The news is spreading here in New Orleans and across the journalism world: the fabled Times-Picayune, as we all know it, may cease to exist. Visitors tour Hurricane Katrina front pages from The Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans and the Sun Herald of Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, as part of the 'Covering Katrina' exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, DC. (Image credit: AFP via @daylife) Writing in The New York Times, David Carr gave details in today’s edition of what seems to have been a closely guarded secret. According to his sources, Newhouse Newspapers, a division of Advance Publications, the Times-Pic’s owner, plans to discontinue the daily paper and embrace the model that it used in Ann Arbor, Mich. That means relying heavily on the ... Continue reading →

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The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which distinguished itself amid great adversity during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is about to enact large staff cuts and may cut back its print publishing schedule to several days a week, according to two employees with knowledge of the plans.Newhouse Newspapers, which owns the Times-Picayune, will apparently be working off a blueprint the company used in Ann Arbor, Mich., where it reduced the frequency of the Ann Arbor News, emphasized the Web site as a primary distributor of news and in the process instituted wholesale layoffs to cut costs.A request for comment from the newspaper’s editor, Jim Amoss, late Wednesday night was not returned.The plans have been kept under wraps, but the newspaper will likely cease to exist as a ... Continue reading →

It’s going to be a long time before the various lawsuits shake themselves out, but one thing’s already clear with respect to the Facebook IPO: absolutely no one has come out of it looking good. It’s worth going down the List of Incompetence here, because regardless of whether any of this was illegal, there are a lot of extremely well-compensated people who, to use a technical term, screwed to pooch on this one. Top of that list, frankly, is Facebook CFO David Ebersman. The WSJ’s account of his central role in the offering is reasonably definitive: a lot of decisions normally outsourced to banks in the markets were made, in this case, by a tech-company executive in Menlo Park. Ebersman didn’t make one big mistake, ... Continue reading →