Number nine on the list is if you are supporting this event you are crossing a picket line

NOLA.com is fine running an Amazon commercial for you at the top of the page (just under the red bar header about the death of a fox.)  The commercial doesn't anything about the strike, though.  Wonder why they're comfortable running that.

Update: See also

Innovation Accomplished

It was only two years ago that Advance hired entrepreneurial creative destruction guru Tim Williamson to innovate the hell out of the NOLA.com newsroom. They were very excited to have him. It seemed important.

"It was important that the next president of NOLA Media Group be a proven innovator with a strong media background, proven business acumen and deep roots in New Orleans," said Mathews. "Tim is all of those things and more. He is the perfect person to lead our company into the future."

And, you know, why wouldn't they be excited? Williamson's resume: Newman, Tulane, Bear Stearns, Cox Communications, Idea Village put him in the perfect position to know and empathize with the upper class, clubby people who make all the decisions that matter in New Orleans. It was important that they had a well placed advocate in the local media for a change, right?

Well he must be pretty darn efficient because that job is done.

Less than two years after taking the helm of The Times-Picayune, former Idea Village founder Tim Williamson is stepping down.

In an email to the staff Thursday, Williamson, who became president of the NOLA Media Group in August 2016, said, “I know this seems very sudden. But it’s something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve watched this team grow and hit its stride."

An article posted on nola.com said Williamson will not be replaced. Instead, the NOLA Media Group’s vice president of content, Mark Lorando, and vice president and chief revenue officer, Alisha Owens, will handle the day-to-day operation of news and sales. David Francis will remain executive vice president.

Can't wait to see where Tim goes next.

On the ground reporting

The literal stupidity of our age of stupid literal-ism is literally stupid.

The company moved into the high-rise building amid much fanfare in December 2012 under the leadership of then-publisher Ricky Mathews, who had been chosen by Advance Media, owners of The Times-Picayune, to bring the paper into what was called the "digital transition." At the time, Mathews told The Wall Street Journal, "The owners wanted us to be in a space that could make a statement," and in a public meeting with New Orleans' tech community, he boasted the offices would have a "Google-Nike kind of vibe." (While NOLA.com employees enjoyed the prime view, some complained about the lack of mobility that came with the location, and cellphone service on the 32nd floor has been spotty at best since day one.)

"It's a beautiful space with the best views in the city," NMG president Tim Williamson told Gambit, "but I think that it was a little disconnected from the community. There's a better way to foster collaboration, and I really want to make a better opportunity to connect to the community. I think a media company should be connected at ground level."

Because the new space is on a lower floor, they are more "connected to the community."  Similarly, Donald Trump thinks "transparency" in border wall construction means you can actually see through it.  Besides, I thought this was the media company who knew about all the communications technology and stuff. Of all people, they should know how to contact the community from a distance.

Their new office space is 1/3 the size of the old one. They say they aren't firing anybody though who can say what good their word is now? For all we know, it's a promise to not literally set anyone on fire. Anyway, this isn't the most encouraging thing.

The size of the new newsroom has some NOLA.com employees concerned that another downsizing may be on the horizon in 2018 — as did a letter last month from Advance Local CEO Randy Siegel, which said, in part, "We will respond better and more nimbly to needs in the markets. We’ll look for more and different ways to generate revenue, as well as operational efficiencies."

Did you have a happy 'trep week?

The "recovery" period is over.

For the first time since Hurricane Katrina, more people moved from New Orleans to other areas of the United States last year than came to the city from other communities, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released Thursday.

While New Orleans continues to grow slowly thanks to births and international migration, the reversal of in-country migration is a milestone for a city that has added thousands of new residents from areas across the country during its long recovery from the 2005 flood.

If the estimates are correct, and 2016 does not prove to be an aberration, the new figures may also be a turning point in the continued growth of the city.

It's fine, though.  No need to add any more residents at all, really.  As long as we can "fight blight" by rehabbing empty houses into STRs where nobody actually lives, it makes for smoother governance, anyway.  That Census estimate has New Orleans at roughly 390,000 or so residents. By comparison, there were 10.5 million tourists here last year.  They so greatly outnumber us that we might as well not even be here at all.  A predominantly tourist population is easier to deal with. It isn't going to bother you about better services, schools, transit, etc. Crime might still be a problem. But if you keep a close eye on the places where visitors are likely to hang out you're probably OK there too.

