The New Orleans Times-Picayune May Reduce Frequency of Publication -- NY Times

Eater.com looks at the state of restaurant critics:

 

I once worked as editor of a business magazine. The editorial staff was me, myself and I... and a list of freelancers, who were paid on a per article basis.

I wonder if newspapers are headed in that direction.

 

Brett Anderson's coming back after all:

http://www.nola.com/dining/index.ssf/2012/06/brett_anderson_invited_to_retu.html

<i>"We intend to honor our commitment to Brett. His work has been integral to the recovery of the dining scene in New Orleans."</i>

 

While I'm glad guy will get to keep his job, I wonder after a year at Harvard if he'll want to go back to a newspaper that will be a shell of what he once knew.

 

I wish Birmingham had a restaurant critic to dispatch. Instead they fired the senior political reporter.

 

Under the proposed model, guess which major events would have been missed in print...



but all those people without power, internet and heck, homes, could have found a way to see the scope of the damage, right?

 

[blue]People without homes don't buy the paper anyway, they just go to the library![/blue]

 

I've been thinking about how to reconcile this as a New Orleans native for the past few days. I'm still having trouble comprehending what it means and how the greater New Orleans area can go without a daily newspaper. Just sucks for everyone, there's no other way to say it.

 

Also posted this on jobs board, but within 72 hours of the bloodbath, there are ads up for LSU and Saints beat reporters with the new company in New Orleans...
http://nola.jobinfo.com/public/description.php?jid=9905806
http://nola.jobinfo.com/public/description.php?jid=9905807

 

Greater New Orleans has about 1.2 million people. The T-P's circulation is about 140,000.

Nearly 90% of the population has already gone without a daily newspaper.

The 10 to 12 percent of the population that has taken the paper are news consumers/junkies. They'll continue to find the news they want/need from a variety of sources. (Or, they've been taking the paper out of habit, and will realize they don't miss it.)

 

YF: No facts to back this up, but I've read the T-P's "reader penetration" is much greater than its circulation numbers. How many people in a city like New Orleans share a daily copy. Barbershops, restaurants, etc. IJS that the circulation numbers/population isn't a black/white way of looking at how the T-P impacts the city.

Slappy: Spot on post. Not that any kind of history/perspective matters to the Newhouse bean counters.

 

I don't mean to make fun but you don't know that the fuck you are talking about.

Newspapers aren't delivered to people, they are delivered to households. New Orleans has roughly 1.2 million people in the metro area but the city population is well under half of around 500,000. Of that, the city has about 188,000 households.

While not perfectly true for Nola, the industry standard is about four readers per subscriber so 140,000 subscribers would mean around 560,000 readers or greater than the city's population. The circulation number on Sunday is 160,000 or so and then the readership number grows to 640,000.

How the Times-Pic gets a market penetration of around 74 percent is likely how they define the market so the suburbs counted in the metro population are excluded. But rough math says 188k households with 140k circ gets to 75 percent.