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 →

Private student lenders are stepping up their game to compete directly with government loans. For several years, private lenders offered mostly variable-rate loans that students used as gap funding to cover their needs above what they could get on government loans. Now private lenders are introducing loans fixed at nearly the same rates as some federal products, seeking to nab a bigger piece of the student loan market as outstanding debts balloon to more than $1 trillion. The largest student lender, SLM (SLM), known as Sallie Mae, introduced fixed-rate loans earlier this month. On May 21, Discover Student Loans (DFS), the third-largest education lender, started a fixed-rate loan program as well. Wells Fargo (WFC), the second-biggest lender, had launched fixed-rate loans last summer. For families ... Continue reading →

“I drank a lot,” she said this spring, three years later. “You get to a certain point, it hits a wall.” One in three American Indian women have been raped or have experienced an attempted rape, according to the Justice Department. Their rate of sexual assault is more than twice the national average. And no place, women’s advocates say, is more dangerous than Alaska’s isolated villages, where there are no roads in or out, and where people are further cut off by undependable telephone, electrical and Internet service. The issue of sexual assaults on American Indian women has become one of the major sources of discord in the current debate between the White House and the House of Representatives over the latest reauthorization of the ... Continue reading →

In March 2010, the unemployment rate for high-school graduates 25 years or older peaked at 11.9%. Since then, it has dropped 4.2 percentage points — a pretty impressive showing, in just two years — and now stands at 7.7%. In the same period, the unemployment rate for college dropouts 25 years or older also fell, from 9.5% to 8.0%. But that drop, of 1.5 percentage points, is much smaller. And now college dropouts have a higher unemployment rate than their friends who never went to college at all. And these two series are very comparable: both sets include about 34 million people. Now these numbers aren’t seasonally adjusted, and you can see that the unemployment rate for high-school graduates is pretty bumpy. As a result, ... Continue reading →

Pete Souza/The White House In the photo that has hung in the West Wing for three years, President Obama looks to be bowing to five-year-old Jacob Philadelphia, his arm raised to touch the president’s hair — to see if it feels like his. WASHINGTON — For decades at the White House, photographs of the president at work and at play have been hung throughout the West Wing, and each print soon gives way to a more recent shot. But one picture remains after three years, its staying power testifying to the thousand words it seems worth to those who see it. In the photo, President Obama looks to be bowing to a sharply dressed black boy, who stands erect beside the Oval Office desk, his ... Continue reading →

Over the last decade, the tower climbers who are building and servicing America’s rapidly growing cellular infrastructure have been dying on the job at an alarming rate. — roughly 10 times that of construction workers. The giant cell phone carriers’ connection to tower-climbing deaths has remained invisible. Some have outsourced this dangerous work to smaller subcontracting companies, shielding themselves from liability when something goes wrong. So is anyone being held responsible? What’s the best way to make the industry safer? And what about the role of the workers — what is it actually like to do this work, and why do tower climbers take such risks? We’ve asked two of the film’s reporters, FRONTLINE’s Ryan Knutson and ProPublica’s Liz Day, as well as former tower ... Continue reading →

We need your help. The Chronicle of Higher Education and ProPublica have teamed up to untangle student debt, and we're seeking information colleges or universities gave you about your loans and other financial aid. We're also creating a Facebook community for people who are struggling with student debt, want to help inform our reporting, or just want to learn more about student loans and keep abreast of new developments. Specifically, we're looking for the "financial aid package," "award letter" or "offer letter" that you received from a college — the one you’re going to or ones that you decided not to go to. We won’t use your name or details that might identify you without first contacting you and getting your permission. We’ve done this ... Continue reading →

For too many students, a college education that is supposed to create opportunities can also mean years of struggle to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Schools must be required to do more to educate students about the real cost of their education and about a complex borrowing process that even the most sophisticated people have trouble understanding. An article in The Times last week described the experience of 23-year-old Kelsey Griffith. She currently earns a meager wage as a restaurant worker and owes $120,000 in student loans for an undergraduate degree from Ohio Northern University, a college whose recent graduates are among the most indebted in the country. Nationally, about two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients now borrow from either public or ... Continue reading →

We need your help. The Chronicle of Higher Education and ProPublica have teamed up to untangle student debt, and we're seeking information colleges or universities gave you about your loans and other financial aid. We're also creating a Facebook community for people who are struggling with student debt, want to help inform our reporting, or just want to learn more about student loans and keep abreast of new developments. Specifically, we're looking for the "financial aid package," "award letter" or "offer letter" that you received from a college — the one you’re going to or ones that you decided not to go to. We won’t use your name or details that might identify you without first contacting you and getting your permission. We’ve done this ... Continue reading →

Look at this lovely JCrew style guide I got, featuring well dressed white models surrounded by exotic temples & Indonesian people! Continue reading →