In general terms the "New" New Orleans is smaller, whiter, more expensive, more dominated by tourism than ever. It's what the city's elites always wanted before the flood. The "recovery" has been an exercise in wish fulfillment for them. And now the mission is accomplished.  All that's left to do are the congratulations.

The mayor had plenty of those to hand out during this most recent "Entrepreneur Week." This is an annual event created by Idea Village which is now an interlocking directorate with NOLA.com consisting of the same crowd of boosters and tech bros who once upon a time foisted Ray Nagin upon us.  They're just as happy now with Mitch, though, who is himself always too happy to promote the con that all our city's social inequities can be solved, not with politics, but with apps.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu's Twitter account provided snippets of his address to open the Civic Innovation Summit Tuesday. "#NOLA is the definition of a resilient city. Catastrophic events provide an opportunity -- out of necessity -- to transform a community," he said. "All of the progress we've made continues to be threatened until we all move forward together."

The Landrieu administration last week launched the Digital Equity Challenge to come up with ways to connect New Orleanians who are underserved -- including low-income, minority, elderly and disabled residents -- to technology. The city is seeking proposals for the best ideas for solving the technology gap. "Connecting New Orleans' low-income residents to technology is an important step to connecting all our residents to new opportunities," Mayor Landrieu said in announcing the effort.

It's this sort of nonsense that delivers the Potemkin village we've built here. All the houses are actually hotel rooms. All the streets are movie sets. The oligarchic landowners are the wealthiest in the state. Meanwhile, the standard of living for most of its residents is poor and steadily declining. The tourism industry that feeds the fortunes of the ruling class runs on the desperation and cutthroat competition among those who create its "cultural" product and those who provide the support services that help deliver it.

Here's a look at what "entrepreneurship" means for  musicians scraping by from gig-to-gig on Frenchmen Street, for example.

Musicians are responsible for the crowds and the drink sales on Frenchmen Street. In an environment where each club has live music from 4 PM until closing time (which may be 4 AM), bands encourage the traffic. The musicians who keep the city’s culture and tourism operating year-round deserve to be paid fairly. Yet the standard pay for bands at Frenchmen Street venues with no cover is 20% of the bar plus tips during a three- to four-hour time slot. This amounts to a starvation wage, as bars pay out as little as $200 total for four- to eight-piece bands. It is common for musicians to walk away from a three-hour, no-cover gig with less than $50, including tips. Musicians must be compensated not only for the time they are performing but also for the countless hours of training and preparation that are required to play well. Music is skilled labor, and demands a high wage. With rising housing and living costs, musicians are left struggling to make a living while spending has rapidly increased at Frenchmen Street venues over the last decade.

Here also is a quick commentary on the "gig economy" writ large. Despite the speeches and presentations and editorials coming out of Entrepreneur Week, the more salient point about the app and 'trep craze is the work environment it fosters for most people just trying to make it.

Fiverr, which had raised a hundred and ten million dollars in venture capital by November, 2015, has more about the “In Doers We Trust” campaign on its Web site. In one video, a peppy female voice-over urges “doers” to “always be available,” to think about beating “the trust-fund kids,” and to pitch themselves to everyone they see, including their dentist. A Fiverr press release about “In Doers We Trust” states, “The campaign positions Fiverr to seize today’s emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive whiteboarding.” This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in the video. It’s a stretch to feel cheerful at all about the Fiverr marketplace, perusing the thousands of listings of people who will record any song, make any happy-birthday video, or design any book cover for five dollars. I’d guess that plenty of the people who advertise services on Fiverr would accept some “whiteboarding” in exchange for employer-sponsored health insurance.

