Leadership = Never having to say you're sorry

Your new superintendent-to-be quits her old job early because the emails she sent on official accounts read more like Lady Chatterley's Lover, only with dildos attached to chairs.

Nancy Sebring advises you about the reason for her early departure -- and that she's desperately trying to keep the whole thing out of the newspaper. She says she doesn't want Omaha Public Schools board members to be blindsided.

You, the board president, along with the board's lawyer, tell no one. And when it all hits the fan, you lie through your teeth about what you knew. You claim ignorance.

And when your lies are found out, your supporters start to cry racism. And sexism, for you are a black woman. If you've gone this far, what's a little shamelessness?

It must be interesting to be you, Freddie Gray.

ULTIMATELY, your fellow board members vote 8-4 to keep you as president, because the OPS board is more a close-knit conspiracy than a governing body. According to the Omaha World-Herald:

Before the vote, Gray made a statement highlighting her goals and accomplishments and urging her fellow board members to “continue on this journey with unity and purpose regardless of tonight's outcome.”

Gray said she wished to be judged on her entire work, not just the Sebring situation.

“There are privacy and withholding of information rationales that can be debated,” she said. “But it comes down to my fellow board members looking at my president's tenure totally and coming to the conclusion that we are, or are not, moving in the right direction.”

She said she believed that she still could be an effective board spokesman and leader. With a crowd of nearly 250 people packing the board room, Gray's supporters on the board praised her leadership and said she shouldn't be removed for a well-intentioned mistake.

“She made a mistake,” [board member Shirley] Tyree said. “She's going to have to live with that mistake.”

Tyree said she didn't want to disrupt the board as a second superintendent search gets under way and kids head back to school on Aug. 20.

[Member Justin] Wayne said the board “can't preach about accountability if we don't hold ourselves accountable.”

He said he wanted Gray to acknowledge that she made a mistake. If she did, he said, he would be willing to support the board publicly censuring Gray but allowing her to stay on as president.

“I heard a lot of people today talking about mistake. I've never heard Mrs. Gray use that word,” Wayne said.

Kersten Borer made the motion to remove Gray, calling her a “bold and passionate leader” but saying that removal was necessary “in order to move forward, improve communication and regain trust from the community.”

Wayne seconded the motion, but the votes weren't there.

[Member Nancy] Huston said Gray was at the center of “a scandal she did not create.”

“She has been a good president,” Huston said. “She is leading us.”

LEADING YOU is no virtue if it happens to be over a cliff.

Support for public education is a tenuous thing these days. When an inner-city school district starts to look as if its governed by arrogant, unaccountable incompetents and overall moral cyphers, it is only a matter of time before middle-class parents with the money to have options abandon it to the poor and to the incorrigible, who have neither.

Really, if you can't deal with l'affaire Sebring, can't get rid of a renegade board president and your moral compass can't point straight, running a successful school system really is a bridge too far. "Urban nightmare," on the other hand, isn't.

And "pathetic" is your everyday reality.

sex, lies and emailgate

Pity Freddie Gray.

The president of the Omaha school board decided to hone her mad JoePa skillz just when everybody -- and by "everybody," I mean the entire world outside State College, Pa. -- decided the late Penn State coach was criminally pathetic.

Consider this: You've just picked a new superintendent for Omaha Public Schools. Suddenly, your new hire abruptly resigns her job in Des Moines, Iowa -- weeks ahead of schedule. She contacts your board attorney. Something about emails. That they would expose an affair. Fairly explicit. A district email account. Public-records request from the Des Moines Register. Embarrassing.

Mein Gott! Mon dieu! What, oh what . . . what should you do?

Well, if you're Freddie Gray and OPS board counsel Elizabeth Eynon-Kokrda, you don't bother to find out what exactly is in those "fairly explicit" emails. You take Nancy Sebring's word for it that the content is "somewhere along the lines of what most seventeen year olds are reading in Cosmo." You don't even check out what most 17-year-olds are actually reading in Cosmopolitan today.

Also, you assume that a woman who's cheating on her husband with a man who's cheating on his wife is being straighter with you than with them. After all, Eynon-Kokrda tells Sebring, “my thought is you have a pretty sympathetic situation.”

Most importantly, you and the lawyer take what Sebring, the naughty superintendent, has told you and make it into "just our little secret."

