Three Days a Week

[Valin]

City Journal: New Orleans’s venerable newspaper goes part-time.

Nicole Gelinas

10 July 2012

 

On May 23, the New York Times’s David Carr reported an exclusive: New Orleans’s newspaper, the 175-year-old Times-Picayune, would cease to be a daily. Starting in the fall, it would publish only three print editions per week—on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. A week later, New Orleanians got a reminder of why city newspapers matter. The paper that greeted residents as they opened their front doors featured a grim front-page picture: a little girl, dead, collateral damage from a shooting that tallied five victims. “I raised my camera and through the zoom lens realized with dawning horror that five-year-old Briana Allen did not have a large pink flower on her dress. A bullet had emptied the contents of her abdomen,” wrote the photographer, Michael DeMocker, for the Sunday Times-Picayune nearly two weeks later.

 

As reader Stephen Monroe pointed out in a letter to the paper, the photo was “a good example of why we need a daily newspaper.” New Orleanians could have learned of Briana’s death in other ways, but the ultimate source of their news would probably have been the Times-Picayune. Residents who don’t buy or borrow the newspaper tend to get their news from nola.com, which relies on Times-Picayune stories for its feed. People who prefer to watch TV or read blogs get their information from anchors and opinion makers who, even if they do their own footwork, usually begin that journey by reading the daily paper or nola.com.

 

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Today, it’s a different story. Cities from Denver to Oakland have seen daily papers fold, and all cities have watched their newspapers shrink. It’s easy to find free wit and snark—just go to Twitter, and you’ll get more than your fill in five minutes. What’s much tougher to find, even in cities lucky enough still to have a daily paper or two, is good, solid reporting of the kind that the Times-Picayune has traditionally offered.

 

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Quo Vadis?