At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear. Human-interest stories about the beauty of some person standing up to the punishments of late capitalism are regular features in the news, too. I’ve come to detest the local-news set piece about the man who walks ten or eleven or twelve miles to work—a story that’s been filed from Oxford, Alabama; from Detroit, Michigan; from Plano, Texas. The story is always written as a tearjerker, with praise for the person’s uncomplaining attitude; a car is usually donated to the subject in the end. Never mentioned or even implied is the shamefulness of a job that doesn’t permit a worker to afford his own commute.

As always, the fundamental problem is the imbalance of political power between capital and labor. Or between the owners and the chronically underemployed now euphemistically encouraged to think of themselves as "entrepreneurs." NOLA.com and Mitch Landrieu and his app aren't going to do anything to correct that.  But they are quite good at dazzling and distracting audiences from it.  And that's what this week has been all about.

It's a tech 'trep's world

We're all just living in it. That is, if we can actually afford to live in it. Some of us may have already been priced out by some sort of "sharing" app. If not, don't worry. They'll get to you sooner or later. When they do, though, don't expect much sympathy from the media. Turns out they run that too.

Idea Village founder and CEO Tim Williamson, a nationally respected business leader whose determination to expand economic and leadership opportunities for New Orleanians sparked an entrepreneurial renaissance in his hometown, has been named President of NOLA Media Group.

Williamson replaces Ricky Mathews, who previously announced his intention to transition out of his role as NOLA Media Group president and help lead new initiatives with Advance Local, a group of affiliated websites and newspapers of which NOLA.com and The Times-Picayune are members.

It's a week for old favorites in the world of "volunteer entrepreneurism."  Yesterday it was Irvin Mayfield and Jim Bernazzani. Today it's Williamson. The guys should really get the band back together and play a number.  If only so many of them weren't in jail. Pour some out for Greg Meffert and Ray Nagin. Once upon a time Williamson and Meffert kind of made their careers locally by being in the circle of businessmen that produced Mayor Nagin.

It Helps to Know the Mayor
 
"We started out lucky, says Williamson. "I call it the MN [Mayor Nagin] factor. Ray Nagin, a former vice president and general manager for Cox Communications in Southeast Louisiana, who had never held political office, defeated New Orleans police chief Richard Pennington in the mayor's race in early 2002.


"He's entrepreneurial, says Williamson. "He understood business; he understood what we were talking about. There was finally a sense of possibility that we could actually create a world-class entrepreneurial community.


"What's critical to this is vision, continues Williamson. "The mayor stated that his vision is to make New Orleans the entrepreneurial capital of the world.

 But Williamson's neoliberal capitalist bona fides extend beyond mere cronyism.

Williamson, 51, is an Isidore Newman High School (1983) and Tulane University (1987) alum. He began his career as an investment banker on the East Coast, including a stint as Vice President of Investments at Bear Stearns in Boston. In 1996 he became regional general manager at Cox Interactive Media, responsible for building Internet markets in Austin, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Omaha, Pittsburgh and his native New Orleans.

Cox cable, Bear Stearns, Tulane, Newman. You could add "Legion of Doom: founding member" to that resume and it wouldn't be the worst thing on there. This is pretty much a made man we're talking about. Which is why one wonders if he's really this dense or more likely just dishonest when he cites historian Lawrence Powell in this video in calling New Orleans  "The place where capitalism was founded. The original silicon valley."  This is true, of course. It conveniently glosses over all the slavery, though.

We've actually mentioned this before in the context of the Confederate monuments controversy. But the book to read is Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Baptist focuses on banking and credit "innovations" pioneered by the entrepreneurs (like Vincent Nolte in the passage below) trading humans and cotton futures at Maspero's during this founding of capitalism Williamson enthuses about.



Anyway, the inheritors of this proud legacy are pretty much running the town now so there's no point in objecting anymore.  Maybe if they manage to bump us up to three "Entrepreneur Week" features per month, they'll finally find the Golden App that solves everyone's problems. Probably not, though. The track record isn't very good.

Another robust round of layoffs coming for NOLA.com

Either that or New Orleans is now the news capital of the state of Alabama.

NOLA Media Group and Alabama Media Group, two media companies owned by Advance Local, will join a new regional company for the Southeast, NOLA.com reported Monday.

