Ricky Matthews' very own Excellence In Recovery banquet

Now that he's all done firing people, it's nice to see Gomer the Destructor come down out of his Windsor Court suite and start meeting with the public.. you know.. so the healing can begin. And who better than developer and entrepreneurial special person Sean Cummings to throw him a welcome party when he does.

Mathews and NOLA.com editor James O’Byrne were the guests at a small after-work group hosted by entrepreneur and real estate developer Sean Cummings. Cummings had invited the techies to Loa, the bar in his International House hotel, for a meet-and-greet where Mathews and O’Byrne could explain the NOLA Media Group’s strategy to shift to a three-day-a-week Times-Picayune and a beefed-up online presence at NOLA.com in a new digitally-focused company.

As we've already seen, Cummings understands entrepreneurship which is good because O'Byrne and Matthews have just finished entrepreneurialy firing 200 people and were eager to talk shop.

“This is an enterpreneurial effort on our part,” O’Byrne told the New Orleans tech group, which was enjoying light hors d’oeuvres and complimentary craft cocktails by mixologist Alan Walter. “Because of the leaks that happened in The New York Times, we lost control of the narrative, and for two weeks we really had to focus all our efforts on what we had to do as a company [which] was to tell all our employees where they stood.

But that's not all. Cummings is also an expert at cultivating a robust selection of  Creative Ones who, according to Matthews, are precisely the people who will be sympathetic to... well shit like this.

“We’re going to create a Google-Nike kind-of-vibe work environment,” Mathews told the group. “It’s our goal to create a world-class digital work environment for the journalists who are going to work for us, because we can attract the best and brightest from around the country. They’re going to want to come to New Orleans when the real story starts to get told. … We’re going to be a cutting-edge new media company with a print component that is still extraordinarily powerful. That’s our goal. So that narrative’s not been fully told yet; it will get told. You don’t tell it by being defensive, you do it by doing it.”

The "narrative" is that, by firing half of their newsroom, NOLA Media Group is creating a "Google-Nike kind-of-vibe" No I'm not sure what that means. I think, by "Google-kind-of-vibe" he means that maybe they'll have a pool table and a Ms. Pac Man in the newsroom or something.  But then "Nike-kind-of-vibe" conjures a different sort of work environment altogether. Maybe Matthews has in mind a sort of Foxconn of news where the suicide net is actually a super-awesome trampoline.

Obviously I don't get it.  But then I never really learned how to think excellence.

Cummings urged the crowd to think excellence rather than to be wed to a particular news model.

I don't know what that means either. As Leigh suggests, it must be similar to being urged to "Smell Greatness" only in this case the bounties are real and they are collected for "cart off" hits on 200 employees.  Either way it's good to see the "tech expert" attendees lobby for a website "worthy of the people who write for it," however many of them are still actually doing that.