Library Chronicles: This blog will sell to John Georges for one million dollars

Friday, May 03, 2019

This blog will sell to John Georges for one million dollars

He probably won't buy it, though. He seems to have it in his head that there are too many "dangerous people" on the internet. And, from his point of view, maybe that's true. Those people will just bring up any old thing if you don't watch them closely. So I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that when Georges does decide to buy a website, he does it mainly to fire everybody.

New Orleans Advocate owners Dathel and John Georges have purchased The Times-Picayune and its nola.com website from the Newhouse family’s Advance Local Media.

The Advocate will publish a seven-day, home-delivered newspaper in New Orleans using the brands and features of both publications. The new paper will debut in June. The two papers’ websites will be combined under the nola.com brand around the same time.

According to Georges, this is being done in order to "ensure a strong print and online news company for years to come.” But you'd forgive us if we weren't entirely sold on the proposition that the "brands and features" of the two papers are worth as much to the reader minus the work of the actual reporters who once produced their content. Georges laid off every single T-P employee effective 60 days from now. We haven't been told how many can expect to be hired on to the new company but the early indications are it will be very few. I guess, technically, you can call that an "expansion" of the Advocate. The Advocate is certainly calling it that, anyway.

The Advocate will be expanding its New Orleans news, advertising and circulation staff by hiring from current nola.com and Times-Picayune employees, and will increase its coverage of suburban communities, sports, and arts and entertainment, and also improve its opinion pages.

How will they be improving the opinion pages, exactly? Somehow I doubt the opinions will improve. The current version of the New Orleans Advocate opinion page prominently features the conventional wisdom of political columnist Stephanie Grace, the curmudgeonly wit of veteran James Gill, and the all out right wing nuttery of Dan Fagan. Gill and Grace get some things right some of the time but, mostly, this is a centrist-to-conservative leaning page. The T-P's Jarvis DeBerry is a pretty moderate columnist himself but would add a relatively more progressive voice to this lot if they were to bring him on. We've not seen or heard anything to indicate the Advocate management is inclined to go that direction, though. While pitching the Advocate's new online paywall to readers last month, editor Peter Kovacs chose to highlight the work of only one columnist in particular.

Six days a week, Smiley Anders captures the wit, kindness and good humor of the people of Louisiana. And even if the rest of the news centers on crime or crisis, you can’t read his column without walking away an optimist.

But maybe none of this matters. The significance of a newspaper opinions page is greatly diminished in the age of social media. Takes, even "good' takes, are cheap. Write your own whenever you like and share them with your friends. The value produced by a newspaper is in the actual news reporting. And John Georges just fired a whole lot of reporters.

It's never a good time for that. But it doesn't improve matters that Georges fired everybody during the height of the legislative session. At the very moment the mayor and the tourism industry are supposedly on the verge of a deal, and as the city council prepares to make a major decision on the future of the short term rental problem, nearly half of the beat reporters responsible for keeping an eye on that stuff just learned they're about to be on the street.

If any of that is worrisome to Lens editor Jed Horne, he isn't about to tell us. Instead he spends most of this editorial gloating.

But starting a rival paper that was better than the T-P wasn’t the end of the drama. Now Kovacs and Shea will run the whole shebang for Georges. Meanwhile, the buzz on the street is that the remaining T-P staff has been given layoff notices and 60 days of severance pay. Enjoying the pick of the litter, The Advocate is expected to offer jobs to a handful of reporters who toiled for its former rival. The reconfigured paper will begin publishing in June.

Yay! Everybody is fired and now has to grovel to one of the slimiest billionaires in the state. Why does Horne love this so much? If there's one positive thing we can say for the six year "newspaper war" it's that the number of reporting jobs in New Orleans declined at a less dramatic rate than they otherwise would have. Now that anomaly has met with an abrupt end. Horne goes on to predict that the Times-Georges monopoly is likely to cull the ranks further. How are we supposed to feel about that? Horne seems confused.

The Advocate editors sure aren't. They think it's great. And they're looking forward to welcoming "some" new colleagues.

We look forward to welcoming some new colleagues, serving new subscribers, helping new advertisers grow their businesses — and tirelessly listening to all of the voices in the great communities we serve.

So congratulations to those guys. Everybody else, have fun reapplying for some of your jobs.

It was puzzling yesterday to see a few commenters describe the late news wars as a "David vs. Goliath" contest. Lamar uses those terms in his title here, though he only does that in a pointed, sort of ironic way. He also hints at something in this paragraph that a lot of people have either missed or purposefully ignored so far.

The decision to fire the entire staff, in one fell swoop, has been roundly criticized on social media by the paper’s readers and among fellow members of the press, while the announcement of the purchase has been met with a range of reactions. Still, among journalists and mass media professionals, the consensus seems to be one of cautious optimism and a sense of relief. In recent years, the Times-Picayune has been faltering under poor corporate management.

Why would a sudden mass firing be met with "cautious optimism and a sense of relief" among media professionals? The most likely reason is they all expected to be losing their jobs soon anyway. It's possible Advance was getting set to shutter the T-P whether Georges bought it or not. Still, the move hardly makes him any kind of savior. He's just stripping the carcass.

Anyway John Georges vs. Advance/Newhouse isn't a David and Goliath story. It's more like Goliath vs. Very Sick And Dying Goliath. And regardless of which Goliath wins, the losers are journalists, support staff and readers. Or maybe it's all just the natural way of market economics. We don't really need two newspapers in a town like New Orleans where so very little news happens, right?

One thing we did learn was this dumb Darren Rovell tweet from back in January turned out to be more accurate than anyone knew. And that's the strangest news to come out of any of this.