The Southeast Regional Media Group, a company slated to launch later this year, will encompass properties from NOLA Media Group — which includes The Times-Picayune and NOLA.com — and from Alabama Media Group, which oversees The Birmingham News, The (Mobile, Alabama) Press-Register and The Huntsville Times, according to NOLA.com.

Probably a way to move sales and customer service into one office and fire a bunch of people in the process. But it's okay because we know what happens next is they all create their own start-ups and NOLA.com will feature them in the next "Entrepreneur Week."  So really this is all about growing the local economy.

Compelling circumstances

Yesterday the media company known clumsily as NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune, having been denied a request for appeal, complied with a judge's order to turn over account information about two frequent commenters on its website.

“Nola.com/The Times-Picayune is committed to the idea that the constitutional rights of Internet users, including the First Amendment right to speak anonymously, should be carefully safeguarded, and that the identity of those who choose to speak anonymously should be revealed only in the most compelling of circumstances,” Lori Mince, the paper’s attorney, said in a prepared statement.

The T-P's position in this matter is laudable in principle. Although it has been pointed out elsewhere that they've been less than consistent on this point.  Right now, it seems, they're committed to objecting to having to rat out their... users? sources? content providers?.. whatever you call a newspaper commenter... to a judge. But they're being forced to do that anyway under "compelling circumstances."

In this case the compelling circumstance is that lawyers representing Stacey Jackson think that one or both of these commenters might have been a federal prosecutor publicly disparaging Ms. Jackson while they were in the process of bringing charges against her.

Many will recall Jackson was head of  the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership agency. 

The NOAH program erupted into scandal in the summer of 2008, when information emerged that many of the homes the quasi-city agency had paid to gut or board up had in fact received no attention. The scandal galvanized citizens frustrated with the city's halting recovery.

Much of their ire was aimed at Nagin, who had championed the NOAH program as a way of propping up overwhelmed nonprofits that had been providing gutting services. Nagin initially reacted defensively, holding a memorable news conference in which he blasted the reporting of Lee Zurik, then with WWL-TV and now with WVUE-TV, and accused him of impeding the city's recovery.

But the real center of the scandal was Stacey Jackson, who was NOAH's executive director and had close ties to several of the program's favored contractors.

Whether or not it ends up becoming the means by which more prosecutorial misconduct is exposed, the NOAH scandal is already a memorable event in the city's political history. Not only was it a major turning point in Nagin's relationship with the media but it also helped launch Karen Gadbois's career in investigative journalism and thus is a major reason we have The Lens today. 

Fewer will recall that Jackson was also part owner of a men's designer underwear shop called "The Him Store" but somehow that fact has become less significant with the passage of time.

Anyway, as we were saying, according to Jackson's lawyers, there is compelling reason to believe that forcing the T-P to turn over information about these anonymous commenters will lead to their being positively identified as federal prosecutors.

Whether they will ever be unmasked, however, is not clear, despite Thursday’s developments.

Keith Marszalek, Nola.com’s director of digital operations, did not respond to an emailed question Thursday about what information the website keeps on its commenters. And whether the identities of “aircheck” and “jammer1954” are even knowable may depend on how hard the two have tried to cover their tracks, experts say.

Or not.  But hey let's err on the side of suppressing free speech and a free press anyway just in case.

Who is poisoning "the discourse"?

Tigerdroppings and NOLA.com are famous internet-wide for being hosts to the most outlandishly mean, racist, sexist, what have you, comment threads a person could hope to experience.  They're often exhibit A held up by whatever pearl clutching community leader is militating for a clamp down on internet speech in the name of preserving the "civil discourse."

It's interesting to me, then, that we keep finding out the people contributing the most corrosive "uncivil" comments happen to be well.. judges and US Attorneys and such.

An Arkansas circuit judge has called off his campaign for higher office after he confessed to making what some deemed to be offensive comments under an alias on the LSU fan message board, Tiger Droppings.

A political blogger first suggested on Monday (March 3) that Arkansas Circuit Judge Mike Maggio was behind the pseudonym “geauxjudge” in a post on his website, Blue Hog Report, according to The Associated Press. Maggio acknowledged the comments were his on Wednesday (March 5), apologized and ended his campaign for a seat on the Arkansas Court of Appeals.

