Holy cow, an honest-to-goodness newspaper war in New Orleans:
When The Times-Picayune decided to print three days a week, a nearby publication saw a chance to expand in the newspaper's backyard and fill a void that for some in the New Orleans area is as much a part of the morning routine as beignets and French coffee.
The Advocate of Baton Rouge, a family-owned daily published 70 miles north, will begin a daily New Orleans edition Monday, setting up an old-fashioned newspaper war. The battle for print readers comes even as more people get their news online and from cellphones _ generally from newspaper websites _ and more news media share stories to save money.
The experiment will be closely watched by an industry that has struggled in recent years as print advertising declined during the recession.
Struggled in recent years? Really? How many end-of-an-era cliches can we dig up? This is like a fight for customers between the last two buggy whip companies at the dawn of the automotive age. It is like fighting for the best deck chair on the Titanic. It is -- well, you get the idea. Coincidentally, I also saw a story about this Pew Research Center survey today:
American are fast turning to mobile devices to get their news, resulting in stunning viewership declines for CNN and existence-threatening readership drops for newspapers, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The winners: social network sites, online news and websites like the Drudge Report and Yahoo.
No matter how people get their news, somebody still has to produce it, so the question isn't whether "newspapers" survive, but who can best keep up with our changing news-consumption habits and who can figure out a way to make money from it. As the New Orleans story indicates, both the papers in that battle have heavy Web presences, so in a sense they're trying to shore up their customer bases, not just keep a print presence.
Comments
So let me get this straight. After losing 130,000 residents/subscribers who never returned after Katrina, the astute newspaper executives at the NOLA Times-Picayune decided to reduce dead-tree newspaper editions to just three per week. I would guess that Thursday and Sunday will make up two of those days. Next we will see the paper as a weekly skeleton of its former self - just before becoming a digital webpage only.
As for the Advocate, they have no market or subscriber base to draw upon in NO, but going regional to a dense market would be cheap if they only have to expand with an added NO local section. I would say that they are doing the right thing, especially since they probably are not burdened with big city wages.
Has it occurred to Leo that Fort Wayne and New Orleans are now about the same population size now and we presently have two newspapers hanging on?