Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville to publish three days a week

Would love to be a fly on the wall in that room today.

 

Unconfirmed from Twitter: 107 fired in Birmingham, 61 in newsroom.

 

Per Cecil Hurt, T-P fires food critic Brett Anderson. Because, you know, who needs a good food critic in New Orleans?

 

The food critic is exactly who you should be keeping. You've got to have a food blog of some kind in New Orleans, right? And wouldn't the food columnist make the most sense to write it?

 

Source on scene says security has been brought in at Huntsville Times due to escalating anger.

 

My bet is the food critic is replaced by reader reports on restaurants -- favorable ones only to be published. No expenses, then you sell advertising. It isn't just newspapers that are dying. It's journalism.

 

I think they may need it.

 

Mike you hit that one over the Big Green Monster.

 

This is sad. Honestly, it is, but do you really think there's going to be a lack of places providing restaurant reviews in New Orleans?

Plus, I'll also bet nearly anything that they will replace him with a freelancer. The Sun-Times fired their long time reviewer, and replaced him with a freelancer who had previously written for Newcity, a free weekly (and not even the top free weekly, which is the Reader).

One of things that hurts newspapers is that they are generalists, and they can't possibly cover certain beats as well as specialists.

So, if you want info on the dining scene in New Orleans, you can get it at http://nola.eater.com/

You can use sites like Yelp.com, or follow "foodies" on twitter for reviews.

Sites like grubstreet and urbandaddy may well fill the gap by adding New Orleans to the cities they cover.

 

If they don't have a good food blog down there, someone will. You can't just assume people are going to flock to the Web. There is a lot of great work being done on the Web in every city that has a traditional daily newspaper.

This is heartbreaking. The whole situation is just infuriating. Suits are making horrible decisions, readers aren't willing to pay and an entire industry is collapsing, which is strange because we've never had as many readers as we do now.