Some have called the comments racist, sexist, homophobic or inappropriate.

Speaking of which, the US Attorneys comment scandal is likely far from over.

Repeat after me: WE DON’T KNOW JACK SQUAT. The next time you read an article on Commentgate — and you will— whisper that mantra under your breath.

We’re two years deep in this scandal and still can’t answer any of the fundamental questions: How many feds were making comments? How many usernames were used? How many comments were written?

Based on my research I’ll wager that there are many thousands of undiscovered comments written by feds who are supposed to be impartial servants of the law.

NOLA.com, the calls are coming from inside the house

I never believed Heebe's techno-forensic phrenologist palm reader guy was what brought the Perricone case to light. Most likely, Fred Heebe just knows (and owns) a lot of people.

I've speculated, ad nauseam, about my suspicion that someone, or someones, from within Nola.com was/were data mining commenters' personal information and sharing it with Heebe's defense team.  Applying Occam's razor, it seems to be the most logical way these commenters were identified or were even known to be commenting in the first place.  In the wake of the revelations about Sal...and then Jan Mann...I began to see some very obvious signs that backed that theory up.

And there's a coda to this. Dambala mentions it in the comments as well but.. come on.

The Times-Picayune’s motion for additional time does not indicate whether the newspaper plans to appeal Wilkinson’s order. Rather, it says, producing the information by Wednesday may be difficult because “the individuals associated with The Times-Picayune who have the ability to retrieve the information at issue are located out of state, and the retrieval of the information involves review of multiple databases by personnel in several states.”

That guy who googles IP addresses works in a different office and unfortunately our robust internet media company has no way of communicating with anyone over so great a distance. 

Still doing it wrong

Thought we covered this this morning.  No need to update the story. On NOLA.com, this is what the comments section is for.

Note: This post has been updated since it was first published to include a remark from a U.S. Attorney's Office representative.

Bold experiment

The so-called "bold experiment" Dambala mockingly questions by defining as "put an ultra-conservative managing editor from Texas in charge of the Baton Rouge bureau" isn't precisely that.  It's better described as an exercise in finding out how many people can be fooled into viewing web pages that offer no helpful information while still calling yourself a "news" entity.

Yes, part of that strategy involves promoting individuals who generate baiting opportunistic fluff like the poll cited by this Gambit post. It also means replacing Stephanie Grace's mild but fact-based political column with James Varney's ideological trolling.  Dambala comments further on Varney.  I gave up on him after his "debut" column accused public libraries of harboring some sort of  "liberal bias" in their periodicals collections because they carry "leftist" publications such as The New York Times and Newsweek. It was clear then that NOLA media group didn't want to be taken seriously. Although they do very much want you to click on their articles.

Further proof nobody knows how the hell NOLA.com works

Feds seeking information on 11 additional NOLA.com commenters

The aliases that the federal government wants to know more about are as follows: "FormerNOPDman," "mardigraswizard," "lawdawg1963," "nolacat60," "FSU1982," "alafbi," thewizard," "copperhead504," "isthisthingon?," "Andjusticeforall," and "uckzerto."

The Times-Picayune could find no evidence that "nolacat60" has ever been a username on the site. Two of the handles -- "thewizard" and "isthisthingon" -- exist on the site, but neither one has posted any comments, according to a search of NOLA.com.

You'll be important to the important people when you die

NOLA Media Group's Ricky Mathews compiles a "community roundtable" of advisers "to point us to compelling stories and inspire us to write editorials."  Of course the Knights of the NOLA.com Roundtable are all establishment insiders. 

We believe these sessions will be invaluable to our work. We expect to gain insights we otherwise might not have. We expect to be prodded and, sometimes, chided. We expect input from Roundtable members to point us to compelling stories and inspire us to write editorials. And we expect our readers to benefit from the collective wisdom of this group.

At long last representatives of Entergy, Audubon, Touro, Tulane, Charter schools, and the Chambers of Commerce for Jefferson and Orleans Parish will have a real voice around here. We look forward to benefiting from their wisdom.

