is not just a wasteland of racist and misogynist “Bros,” but — according to intelligence agencies and mainstream pundits alike — the beneficiary of an ambitious Russian plot to “stoke the divide” within the Democratic Party. The Joe Rogan independents attracted to the mild antiwar message of Tulsi Gabbard are likewise traitors and dupes for the Kremlin.

If you’re keeping score, that’s pretty much the whole spectrum of American political thought, excepting MSNBC Democrats. What a coincidence!

But people do. People take all of this bizarre Tom Clancy novel stuff constructed by cable news fantasists to be the actual meat of our national political debate.  Meanwhile poor people all over this country are living isolated lives. Left behind by a hostile ownership class, Americans find themselves without adequate housing, medical care, or any sustainable means of supporting themselves. And yet our politics is dominated by the nightly MSNBC hunt for imaginary Russian sleeper agents. Whenever I feel obliged to say anything about it at all what I want to say is it depresses and exhausts me.

Please just let me drive straight into the nearest flooded out underpass.  That, I can understand.

Today, in #Bothsides at the Daily Georges

This afternoon the front page of the Daily Georges website is highlighting a letter writer aruging in favor of Drew Brees's constiutional right to wittingly associate his professional marketing persona with a despicable hate group. Go find it if you want to read it.  It figures that the letter writer specifically praises the Advocate's decision to print a dishonest opinion piece about the subject by resident toad Dan Fagan earilier in the week.

We went over this the other day, but just to reiterate, the problem we have with their decision to publish Dan Fagan is not that he writes opinions we do not like. The problem is he writes bullshit opinions constructed from deliberate lies about the subject of his opining. Giving him a platform on the editorial page, in turn, sets the boundaries of subsequent discusssion to encompass his bullshit as an acceptable premise.  This generates more letters and opinions based on that bullshit which the paper is then only too happy to print and highlight on their web page thus reifying the bullshit further.

None of this is an accident. It is a deliberate editorial choice which reveals the preferred inclination of the paper's management which is clearly quite favorable toward bullshit.

For example, last week, this happened.

Congratulations to the Daily Georges on 1) running a syndicated Rich Lowry column downplaying "hysteria" over climate change and then 2) printing two different reaction letters in order to "bothsides" the hell out of climate change pic.twitter.com/3x33rpDkaW

— skooks (@skooks) September 7, 2019

Bullshit. It's just one side of an irresolvable "civil" debate.

Your God-given right to record videos for hate groups

Why does the Advocate publish Dan Fagan? Their management constantly makes a big deal out of the need for us all to arrive at a more respectful civil discourse. But then they turn right around and hand over editorial space to Fagan's inflammatory disingenuous clickbait taeks. I really don't understand. The only explanation I can come up with is Fagan's product comports with somebody in charge over there's definition of decency.

Which means somebody in charge over there thinks it's perfectly within the bounds of decent, respectful, civil discourse to say that a well known hate group famous for promoting psychological torture and funding politicians who believe there is such a thing as "legitimate rape" is merely "advocating for the preservation of family values."

Brees did seem to waffle some on his association with Focus on the Family, claiming he was unaware of the religious group’s stand on gay issues.

 “I was not aware of any of the things they said about them lobbying for anti-gay (causes)… any type of messaging or inequality or any type of hate-type related stuff. I was not aware of that at all,” Brees said.

 But Focus on the Family is much like most Christian organizations advocating for the preservation of family values. Does Brees consider defending traditional marriage as “hate-type related stuff?”

Focus On The Family is not like "most Christian organizations." It is a politically active anti-gay hate group founded by a psychopath. Dan Fagan clearly knows this and yet chooses to tell us a blatant lie about it. And the Advocate then chooses to legitimize Fagan's deliberate lie by publishing it on its very civil and respectful op-ed page. Why would they do that?

Drew Brees ought to have known all of this as well although, as Lauren Theisen writes here,  the possibility that he did not is at least plausible.

I can’t see inside Brees’s head and don’t know what his beliefs are—given that he’s a rich, straight man who’s spent nearly two decades fanatically focused on playing pro football at a legendary level, I’d wager he might not even know what conversion therapy is. But his explanation has to do better than this. The video doesn’t mention Focus On The Family at all, let alone disavow them, and speaks in only the vaguest possible terms about the specific criticism Brees received. At best, the statement makes clear that Drew Brees will not directly attack any gay person for their sexuality, but whether or not he believes they should have full rights is still up for debate.

“I’m not sure why the negativity spread, or why people have tried to rope me into certain negativity,” Brees says in the video, most annoyingly. I know he’s hard at work preparing for the Texans, but literally five minutes on the internet, tops, would answer that question. He really doesn’t even have to do it himself! Just find someone who’ll tell him, “Hey, that video was produced by people who want to oppress gay people. Back away from it now.” Drew, if you’re reading, I’m telling you it right now.