Even though Sebring has reached out to you and counsel because “I don't want anyone on the OPS board to be surprised by this situation in Des Moines,” you don't inform a single board member because. . . .

Because. . . .

BECAUSE you feel obliged not to after the fun superintendent expressly said she didn't want anyone on the Omaha school board to be surprised by the brewing scandal.

“We had an individual who ... we thought was being very open and honest with us about something that was a very personal issue, a very painful issue for the individual,” Gray told The World-Herald. “We believed that we had a contracted employee who was reaching out and was telling us the truth.”

In a May 24 email to Sebring, Eynon-Kokrda wrote that she did not share Sebring's emails with board members: “I do not forward your emails because I want them arguably protected and/or not known to exist, per se, but I do advise Freddie of our contacts so she is current.”

In that same email, the lawyer wrote that Gray was the only OPS board member who knew of the Des Moines Register's public records request, through which that newspaper eventually obtained the personal emails.

WHO IS working for whom here?

It's rather interesting, in the same sense that his evening at Ford's Theater gave Abraham Lincoln a headache, that Eynon-Kokrda and Gray seem to lose track of where their primary loyalties lie. They protect OPS' wayward new hire to an extent she didn't even ask for, refusing to give the full school board even the slightest heads-up about her naughty-email problem in Des Moines.

They take Sebring's word for everything. In short, they try to keep her viability as OPS' new superintendent totally intact by aiding and abetting an ultimately failed cover up.

When she resigned abruptly from Des Moines in early May, Sebring said publicly that it was because she needed extra time to take care of personal matters, such as moving to Omaha and preparing for her daughter's summer wedding.

The newly released emails show that after resigning from Des Moines, Sebring kept in regular contact with Eynon-Kokrda, who relayed information about those contacts to Gray as all three anxiously waited to see what the Des Moines Register would do with the volatile emails the newspaper had requested from the Des Moines district through a public records request.

The emails Sebring made public last week were sent between May 18 and June 1, the day The World-Herald and the Des Moines Register broke their stories online.

The emails show that Eynon-Kokrda and Gray remained committed to making Sebring the next OPS superintendent if she could survive the uproar of the emails going public or if the emails never went public.

The three of them planned how they would respond publicly should news organizations discover that the emails were the actual cause of her resignation from the Des Moines job and publish stories about them.

(snip)

In a May 24 email to Eynon-Kokrda, Sebring wrote that four of the Des Moines emails were “highly personal and contain fairly explicit content (somewhere along the lines of what most seventeen year olds are reading in Cosmo),” referring to the women's magazine Cosmopolitan.

In the same email, Sebring offered to resign from the OPS job, telling Eynon-Kokrda: “I would rather bow out gracefully before starting my job in OPS, than be caught up in a scandal after I begin the job.”

She asked Eynon-Kokrda whether OPS would fire an employee who had done what she did.

Eynon-Kokrda wrote back that she would not recommend that Sebring submit an immediate offer of resignation, saying that “seems extreme” and “my thought is you have a pretty sympathetic situation.”

Eynon-Kokrda wrote that she knew of no OPS employee ever terminated solely for personal use of email, saying that OPS informs employees that emails are not confidential and that individuals must “use good judgment” but that sending personal emails has never by itself demonstrated sufficient poor judgment as to result in termination.

“The closest I've ever seen is where a principal involved with a subordinate at his school had about 50 texts and emails per day during school hours, over months and months (thousands of emails and texts on school phone) some of which proved he had inappropriately approved sick leave so she could join him on business trips,” Eynon-Kokrda wrote.

She wrote that if the situation “starts to really go south,” she would recommend meeting with the OPS board “to explain and provide them with the opportunity to circle the wagons.”

(snip)

“Freddie will be in about the same place,” Eynon-Kokrda wrote. “If asked for comment, she will say it isn't appropriate for her to discuss your personal life.”

If pressed, Eynon-Kokrda wrote, Gray would say that while people shouldn't use work email for personal purposes that interfere with job performance, “she is unaware of any allegation that you have anything but a stellar job performance record, and your personal emails and private life don't change that.”

UNTIL THEY did change that. The Register and the World-Herald not only ran their stories about why Nancy Sebring quit Des Moines so quickly, but they ran the worst of the emails, too.

At that point, Gray ended up running away from Sebring like her feet were on fire and her ass was catching. A thoroughly surprised (thanks to Freddie Gray) OPS board ended up accepting Sebring's resignation from a job she'd yet to begin.

