Are The Picayune-Times Layoffs The Beginning Of The End?

It may feel that way. One scary thing about the story is that if you read things like this interview with one of the reporters offered a job with the new digital-focused offering in New Orleans it doesn't seem like there's any feeling at all that the new model will work. That makes this an incredibly drastic move towards an end result festooned with uncertainty. Yikes. The main troubling things, though, at least to my mind, are that this is a paper that has a certain recent hold on the community for its Katrina coverage and this is a city with a real digital divide in terms of number of people with access to the Internet. So you're talking about a publication that had every reason to have the attention of its community that I guess didn't have it enough to be profitable without massive cuts, transitioning into an uncertain model with a potentially crippling disadvantage going in: a limited audience. In other words, the new publication has to find a way to do what it failed to do before, only this time its starts out with no real plan, developing and perhaps unfamiliar technology, a smaller potential target to hit and fewer resources than it's used to having. Yikes.

(One thing I'd look for is if someone takes the opportunity of all this talent either unemployed or dissatisfied and tries a competing publication that's web-first with a print component and perhaps a seven-day print cycle in a targeted way -- like downtown only, or fewer content offerings -- and a more aggressive overall approach than what one is likely to see from a "transformed" institution like the Times-Picayune. An Image Comics to the existing paper's Marvel, only pivoting off of the format change. It's unlikely, but still. As someone with a one-person blog that publishes in the context of efforts that employ a lot more people, I'm always thinking that a site starting from the ground-up with or without a print element may have some advantages over a formerly all-print institution trying to work out of its comfort zone with a major portion of its enterprise. I could always be very wrong, too.)

On my darker days, it seems to me a real possibility we could experience a compressed version of the decades-long move away from multiple-newspaper towns and into single-newspaper towns via a run of full-service papers becoming drastically-reduced publications that come out only a few days a week accompanied/ameliorated by some sort of vague commitment to move on-line in more dramatic fashion. That just seem horrifically tricky to me, fraught with danger, mostly, again, because no one seems to have a clear vision on how to make digital work for a publication like this one. My hunch is that we could also see some smaller papers close altogether -- papers in communities of 50K to 150K people -- although I have to admit I thought that was going to start happening in a more dramatic way a few years ago. Whatever happens will shape the newspaper strip and editorial cartoon markets.

Speaking of which, Alan Gardner over at Daily Cartoonist has done a nice job with the part of the story that is editorial cartoonist Steve Kelley being let go. I think that Kelley will find safe harbor because 1) he has another job, as one-half of the successfully launched Dustin feature, and anyone looking for a job knows that it's much easier to find one when you already have a job, and 2) he has a certain skill set apart from his considerable cartooning talent that should make him an asset to a smart publication. Still, it's tough out there.

Update: Kelley talks to Michael Cavna.
 
posted 6:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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