For whatever reason, though, Brees, who makes an estimated $16 million a year renting out his carefully managed public persona for brands, doesn't always subject his partners to the most strict vetting process. Witness his association with cult like multi-level marketing schemes like Advocare, his support for an attempt by Tom Benson and Ron Forman to privatize and profit off of publicly accessible park space at The Fly, and his involvement in a diamond counterfeiting deal over the summer to name a few. We might expect that someone with this much money at stake in choosing the right business associates should pay a little more attention to what their business is all about.  But Brees is enough of a weirdo football nerd that it we can't be too surprised if it turns out he doesn't make time for all that.

That's hardly an excuse, of course.  Big Easy Magazine traces Brees's relationship with Focus on the Family at least as far back as 2010.  Certainly some basic awareness should have soaked through at some point. Maybe he really does support the hate part of the hate group's agenda after all.  Indeed even the "Bring Your Bible To School Day" event he promotes in the video is, at best, an iffy propaganda stunt aimed at undermining church/state separation by stoking the radical right's victimization complex.  That's certainly the angle Fagan takes in his bad faith (groan) defense of Brees from persecution at the hands of (checks notes) a small New Orleans based website.*

But the rules are different now. Are Christian groups no longer allowed to take positions on controversial social issues? Are organizations whose beliefs are Bible-based now off-limits for celebrities like Brees? Is this the new standard? The fact Brees had to defend, quantify and clarify his association with Focus on the Family speaks volumes. It should concern us.

Actually, no, none of this "should concern us."  The fact that the Advocate thinks so little of its readers that it would present such obvious bullshit as just one end of the ordinary spectrum of honest political argument might, however.

*Speaking of persecution complexes, maybe the folks over at Big Easy Mag can sit back and take a few breaths.  The way they've reacted via social media and subsequent commentary to the inevitable criticism that comes with publishing a critical story about a local icon seems a little out of proportion. On the other hand, maybe if the other various corporate outlets such as the several owned by the Georges Media virtual monopoly weren't #bothsidesing the issue to death, they wouldn't feel so out on a limb.

The whole point of the internet

Once upon a time there was this quaint notion that academic research, specifically, but general human knowledge by extension, would be greatly accelerated if the individual costs of sharing information were reduced almost to zero. Inevitably this ran up against the equally quaint notion that you can make billions of dollars creating artificial and unnecessary bottlenecks in the process.

The University of California decided it doesn’t want scientific knowledge locked behind paywalls, and thinks the cost of academic publishing has gotten out of control.

Elsevier owns around 3,000 academic journals, and its articles account for some 18 percent of all the world’s research output. “They’re a monopolist, and they act like a monopolist,” says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, head of the campus libraries at UC Berkeley and co-chair of the team that negotiated with the publisher. Elsevier makes huge profits on its journals, earning its parent company RELX billions of dollars a year. 

This is a story about more than subscription fees. It’s about how a private industry has come to dominate the institutions of science, and how librarians, academics, and even pirates are trying to regain control.

Which one of these notions defines the actual point of the internet for you depends on how favorable you are to the advancement and liberation of humanity vs.. you know.. capitalism.

I hope they at least buy Valerio something nice

You may have seen a few of these signs adorning the lawns of the nicer Uptown homes this month

Here is a shocker for you.  It turns out that all of the differently branded editorial voices belonging to the Georges Media Empire Holding Company are in agreement about how everyone should vote in an election. All of the Georgeses want you to approve the Audubon millage on Saturday's ballot. The Georges-Advocate says Audubon has "done a smart thing" in lumping City Park and a pair of city agencies in with their new tax proposal. The Georges-Advocate-Gambit says some nonsense about how it overcomes "a piecemeal approach" to parks management. The Times-Georges-DotCom says it's "a smart way to maximize tax dollars."

The Mayor and her friends have also dumped several hundred thousand dollars into an all out advertising blitz in favor of the new tax. According to campaign finance filings,  the pro-tax  PAC "Together For Parks Alliance" had spent over $180,000 through March. The report for April isn't out yet. The PAC had about $35,000 on hand to start the month.  Judging from the explosion of mailers and ads on local TV and social media, I'd guess they will have spent something close to $250,000 by the time it's all over.   That's a lot to dump into a single ballot measure. They could have bought one "nurse, teacher, or first responder" a whole condo for that.