On the one hand we could say that at least they're being transparent.  It's always been a matter of course that the T-P's natural disposition is to serve as an establishment mouthpiece.  But there are degrees of brown nosing and, from the looks of things, NOLA Media's Ricky Mathews is a Class A talent there.  Back in May, as news of the changes at the TP  was still breaking, Gambit's Kevin Allman wrote,

Across town, Mayor Mitch Landrieu released a general statement of support for the paper, noting he had been a T-P paper boy in his youth and saying, "I look forward to talking with new management and others who have a stake in the future of The Times-Picayune to discuss how we can help the newspaper grow and not diminish."

That probably sounds like music to the ears of Mathews, who is said to be a guy who courts those in power — a stark contrast to Phelps, who avoided public relationships that might become conflicts for his newspaper. In Alabama, Mathews was the head of the Coastal Recovery Commission (CRC), created in 2010 after the BP oil disaster. The commission, a project of then-Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, was funded entirely with BP funds. Mathews used AL.com to promote both the CRC and its subsequent nonprofit arm, the Coastal Alabama Leadership Council, in chatty stories under his own byline. Some Picayune employees worry that Mathews will not hesitate to become involved in Louisiana politics in ways that Phelps shunned, at least publicly.

I get that there's some value to cultivating access to influential sources, but Matthews strikes me as someone who very badly wants to be in the club, so to speak, and will do anything to please the gatekeepers of club membership. Maybe he should by them each their own Loving Cup coffee mugs to use when they sit together at the Roundtable.

Update: I guess not everybody knows the song in the title here. Hard to find a good version on YouTube. This will have to do.

The Word Business

I agree with Dambala.  The Advocate is going to have to come harder than this if they want to compete. 

Meanwhile, the new NOLA.com reveals that it has dumped Stephanie Grace's middle-of-the-road but at least informed and relevant politics column for James Varney's act which so far appears to be a conservative talk radio style series of trolling gimmicks.  In his first column, Varney visits area libraries and concludes their periodical sections are insufficiently conservative. Hilariously, Varney provides as examples of the "leftist" reading materials on display The New York Times and .... wait for it... Newsweek.

Later we get this jewel of a, "I'm not saying X but actually I'm saying X" line.

What explains this? I don't think the librarians are some conspiratorial set looking to blacklist a viewpoint. At least, I sure hope that's so.

It's disingenuous of NOLA.com to sell this obvious baiting bullcrap on its opinion page.  I don't object to a conservative columnist.  Ideological alignment is irrelevant so long as the writer presents a genuine and thoughtful attempt at grappling with a relevant news item. For example, I enjoy Owen Courreges' column over at Uptown Messenger even though I frequently disagree with it. 

What NOLA.com has done, though, is shoehorn Varney into position specifically so that they can have  a "Conservative Columnist" to falsely "balance" out their opinion page. Tonight they're promising to follow up the Presidential debate with a staged argument between Varney and their ostensibly "liberal" columnist Jarvis DeBerry.  I think Deberry is a fine writer, although I don't think it's accurate or helpful to label his output as categorically "liberal."  But, then, he obviously agreed to play in this sandbox as well so maybe he's more comfortable with the reductive generalization than I would have assumed.

I guess, in the meantime, it's up to us to blacklist this nonsense until someone presents us with something better.

Paper data

Sunday afternoon I bought a copy of the Advocate so that Menckles and I would have something to play with at Tracey's while we waited for the Saints game to come on. We had intended to pick up the final daily printed copy of the Times-Picayune that day but it turned out a lot of folks must have had the same idea. More folks than the Walgreens could supply anyway.

When I pointed out the Advocates available on the rack, Menckles blew me off.

"Isn't that like the Scientology newsletter or something?"

I was surprised but only for a second. Menckles didn't grow up in Louisiana, has only lived in the state for about six years and even then only in New Orleans... in the same neighborhood the whole time.   In that time, she's become enough of a New Orleanian to not give a shit what or if anybody outside of the city is reading.  So I was filling her in on the whole story about the Baton Rouge-based paper's decision to open a New Orleans bureau and begin daily delivery in the New Orleans area just as the T-P was scaling its back. The cashier overheard us.

