Tag Archives: Frank Donze

Times-Picayune newsroom “in triage, in mourning” Gambit editor tells “Informed Sources”

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Kevin Allman, editor of New Orleans’ Gambit alternative weekly, who has exhaustively and compellingly covered the changes at The Times-Picayune, appeared last night (July 20) on New Orleans’ public television station WYES-TV’s “Informed Sources” to talk about the latest developments. (Watch the entire episode by clicking here.)

Some of what he had to say:

On Thursday’s largest mass departure from the newsroom, which included veteran City Hall reporter Frank Donze, fellow City Hall reporter Michelle Krupa, and health care and state politics reporter Bill Barrow. (Friday’s night’s going-away party at the Ugly Dog Saloon also feted soon-to-depart crime reporter and Pulitzer finalist Brendan McCarthy, business reporter Jaquetta White, St. Bernard community news editor Kim Gritter, special projects reporter Cindy Chang, Kenner reporter Mary Swerczek Sparacello and managing editor Peter Kovacs.): “What they’re losing right now is a lot of institutional memory. The whole list of people going down the line that are leaving, I don’t think they (newspaper management) expected to leave.”

State of the newsroom: “The newsroom is in triage, the newsroom is in mourning. They’re afraid they’re going to be missing stories in the next couple of months, both because the man and woman power isn’t there, and because there’s no one really in charge, they don’t see where they’re going, they still have not been addressed by this new publisher.” Incoming publisher Ricky Mathews has editorialized on the front page of newspaper and met with fellow executives and major advertisers, but has not yet spoken to the rank-and-file.

Shifting control of the backstory? “The NOLA Media Group feels like it’s getting control of what they call the narrative again,” boosted this week by the high-profile hiring of Larry Holder from CBSSports.com to cover the New Orleans Saints. “Some changes may be coming to NOLA.com, which I don’t think anybody likes very much. So I think they think they’ve got a long-range plan that come October, they might be in pretty good shape.”

Author and freelance journalist Jason Berry discusses Times-Picayune saga on WYES-TV’s “Informed Sources”

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Freelance investigative journalist and author Jason Berry, who penned a June 12 article for The Nation about the debacle at the newspaper titled “Rolling the Dice at The Times-Picayune,” appeared last night (June 29) on New Orleans’ public television station WYES-TV’s “Informed Sources” to talk about the latest developments in the ongoing saga. (Watch the entire program by clicking here.)

Among his choice observations:

On Friday’s decision by at least eight newsroom staffers to reject the newspaper’s offers to stay: “This is like the New Orleans Saints – everyone is wondering when Drew Brees is going to sign – this is like the entire backfield.”

On Advance Publications/ Newhouse’s new direction and the resulting brain drain: “This has been an amazing disaster. Here you have a newspaper that won four Pulitzer Prizes in 20 years, and they’ve wiped out their institutional memory, they’re losing many of their best reporters and they’re making money in the process.”

On profitability: “They had about an 8% profit last year, which means the Picayune made somewhere in the $8 million-to-$10 million range, not a bad profit.”

On the single-mindedness of the Newhouse’s plan: “They made no effort to build a circulation drive, to try to draw in younger readers, or any number of things they could have done, and absolutely had no interest in doing. And so now we have this skeleton where they once had a pretty healthy, thriving newspaper.”

On the New Orleans business community’s responsibility to do more to ensure that the resurging post-Katrina city has a daily newspaper: “I think the challenge to the business community here is striking because we are becoming an international city, we have become a city of the young … the number of entrepreneurs, website developers, young filmmakers who have come here in the last several years, not to mention the resurgence of the music community, the restaurants … All of this is fodder for a good daily paper. The question is whether the business community will simply sit back, be passive, let the Picayune lumber along as this new skeleton, or whether they’ll recognize that getting behind a serious, bona fide news engine will be to the betterment of the community, which certainly it would be.”