Yesterday’s Papers

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Yesterday’s Papers

New Orleans | 06/06/2012 9:31am |
Ariella Cohen | Next American City


I was in New Orleans when news broke that the city’s daily newspaper, The Times-Picayune, plans to cut back its printing schedule to three times a week and lay off staff. It was my first time in the city since March, when I moved to Philadelphia after nearly five years there, working as a journalist and sharing the city’s newsbeat with the TP. As you’ve likely heard by now, the news made waves — people fretted, people drank free drinks at the old journo-dive Mollys in the Market, they formed Facebook groups that produced ugly if effective agitprop and organized into citizens groups.

They also penned legislative resolutions urging the newspaper’s owner to maintain the daily.

For me, the news was upsetting, if not altogether surprising; The Times-Picayune is the only daily newspaper in a region of 1.3 million people — and a well-read one at that with an extraordinarily high penetration rate of of 75.5 percent, meaning that three out of four people see the newspaper’s headlines every week, whether they get it delivered to their home, buy it in a newsbox or read at work, their corner bar or beauty parlor. Yet while virtually everyone counts on the TP, that “everyone” constitutes a shrinking pie — New Orleans is one of many American cities significantly smaller now than it was in the recent past.

In 2005, before Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent federal levee failure, the paper recorded a daily circulation of 261,000; in March of this year, the circulation hovered at 132,000, according to The New York Times, which broke the news, stunning the newspaper’s own staff who had not yet been informed by their boss-owners, Advance Publications, owned by the Newhouse family. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://americancity.org/daily/entry/yesterdays-papers