All their bats are corked

Moseley does well with this metaphor.

Some fellow pundits claim the scandals involving online comments and possible prosecutorial misconduct only tarnish the terminal months of Jim Letten’s legacy as U.S. Attorney in New Orleans. They’re a stain at the end of his distinguished tenure, according to WWL’s Clancy Dubos. A bad final chapter in an otherwise great book of accomplishments, according to WGSO radio host Kaare Johnson.

It’s as if Letten were at bat in the bottom of the ninth inning, and struck out on a wicked slider thrown by businessman (and former federal target) Fred Heebe. Then he retired. You can’t boo a Hall of Famer for one untimely lapse, can you?

Government and politics is no place for hero worship.  No one rises to these leadership roles through the awesome force of shimmering virtue. Instead, such men and women make their careers through grasping compromise of principle; by going along to get along; by consciously conforming themselves, their opinions, and priorities, to those of the governing class; by whispering together in their dry cellars and such.

High ranking public officials are not "dragonslayers." They are club men.  Their most common distinguishing characteristic is cowardice. This isn't always a bad thing, of course.  Because we are fortunate enough to live under a mildly responsive, somewhat functional, kind of democratic form of government, we can occasionally frighten the cowardly club men into doing the right thing.  But what that requires from us is constant attention, and much screaming and yelling at no small expense to our leisure, our security, and to our pocketbooks.

Even so the failure rate remains high. The club, after all, is the club and its members enjoy many privileges most of us do not. In any case, there is no time in this to stop and pretend any of our presumed leaders, even when occasionally made to behave, is our friend.  It would be helpful, then, if the gatekeepers of our journalism would refrain from doing so too. But maybe that's too much to ask since so many of them clearly want to be in the club themselves.

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.

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.  

Robust website of the day

Rickygohome.com is a protest site set up in support of efforts to keep the Times-Picayune in print. It compares the "paper"'s new publisher Ricky Mathews to other infamous villains familiar to New Orleanians.

Its opening page features a slideshow of new publisher Mathews along with a rogues' gallery of New Orleans' enemies (former FEMA director Michael Brown, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, the Atlanta Falcons, a mosquito and Edward Pakenham, the director of British forces during the Battle of New Orleans)

It's likely the humor and quite possibly the references are all lost on the Newhouse family.

As for Matthews, who knows what he does and doesn't get?  In this robust Al.com post, he tells us what "we have every reason to believe" about Gulf seafood in the years to come following the Macondo oil disaster. 

We already knew that Gulf seafood is the best-tasting in the world. And now we have every reason to believe that it is the most safety tested and monitored. That should only enhance the Gulf brand. People will someday soon seek out Wild Caught Gulf of Mexico Seafood, and they will pay more for it.

Before we write off Matthews as overly credulous, let us consider that maybe we're not giving him enough credit. Maybe he understands there is a difference between "the most safety tested and monitored" seafood and "the safest" seafood.  The key difference there being whether you care to mention the results of that testing.

Choosing the right words there is certainly one way to "enhance the Gulf brand" anyway.  We look forward to Matthews' work enhancing the T-P brand along similar lines.