by Glynn Wilson

The word trickled out from New Orleans on Tuesday like news from the killing fields that the Times-Picayune would cut half its newsroom staff effective Sept. 30.

Two hundred will not have a job when one of the nation’s oldest daily newspapers becomes a daily no more, only publishing three days a week and trying to shift its focus to online news, according to the AP wire.

Executives with the new Newhouse corporation set up to replace the newspaper indicated that 84 of the newsroom’s 173 employees will be laid off or forced into early retirement at the 175-year-old newspaper. They said advertising, circulation and other departments will also be affected.

“The change means New Orleans will become the largest metro area in the nation without a daily newspaper in the digital age,” according to AP.

In Alabama, three major daily newspapers announced lay offs of about 400 employees, many of them in the newsrooms at the Birmingham News, the Mobile Press-Register and the Huntsville Times.

All four papers will continue to be published on the Newhouse corporate Websites, nola.com and al.com, although AP got that part wrong. The newspapers have not been in control of their Web sites and content since Newhouse’s Advance Publications set up a separate corporation to shovel the newspaper’s content online a decade ago. They claim in the announcement that online access will remain free, but we suspect they are working on a plan to charge down the road and you still have to sign up for the sites for some features, like commenting on blog posts.

Papers have struggled in recent years as print advertising declined during the Bush Great Recession, and newspapers have “yet to learn how to make online advertising as profitable as its printed counterpart,” according to the wire service.

Funny, they don’t report on how the decline of print impacts the AP wire itself, which sells its content to a lot of Web outlets but still remains print biased.

News of the pending changes first broke late last month and was “greeted with dismay In New Orleans,” according to the wire service.

A rally in support of keeping The Times-Picayune a daily drew hundreds of people outside a popular restaurant last week, and there is an ongoing protest on Facebook to demand that the Newhouse corporation either keep the papers daily or sell out.

Community leaders and a group of advertisers that includes an auto dealership, one of the area’s largest real estate agencies, jewelers and a regional grocery chain have called on the parent company to keep the daily publication.

“Many readers can’t imagine the morning without our newspaper in their hands,” Times-Picayune editor, Jim Amoss, said in a video posted on the paper’s affiliated website, NOLA.com. “I understand that. I’m a print guy. I grew up in this business. But I’m also a news guy, a journalist and a New Orleans native. My priorities are to cover the news of the New Orleans area, to have the best reporters investigate and explain the complexities of this politically byzantine community and to write about our culture, our food, our music, our sports mania.”

Job casualties in New Orleans included some of the city’s most experienced writers and photographers, many of whom announced their own departure on a Facebook page by simply posting “-30-,” an old copy editor’s code for “end of story.”

Peter Finney, a sports writer for the paper since 1945, is being laid off but has been asked to write a freelance column, the paper said. Managing editors Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea, among the newsroom leaders during the paper’s Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, have not been asked to stay. Brett Anderson, the current restaurant critic for the food-obsessed city, is leaving for a fellowship.

Employees who took part in Tuesday’s meetings described an emotional scene that played out over the course of the day among colleagues who have worked together for many years.

Reporter Barri Marsh Bronston said she was being let go after 31 years.

“These last three weeks have been unbearable, but I’m feeling a sense of relief right now,” she said in a post on Facebook. She did not want to be interviewed but gave permission for her comment to be used.

Throughout the day, employees met with various managers and were told either that they would have a job with the new company, Nola Media Group, or they were offered severance packages. Some will later be able to apply for positions in the new operation, the paper said.

The Times-Picayune was acquired by the Newhouse-family run Advance chain in the 1960s. The current news operation was rooted in the combination of the Times-Picayune, a morning newspaper, and its afternoon companion, The States-Item, in 1980.

After the merger, the newspaper expanded coverage with the opening of bureaus in the New Orleans suburbs. It earned two Pulitzer Prizes in the 1990s and then later two more for its reporting of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

We have seen these changes coming for years, and wrote a column about it on Memorial Day.

The Big Picture: A Memorial Day For the Daily Newspaper?

© 2012 – 2015, Glynn Wilson. All rights reserved.