Recommended to be read all over

Gambit's Kevin Allman has been doing yeoman's work reporting on the events since the Times-Picayune announced its layoffs and transition to 3 day per week publication beginning in October. In this week's Gambit cover story he re-caps the entire saga.  If you haven't been following along all summer, this article is an excellent opportunity for you to catch up.

And you'll want to catch up before this weekend.  Here's why.  Allman's piece begins.

There are things in your life, rightly or wrongly, you think are never going to change," says Rebecca Theim, a former Times-Picayune reporter now living in Las Vegas. "When I come back to New Orleans, I know there's always going to be a French Quarter, there's always going to be corrupt politicians and there's going to be a Times-Picayune."

So when The New York Times' David Carr reported last May that New Orleans' daily paper would scale back to three-days-a-week publication — which came as a shock to most of the staff — Theim created an online petition to "implore Advance and the Newhouses [the company and the family that own the paper] to maintain the publishing frequency and proud legacy of The Times-Picayune and its other newspapers."

That petition became the pebble that spawned an avalanche of protest — and a summer of rocky publicity for the Newhouse family; Advance Publications and their newly rebranded NOLA Media Group; and the paper's new publisher, Ricky Mathews, who had arrived from Alabama just two months before the news broke. It was Mathews, along with James O'Byrne, editor of Advance's local online operation NOLA.com, who would steer the paper to what was euphemistically being called the "digital transition." (Neither Mathews nor O'Byrne returned Gambit's emailed request for an interview for this story.)

Saturday afternoon at Rising Tide the day's final discussion, "Black and White and Red All Over" will  look at the Picayune's transition to the new NOLA Media Group and what it means for the future of local news in a changing environment.  Kevin Allman and James O'Byrne are both scheduled to appear on the panel.