Gambit Editor Kevin Allman on why the community's effort to keep its daily paper printing seven days a week never had a chance
A full-court press by readers of the Times-Picayune and business leaders throughout the New Orleans area was not enough to keep the paper on a daily publishing schedule:
The thunk of a Tuesday or Thursday Times-Picayune hitting the porch (however faint that sound may have grown in recent years) is going away forever, and many have expressed their fears that NOLA.com and a three-days-a-week paper, no matter how robust, is no substitute for The Times-Picayune's 175 years of daily public service. Imperfect as "da paper" may have been at times, as wrong as it has been on important issues over the decades, it still served as a watchdog, and in recent years was a newspaper far better than many larger papers - in short, far better than it had to be.
"I wish New Orleans had drawn a line in the sand," writer Michael Tisserand tells Kevin Allman, editor of Gambit, the paper Tisserand once presided over. "I somehow wish we could have had a massive consumer and advertiser boycott and a walkout in the newsroom. But the groundwork just wasn't there for that kind of fight to take place."
In an analysis posted today, Allman explores how the gutting of the Times-Picayune, a story that garnered national attention, brought the city together in an effort to save a paper that had no intention of being saved.
Read the story here.