We've already talked about this in terms of the hypocrisy of the elites in the Audubon adjacent fundraising clubs who think they run the city. But, okay, what is it they're actually asking voters to do? The Georgeses opinionators all say we're being asked to "renew" existing millages.  But this isn't really what's happening.  The proposed millage is, in fact, a whole new tax that replaces three current millages set to expire two years from now. The Georgeses also tell us that Audubon is graciously redistributing its current revenues in order to "share" something with less well funded entities. That isn't quite right either.

Here is the Assessor's sheet of current dedicated millages in Orleans Parish.

Audubon has two millages set to expire in 2021. One of them (labeled "Audubon Park Zoo" here) is .32 mils and meant to supplement operations and capital improvements at the privately owned and operated facility.  The other one, labeled "Aquarium" for 2.99 mils was specifically dedicated to finance the construction of the Aquarium sometime way back in the 1900s. The bonds serviced by those funds are set to be paid off when the millage expires. In other words that tax has paid for what it was meant to pay for. It's just money that has been going directly to the bank for thirty years. Nobody will actually miss it when it's gone.

Audubon's spokesperson admits as much in this article. 

Although Audubon would lose more than $4 million a year in tax money, Dietz said it will be able to absorb most of that blow when it finishes paying off the bonds that financed building of the aquarium in 2021.

"Most" of the $4 million loss in expiring tax revenue could be "absorbed" when the debt is retired. Makes sense since that's what it was for. This is further corroborated today by a person on Twitter who informs us that Audubon has been spending approximately $3.8 million a year on debt service. If they were to come back in a couple of years and ask to renew their expiring .32 mils, that looks like it would cover the difference just fine. We could argue further about whether they're entitled to that, even. But it doesn't matter because what they're asking for is a brand new tax altogether.


The new tax is 6.31 mils. This figure is derived by combining the .32 Audubon base millage with what had been the 2.99 mils dedicated to bond financing. In order to sell the public on the deal, another 3.00 mils is added to match the amount currently shared by NORD and Parks and Parkways.  The three entities then divide up the total in a way that allows each to take a little bit of what had been the Aquarium debt fund. City Park is also cut in a share.

Critically, though, for Audubon this means a dramatic increase from .32 mils for discretionary stuff  UP to 1.95. The Parks and NORD millages expire in 2021. They could be renewed, or even increased, at that point. There is no need to tie the future of those mils to Audubon other than to provide Audubon with an excuse to bump up their own funds. The claim that Audubon is actually giving something up in order to "share" with the other parties is just a shell game.  The Georges papers certainly know this.  It's a shame they have three "brands" available with which to broadcast their lies about it. 

There's also something perverse in the idea that Mayor Cantrell, who is supposed to be leading a fight for a "fair share" of tax revenues currently enjoyed by the tourism industry would promote this plan to hold our public parks and recreation departments hostage to the greedy interests of Ron Forman's commercial tourist attractions.  But that's the standard procedure around here.  There's no such thing as a public good if it doesn't first trickle down through the usual network of oligarchs.

Just as we're finishing up this post it looks like the new plan has passed by an overwhelming margin.

And that's what having a quarter million dollars to throw around on a single ballot question will buy you.  As long as we keep funneling public money right back up into the hands of the well-to-do, there's sure to be more where that came from. 

This blog will sell to John Georges for one million dollars

He probably won't buy it, though.  He seems to have it in his head that there are too many "dangerous people" on the internet.  And, from his point of view, maybe that's true. Those people will just bring up any old thing if you don't watch them closely.  So I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that when Georges does decide to buy a website, he does it mainly to fire everybody.

New Orleans Advocate owners Dathel and John Georges have purchased The Times-Picayune and its nola.com website from the Newhouse family’s Advance Local Media.

The Advocate will publish a seven-day, home-delivered newspaper in New Orleans using the brands and features of both publications. The new paper will debut in June. The two papers’ websites will be combined under the nola.com brand around the same time.

According to Georges, this is being done in order to "ensure a strong print and online news company for years to come.” But you'd forgive us if we weren't entirely sold on the proposition that the "brands and features" of the two papers are worth as much to the reader minus the work of the actual reporters who once produced their content.  Georges laid off every single T-P employee effective 60 days from now. We haven't been told how many can expect to be hired on to the new company but the early indications are it will be very few. I guess, technically, you can call that an "expansion" of the Advocate.  The Advocate is certainly calling it that, anyway. 

The Advocate will be expanding its New Orleans news, advertising and circulation staff by hiring from current nola.com and Times-Picayune employees, and will increase its coverage of suburban communities, sports, and arts and entertainment, and also improve its opinion pages.