The emails were exactly what one would expect from a Cosmo "sex issue," which I presume is just like a regular issue of Cosmo (as read by "most seventeen year olds") only a little more so. Thus, "circling the wagons" wasn't a viable option, as we already had learned low "in love" Nancy Sebring was with her boyfriend's d***.

And the emails got better than that.

UNFORTUNATELY for Gray, the board president's ability to lie convincingly to the press just doesn't get better at all.

On June 1, Gray told the World-Herald "she had heard only 'rumors and innuendo' about why Sebring resigned. During that interview, she said she had not discussed with Des Moines district officials the circumstances of Sebring's resignation and did not know what was contained in the emails.

"I haven't seen them," she said then, "so I have no clue what they are, what they're not."

In a later interview, a World-Herald reporter asked Gray whether Sebring had been in contact with her or Eynon-Kokrda about the personal emails prior to them going public.

“No, why would she be?" Gray had said.

UH . . . lots of reasons?

Unfortunately, some people never learn that when you tell a big one, at least be plausible:

Gray and Eynon-Kokrda told The World-Herald this week that they would have acted differently had they known the actual contents of the emails.

“She never characterized these as graphic, pornographic or in any way sexually embarrassing,” Eynon-Kokrda said. “She portrayed them as not salacious, as chatty, and as emails that would reveal that she had an affair.”

When Sebring wrote to Eynon-Kokrda May 24 describing the explicit emails as something a 17-year-old girl might read in Cosmo, that still didn't cause alarm, Gray and Eynon-Kokrda said this week, because they didn't perceive Cosmo as a raunchy magazine.

TWO PROBLEMS with this one render it a no-percentage assertion -- it requires Omahans to believe either that Gray and Eynon-Kokrda think they're really stupid, or that Gray and Eynon-Kokrda themselves are really stupid. Personally, I go for a third option: Yes, they think we're stupid . . . because they're idiots.

Make that complete idiots.

Here's Gray, back in June:

“For the board, this is about policy violation. It's not about the content,” she told The World-Herald after Sebring resigned. “These are things we tell our staff all the time not to do. It's a big violation to use company equipment and emails.”

BUT NOW Gray defends her secrecy and her inaction regarding Sebring's emails by saying she was misled about how bad they were. That she didn't think Cosmo was "raunchy," so it couldn't be that big a deal.

But if "it's not about the content," as she said last month, who cares? Sebring admitted to doing, in Gray's words, "things we tell our staff all the time not to do." Which, she told the reporter back then, was "a big violation."

And certainly no rationale to help a sister out, which is exactly what she and OPS' legal counsel set out to do. In secret.

The other OPS board members ought to be furious right now. Beyond furious, actually. But the biggest problem the school system faces today is that I'll bet most aren't that upset at all.

After all, if they "circle the wagons," Freddie Gray might be able to survive unscathed as president despite having been caught in more than one big lie. Despite having kept her board, and the board's constituents, completely in the dark about the time bomb ticking away nearby. Despite having proven that her loyalties lie not with her board, or the voters who elected her, but instead with a fatally flawed would-be superintendent whose personal and professional sins finally caught up to her.

If the board circles the wagons well enough, maybe there won't be the unpleasantness of Freddie Gray getting what she so richly deserves -- immediate removal as president, accompanied by the board's demand that she resign her seat.

NO, that would be ugly. Firing the board attorney would be, too.

In that light, I'm sure Gray is banking on her colleagues being "incredibly supportive," just like Eynon-Kokrda was for Sebring, because this whole World-Herald exposé thing is "ridiculous."

After all, "hindsight is 20/20." Yeah, that's the ticket.

Write for your life

This is what it sounds like when a city fights for its life.

Community leaders and luminaries in New Orleans know what the "optics" will be for their home when the Newhouse family ends daily publication of The Times-Picayune and proceeds apace in killing the entire enterprise dead. They know that a city that "can't support" a daily paper plays into all the talk about the Crescent City's impending demise.

They know a self-fulfilling clusterf*** when they're presented with it. They know that the area's -- and Louisiana's -- famously crooked pols are slobbering at the diminution of the Picayune like a dog slobbers at the prospect of a meaty bone.

