NOLA.com memory hole

UPDATE: And of course as soon as I get done bitching about this, both of the stories referenced make it up onto NOLA.com.  Maybe everyone there has just been out at Jazzfest all weekend.



Ray Nagin, Greg Meffert take hits in Katrina book by ex-Unisys executive

Mayor Mitch Landrieu continues to stock election war chest

Anyway here's the irrelevant complaint about shit not being on the internet as soon as I wanted it to be.

This may be just a problem I'm having but recently the contents of the Times-Picayune's  "New Orleans Politics" beat column that runs regularly in the Metro section haven't quite been making their way online at the paper's partner website NOLA.com.  I don't know if the T-P considers the frequently juicy but often frivolous gossip that appears there class of  information too privileged for wide distribution but, it their aim is to keep secrets, restricting them to publication in their ever-shrinking and increasingly unread print edition is a good way to start.

One frivolous story I very much wanted to link to and share here appeared in yesterday's edition. In it, Gordon Russell featured selected episodes from After Disaster, a Katrina memoir written by Edward Minyard who worked for Unisys when it was a city tech contractor working with Greg Meffert's office.   I'm going to transcribe some of the more interesting highlights here.  Again, I'd love to share this story with a link that would properly attribute the referenced source material and invite readers to visit NOLA.com for more information, but apparently they wizards over there don't want any of that to happen.  I also can't recommend that you buy yesterday's paper because 1) it's gone with the wind now and 2) there's really not enough in it anyway to make reading these three paragraphs worth it.  Oh well.

First, here's Minyard's account of Meffert's attempt to bully Unisys into hiring a preferred subcontractor.

Minyard writes that Meffert was pushing him hard to dump his subcontractor in favor of one Meffert wanted. Minyard doesn't name Meffert's favored company, but he makes clear he's referring to Major Services Inc., owned by Bobby Major.

"In his emails, Meffert told me, 'You need to get rid of Mr. X and get Mr. Y in there,'" Minyard writes, adding that he still has the offending emails. He and Meffert, "had a very pointed discussion," the book says, in which Minyard made clear he wasn't  going to engage in patronage or graft.

As a result, he claims, "our invoices always ended up on the bottom of the pile," and Minyard ended up in the doghouse with Unisys brass.

I should note at this point, that some of that could be Minyard taking advantage of Meffert's well deserved reputation for graft in order to address some other issue between himself and Unisys.  Who knows why some of these books get written.  Anyway Minyard tells a couple of other stories about Nagin demanding cable service to his room at the Hyatt. Again Minyard is clearly trying to make Nagin sound like a more frivolous person than he actually is.

Minyard writes that during the approach of Hurricane Rita three weeks after Katrina, he got an "emergency call" from one of Nagin's bodyguards, who said the Mayor needed a communication cable strung up to the Hyatt's 27th floor. "I got people scrambling like crazy to get a line up there," Minyard writes. He finally asked the bodyguard what it was for.

"Fantasy football, man," the bodyguard replied, according to Minyard. "I've got to get my team picked."

Were Nagin and his bodyguards playing fantasy football in the Hyatt?  Probably.  Is there anything wrong with that? Not necessarily. But it was probably a good idea for them to have communications capability where they were holed up.  So while this anecdote is kind of funny, it's also not exactly something that merits Minyard's huffy presentation.  But then since this a man whose company was allegedly stiffed by the Nagin administration for $8 million, you can see why his feelings might be hurt a bit.

So maybe this isn't the most earth shattering news item, but since it never appeared online, I'm guessing a very very select number of individuals ever got to decide what it was worth. 

On the other hand, much of what appears in that space is actually pretty useful, especially for the number of citizens who care about was transpires among the people and institutions  who run the city.  Maybe that number is few.  Or maybe the paper's editors think civic affairs are mostly none of our business.

Today's Metro section prominently features an article about Mayor Landrieu's campaign war chest.  It does not appear online which is a shame because one would think that people in the news business would want to make this information widely available.  One would think that NOLA.com or the T-P would want us to use their site to research candidates and their donors. Or maybe they just want that sort of thing glanced over once on a Sunday morning outside of campaign season by a much smaller number of readers.   Anyway here's the relevant section.

More than 300 donors gave money to the Landrieu campaign last year. Thirteen of them contributed the maximum $5,000, including Alamo Services, a local firm that provides event and convention security; Archon Information Systems, a delinquent taxes collection firm; engineering consultant Walter Baudier, Dr. Juan Gershanik; businesswoman and education reform leader Leslie Jacobs; Shaw Environmental; Helis Oil & Gas Co.; and Threefold Consultants, an architectural and engineering firm.

Among Landrieu's $2,500 donors were political consultant James Carville; former state Sen. Joel Chaisson; Festival Productions, the local company that stages the Jazz Fest; Integrated Logistical Support Inc., a consulting firm owned by businessman Robert Tucker; City Planning Commissioner Lynes "Poco" Sloss; and Veolia Transportation, which runs the city's transit system.

Additional $2,500 contributions came from former City Attorney and current City Council consultant William Aaron, the Adams & Reese law firm, banker Alden McDonald, Boh Bros. Construction Co., Darryl Berger Investments, lawyers Ralph Capitelli and Randall Smith, and architect Ray Manning.

Among Landrieu's $1,000 donors were former Saints quarterback Archie Manning; actress Patricia Clarkson, the daughter of City Council President Jackie Clarkson; union leader Peter Babin; Entergy Corp. Chief Administrative Officer Rod West; lawyer Henry Braden; Commander's Palace Restaurant; and former Lieutenant Governor James Fitzmorris.

Of course campaign finance reports are public information that any of us can sift through on our own. But obviously, there's a reason journalists do this research for us.  They know it's going to be helpful to anyone who wants to understand future events covered in the paper.

So I'm curious as to why an article like this doesn't appear on NOLA.com. A lot of people probably read the Sunday Metro section today but they'll all probably throw it out sometime in the next few days.  Had it appeared online, this is the sort of thing someone like me would bookmark using a tool like Delicious.com  and tag it with the Mayor's name and the names of all the relevant companies and people listed for ease of future access.  But I venture to say not a whole lot of people do that.  However, at some point in the future, a good number of people might find themselves searching for news about Mitch Landrieu's campaign donors.  One of the first places they'll look for that is NOLA.com (or just Google) but, even though it was reported today, this information won't be readily found by the casual searcher a few months from now.

While it's all well and good that the T-P reports this information, if it cannot be recalled when it becomes relevant, it loses its value to the reader very quickly. For example, in the coming weeks as we continue to talk about the proposed Hospitality Zone, we might find it relevant to refer to the fact that among the Mayor's max donors are a private security firm who works tourism events.  When we read about the affect of this ruling regarding the way the city handles delinquent tax collections, it might be fun to note that a max donor to the Mayor's campaign is a collections firm.  But, for whatever reason, a key piece of this puzzle gets flushed down the memory hole.

I have no idea why this peculiar editorial decision is made. Maybe it's just an accident. I'll have to pay closer attention to see if I can catch more of these.  I don't think they're trying to entice us to buy more papers by restricting some of their content.  If that were the strategy, we'd expect them to announce it otherwise it's not very affective advertising. Anyway it wouldn't work.   I do know that whatever the reason, they are leaving their readers less well informed and making their site less valuable as a tool.