"They're not making the Picayune anymore?"

And it was then that it occurred to me that maybe I'm living in a bit of a bubble.  While it may seem to a myopic news geek that the ro-busting of the T-P and all its little side dramas, "digital alliances" and overwrought symposia on the meaning of it all was a major story in 2012, the truth is many people really could not care less.

Which is where this LSU Public Policy Research Lab survey comes in.  The report is titled The State of Newspapers in New Orleans Survey: Citizen’s reactions to the loss of the daily Times Picayune The title actually does a far better job of explaining the document than the "Executive Summary" which follows. The study is produced in part by the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication which is noteworthy since the Manship family still owns and publishes the Advocate and were no doubt interested in these results.

The report is only marginally helpful, however.  The questions asking respondents why they like to read the news in print or why they like to read online are poorly designed.  I suspect the flaw is the multiple choice options conceptualize the respondents more as consumers than as readers.

I use both print and online sources for news because I think each has a specific value. I like the print version of a newspaper because it assembles the events of a day in a whole document; a static archive of the moment that tells us not only what happened but also how the editors chose to prioritize those events.

Meanwhile the great advantage of online news sources is the opportunity they afford the reader to interact either through direct feedback in a comment or an email to the author or by sharing and discussing the news with others.  This is kind of the point of the whole internet, really. And it's staggering that this survey disallows something like it as a response.

Also, and this is a small thing, the report is poorly written.  The narrative repeatedly insists that this or that datum is "interesting" or happens "interestingly." One item is described as "slightly bizarre."  There is an improper usage of the word "it's." As someone who delivers daily truckloads of typos to the world myself, I'm not usually one to pick these nits. But, for something produced by an academic institution and concerned specifically with the communications business, this is especially weak.

Anyway here are the bits that struck me as actually rather than just nominally interesting.

More than 4 out of 5 New Orleans area residents (82%) were aware that the Times Picayune was moving to a 3-days a week publishing schedule. Of course, that also means nearly 1 out of 5 residents were unaware.

One of those "1 out of 5" sold me my Advocate on Sunday.

At the time, this survey was conducted less than 1 in 4 (22.8%) New Orleans area residents were aware that The Advocate (the local Baton Rouge paper) would be publishing a special New Orleans edition daily.

I was momentarily surprised Sunday to learn that in my own household only 50% of residents were aware of this.  But it turns out even that is above the metro rate of awareness.

But those factoids are probably interesting only to me.  Here's the thing to pay attention to.

The percentage of users who read news about their local community online everyday is noticeably higher than the percentage of users who specifically read NOLA.com everyday; NOLA.com being the web presence of the Times Picayune. This suggests users are getting their local news online from a source other than local newspaper itself

NOLA Media Group has deliberately backed away from a format where it enjoyed an insurmountable market status in order to focus on an area where it is far less dominant.  Furthermore they're making this move on the cheap by choosing to drop many of the veteran reporters and opinion writers who had been tightly associated with the paper and its brand.  What they're looking to do now is  trade  primarily on the name NOLA.com.  If this flawed survey is to be believed, then that may mean they have taken a weaker position than they think they have.

Gill vs Yoko

NOLA.com has presented us with a subtle but annoying sort of Point/Counterpoint this morning.

James Gill's column today is about a corrupt researcher who pocketed $413,000 in compensation from a gas exploration company to produce an academic flavored report that appears to exonerate fracking.

The Public Accountability Initiative duly revealed that (Charles "Chip") Groat is on the board of Plains Exploration and Production, which paid him $413,000 in cash and stock last year. Since 2007 Groat has received $1.6 million in stock alone from the company, according to SEC reports.

So the frackers' clean bill of health is highly suspect, UT research money is down the drain and the Water Institute is dragged collaterally into the mud. Groat himself has paid no price, unless, contrary to the evidence here, he has a sense of shame. The Energy Institute's director, Raymond Orbach, who didn't know about Groat's conflict, now blows it off, claiming that, although it should have been disclosed, it made no difference to the study's conclusions.