When you're staring that in the face, you write something like this to 22 members of the Newhouse family:

It is painful to report that right now it is nearly impossible to find a kind word in these parts about your family or your plan to take away our daily newspaper. Our community leaders believe that your decision is undermining the important work we continue to face in rebuilding New Orleans. Whether you intended to or not, you have already created the impression that our recovery is so tepid that we cannot support an important civic institution like a daily newspaper.

In the end, we fear our community has already made its judgment on the three-day publication plan and the damage already realized cannot be undone. But the relationship between your family and our community does not have to end sourly. If your family does not believe in the future of this great city and its capacity to support a daily newspaper, it is only fair to allow us to find someone who does.

If you have ever valued the friendship you have shared with our city and your loyal readers, we ask that you sell the Times-Picayune. Our city wants a daily printed paper, needs a daily printed paper and deserves a daily printed paper.

Sincerely,
Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond
Archdiocese of New Orleans

Steve Roberts

Scott Cowen
President Tulane University

Ralph O. Brennan

Gayle Benson

Mary Matalin

Cokie B. Roberts

Norman C. Francis
President Xavier University

Archie Manning

Tom Benson

James Carville

Wynton Marsalis

Kevin Wildes S.J.
President
Loyola University New Orleans

Wendell Pierce

PREACH IT, people. Preach it.

Awesomest forecast ever. . . .

Unfortunately, it'll be one of the last we ever get.

Still, a final, apocalyptic tip o' the tinfoil hat to former Richmond, Va., TV weather guesser Aaron Justus for this joke weathercast he did last year before leaving WTVR for a more satisfying career as a brewer in San Diego.

But here's what you need to know about this viral video. Almost everyone reported it wrong.

The Huffington Post got the story wrong, reporting Monday afternoon that Justus was still at Channel 6, and that Richmond viewers actually saw the spoof before it became a YouTube sensation.

THEN, among others, The Boston Globe came upon the reportile dysfunction and ran with it online the next morning, and then Mediaite, and then Fox 4 in Kansas City, and then WMAR television in Baltimore, and on and on it went.

All this despite The Richmond Times having gotten the story straight Monday, as did The Hollywood Reporter, and then TV Spy the next day.

As newspapers die left and right of natural causes -- or expeditiously at the hand of newly-minted grads from the Kevorkian School of Business -- this is the media landscape we're going to be left with, as ink-stained wretches get replaced by 20-somethings with a daily web-post quota to fill.

New Orleans must be feeling so very optimistic about its future right now. And Louisiana's famously scumilicious politicians must be pissing themselves with the excitement of possibility.

The sound of bullshit

I'm sure you're familiar with Potter Stewart's concurring opinion on a 1964 pornography case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sure, you remember. Stewart wrote, in Jacobelis v. Ohio, about an explicit French film that had been deemed obscene in Ohio and its exhibitor fined $2,500:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

Similarly, I think we all know bullshit when we see it. Particularly, we know it when we smell it. But do you know bullshit when you hear it?

Like Justice Stewart, I might never intelligibly define bullshit -- the figurative kind that assaults truth, as opposed to the literal bovine kind -- in all the fullness of its being. But I know it when I hear it, and I just hope the Gambit writer wore his cowboy boots when he covered an appearance by NOLA Media Group head Ricky Mathews and NOLA.com editor James O'Byrne at a New Orleans tech gathering last week:

Word of the digital plan had leaked out before the paper had planned to announce it (ironically, in digital form -- a blog item by The New York Times’ David Carr), and O’Byrne and Mathews were still batting cleanup, trying to get hold of what Mathews called “the master narrative.” Despite the civic shock, Mathews said, the NOLA Media Group had known all along that cutting back The Times-Picayune would be a tough sell in a traditional (if not hidebound) city that loves its institutions -- even if it doesn’t always support them.

“We could have had this play out exactly the way we wanted to, which is announce a new company and talk to your employees simultaneously, and we’d still be in the same spot -- with a really visceral reaction from the community,” Mathews said. “The way to change that is to be talking. I’ve been talking till I don’t have a voice any more, explaining to people what we’re doing.”

(None of that talking has been done in The Times-Picayune newsroom, where 48 percent of the employees were given severance papers last week; 200 people from around the company are being let go. Mathews and O’Byrne have yet to address the staff in person, though Mathews said he had met recently with Mayor Mitch Landrieu for “about three hours, and he [Landrieu] got it immediately.”)