How will they be improving the opinion pages, exactly?  Somehow I doubt the opinions will improve. The current version of the New Orleans Advocate opinion page prominently features the conventional wisdom of political columnist Stephanie Grace, the curmudgeonly wit of veteran James Gill, and the all out right wing nuttery of Dan Fagan. Gill and Grace get some things right some of the time but, mostly, this is a centrist-to-conservative leaning page. The T-P's Jarvis DeBerry is a pretty moderate columnist himself but would add a relatively more progressive voice to this lot if they were to bring him on.  We've not seen or heard anything to indicate the Advocate management is inclined to go that direction, though. While pitching the Advocate's new online paywall to readers last month, editor Peter Kovacs chose to highlight the work of only one columnist in particular.

Six days a week, Smiley Anders captures the wit, kindness and good humor of the people of Louisiana. And even if the rest of the news centers on crime or crisis, you can’t read his column without walking away an optimist.

But maybe none of this matters. The significance of a newspaper opinions page is greatly diminished in the age of social media. Takes, even "good' takes, are cheap. Write your own whenever you like and share them with your friends. The value produced by a newspaper is in the actual news reporting. And John Georges just fired a whole lot of reporters.

It's never a good time for that. But it doesn't improve matters that Georges fired everybody during the height of the legislative session. At the very moment the mayor and the tourism industry are supposedly on the verge of a deal, and as the city council prepares to make a major decision on the future of the short term rental problem, nearly half of the beat reporters responsible for keeping an eye on that stuff just learned they're about to be on the street.

If any of that is worrisome to Lens editor Jed Horne, he isn't about to tell us. Instead he spends most of this editorial gloating. 

But starting a rival paper that was better than the T-P wasn’t the end of the drama. Now Kovacs and Shea  will run the whole shebang for Georges. Meanwhile, the buzz on the street is that the remaining T-P staff has been given layoff notices and 60 days of severance pay. Enjoying the pick of the litter, The Advocate is expected to offer jobs to a handful of reporters who toiled for its former rival. The reconfigured paper will begin publishing in June.

Yay! Everybody is fired and now has to grovel to one of the slimiest billionaires in the state. Why does Horne love this so much?  If there's one positive thing we can say for the six year "newspaper war" it's that the number of reporting jobs in New Orleans declined at a less dramatic rate than they otherwise would have. Now that anomaly has met with an abrupt end. Horne goes on to predict that the Times-Georges monopoly is likely to cull the ranks further. How are we supposed to feel about that?  Horne seems confused.

The Advocate editors sure aren't.  They think it's great.  And they're looking forward to welcoming "some" new colleagues.

We look forward to welcoming some new colleagues, serving new subscribers, helping new advertisers grow their businesses — and tirelessly listening to all of the voices in the great communities we serve.

So congratulations to those guys.  Everybody else, have fun reapplying for some of your jobs.

It was puzzling yesterday to see a few commenters describe the late news wars as a "David vs. Goliath" contest. Lamar uses those terms in his title here, though he only does that in a pointed, sort of ironic way.  He also hints at something in this paragraph that a lot of people have either missed or purposefully ignored so far. 

The decision to fire the entire staff, in one fell swoop, has been roundly criticized on social media by the paper’s readers and among fellow members of the press, while the announcement of the purchase has been met with a range of reactions. Still, among journalists and mass media professionals, the consensus seems to be one of cautious optimism and a sense of relief. In recent years, the Times-Picayune has been faltering under poor corporate management.

Why would a sudden mass firing be met with "cautious optimism and a sense of relief" among media professionals?  The most likely reason is they all expected to be losing their jobs soon anyway. It's possible Advance was getting set to shutter the T-P whether Georges bought it or not. Still, the move hardly makes him any kind of savior. He's just stripping the carcass.

Anyway John Georges  vs. Advance/Newhouse isn't a  David and Goliath story. It's more like Goliath vs. Very Sick And Dying Goliath.  And regardless of which Goliath wins, the losers are journalists, support staff and readers. Or maybe it's all just the natural way of market economics.  We don't really need two newspapers in a town like New Orleans where so very little news happens, right? 

One thing we did learn was this dumb Darren Rovell tweet from back in January turned out to be more accurate than anyone knew.  And that's the strangest news to come out of any of this.

"Times-Advocate" Now THAT is some breaking news... https://t.co/zpFEJ2VpXl

— skooks (@skooks) January 24, 2019

Mayor Trump

Amazing. I was just talking about this the other day. The recent mayors of New Orleans always seems to have certain stylistic traits in common with whoever was President during their terms.  LaToya acts a lot like Trump sometimes.  Assumes everyone is out to get her, especially the media who she frequently bullies.

In an interview with Essence about her recent trip to Cuba, Mayor LaToya Cantrell was blunt about the way she perceives she's been treated in the press: "I have not received the benefit of the doubt from the media since the beginning of my tenure as Mayor," she told Essence.

And we're just a year into this.