Perhaps Orbach is embarrassed by his own failure to check out Groat's background. Orbach also may have failed to read UT's ethics policy, which includes the standard warning against real or apparent impropriety.

Of course they're standing by the study.  It does exactly what they wanted. Plains Exploration got what it paid for. Groat gets to keep his money. We're certain this study will be cited by every pro-fracking lobbyist and spokesperson from now until the end of time regardless of this controversy no one will remember.  At least Gill was good enough to point it out for us if only just this once.

Unfortunately, in order for Gill to do even this much, he still has to face a subtle counter-argument from his own online editors.  See, in the NOLA.com version of this column, it is paired with a tangentially related photograph of some annoying people nobody likes.



That's Sean Lennon standing there (hands on hips and all) at the invisible podium speaking at a press conference regarding something called "Artists Against Fracking" Yes, that's Yoko sitting next to him.  Also on stage is actor, Mark Ruffalo. As is always the case, celebrities... especially.. pretentious untalented celebrities like these do far more harm than good to any cause they presume to stick their stupid "Artists Against _____" noses into.    Somehow they remain oblivious to this effect they have, though.  Perhaps someday they'll figure it out.  We can imagine it, anyway.

NOLA.com's editors get it, though.  And that's why they've placed this photo here. It's how they bring a slight sense of balance to Gill's column.  On the one hand you've got Gill's point: Charles Groat has produced a corrupt and invalid report at the cynical behest of the oil and gas industry that will undoubtedly be used to further their lobbying efforts.  On the other hand you've got this photo's point: Look at these pretentious hippies.

Well done, NOLA.com.  That is a very robust argument. 

Update: Regarding Plains Exploration, looks like they're expanding their investment in Gulf oil fields so they may be hiring a researcher or two to tell you how safe your seafood is any day now.

Robust arms race

Digital media technology faces off as NOLA Media Group's memory hole goes up against Gambit's wayback machine.

Counting the days until Roger Goodell's resignation Day 2

PFT's Mike Florio on what we're beginning to call Un-Bountygate.

If Vilma truly offered to pay $10,000 to anyone for injuries to be inflicted on Favre, Warner, or any other opponent, someone presumably heard Vilma say it.  If the NFL doesn’t produce that person to testify at Monday’s hearing, how can Vilma ever obtain anything remotely resembling a fair opportunity to prove his innocence?  Coupled with the league’s likely refusal to make available coaches who would have been in the room when Vilma said what he said — coaches who possibly would say “I never heard Vilma said that” — the process becomes a sham.

Instead of giving the players a chance to get to the truth, the league seems to be relying on the same “take our word for it” approach that has characterized its entire handling of the pay-for-performance/bounty scandal.  It’s an approach that was launched the moment the league duped the media on March 2 into thinking there had to be conclusive proof of a bounty system, and that has lasted through each subsequent effort not to share evidence but to characterize and/or summarize it in a way that was skewed toward the league’s desire to hammer the Saints for using bounties, presumably to serve as the ultimate warning for any other players or coaches who may be tempted to use bounties in the future.

Meanwhile, the good folks at NOLA.com are looking to hire a digitally focused, SEO expert, to help cover their newly robust Saints beat. 

If you think you've got what it takes, please submit your application (including... I shit you not.. "Your most searchable keywords") according to the format provided here. 

Bad timing, or just bad taste?

The video below was just posted on NOLA.com this afternoon.  It's the latest in a series of endearing episodes in which Times-Picayune food columnist Judy Walker teaches Times-Picayune crime reporter Danny Monteverde how to cook something.

Yesterday Monteverde was among the staff fired by Advance while Walker was retained.  NOLA.com went ahead and posted this video anyway because... well.. what the hell.  Kind of takes on a dark meaning, though, watching Monteverde try to learn a new skill like this.

Letters to the Editor

Times-Picayune staff submit a list of detailed questions to Jim Amoss and Newhouse/Advance in an open letter here.

If compensation is based on or influenced in any way by the number of clicks, what safeguards, if any, will be in place to avoid a slide to the sensational, to avoid dissension among reporters/content producers with similar job descriptions?

Or to put it another way, "Will we be paid per kitteh?"