[UPDATE, June 21, 1:15 pm: A source in the mayor's office said the office "wouldn't characterize the meeting in those terms, either in the amount of time spent or in the mayor's takeaway (from the meeting)."]

“This is an entrepreneurial effort on our part,” O’Byrne told the New Orleans tech group, which was enjoying light hors d’oeuvres and complimentary craft cocktails by mixologist Alan Walter. “Because of the leaks that happened in The New York Times, we lost control of the narrative, and for two weeks we really had to focus all our efforts on what we had to do as a company [which] was to tell all our employees where they stood.

“I know that the layoff at The Times-Picayune seems significant,” O’Byrne added, “but it’s important to realize that we’re advertising for about 50 people in the new digital company. So you end up in a space where you’re going from about 165 down to 140. But you’re eliminating four days a week of print, and a lot of that labor existed to get that seven-day-a-week product.”

HAD ENOUGH? No? Well, you little masochist, you!

“We’re going to create a Google-Nike kind-of-vibe work environment,” Mathews told the group. “It’s our goal to create a world-class digital work environment for the journalists who are going to work for us, because we can attract the best and brightest from around the country. They’re going to want to come to New Orleans when the real story starts to get told. … We’re going to be a cutting-edge new media company with a print component that is still extraordinarily powerful. That’s our goal. So that narrative’s not been fully told yet; it will get told. You don’t tell it by being defensive, you do it by doing it.”

Mathews also addressed the issue of broadband access, which is not as widespread in New Orleans as other cities and has raised concerns over who will be able to get the new digitally focused paper. “New Orleans is quite a wired community, but there are certain parts of the community that are not wired,” he said. “So we’re going to invest money working with the Knight Foundation to begin to make a dent in it.”

OH, BROTHER.

“We’re going to create a Google-Nike kind-of-vibe work environment”? Really? When somebody says something like that, it can't NOT be bullshit. That's such a red-light indicator of the presence of bullshit that mere language loses it power in its presence.











See, I told you. My mouth is still agape and, obviously, so is my keyboard.

These people are just making this stuff up. It's the inverse of what people tell bums panhandling downtown -- no, I don't happen to have any cash on me right now. Dang.

Instead, Mathews and O'Byrne are out there trying to convince Crescent City techies that they're loaded when, in reality, they got nothin'. My God, it's like a couple of frat boys desperate to get laid. They'll say any damn thing, so long as it sounds good and halfway plausible. They'll make stuff up.

Unfortunately, the mass firing of Times-Picayune staffers, they didn't make up.

Perhaps they'll sleep a little better in the long months ahead knowing it wasn't the economy . . . or the death of newspapers . . . or random fate that did them in and will leave their city with "three Sunday newspapers a week" . . . and a crappy website. No, it's because -- Pulitzer prizes notwithstanding -- they're just not among "the best and the brightest from around the country."

The sort of folk worthy of "a Google-Nike kind-of-vibe work environment."

Swoosh, y'all.

DISCLOSURE: I went to college with James O'Byrne at LSU, where we worked together on The Daily Reveille in 1981. I'll just say that I don't envy him, and that life do throw some mean-ass curveballs at people as time goes by.

Dear God. There was more out there.

I told you so.

Here.

Now here are some details of a brand-new, court-released stash of a former Iowa school superintendent's naughty (and quite public, as it turns out) emails can be found here. A sampling from the Des Moines Register:

The 115 emails, sent from March 13 to May 8, were released Friday afternoon to The Des Moines Register and other media that had requested them under the state’s open records law.

The discovery of the personal exchanges, 43 of which dealt with sex, came to light after open records requests seeking information about Sebring’s sudden exit from the Des Moines district. Some emails were released May 29; Sebring sought an injunction blocking the release of the additional emails.

Sending personal emails or sexually explicit materials on school equipment violates Des Moines district policies.

District Judge Robert Hanson’s ruling on Friday said that Sebring’s argument that “purely personal communications” aren’t matters of public interest “indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the public interest is.”

Hanson also refused a request by Sebring’s former lover, who is married and is in the military, to shield his name from being disclosed. The man had sought protection under a portion of Iowa law that Hanson said was intended to protect whistle-blowing communications from outsiders with state government.

“First, common sense dictates that communications that should not have been occurring in the first place — personal communications using the school district’s computer equipment and email system, in violation of written school district policy — would not be protected from disclosure,” the judge ruled.

(snip)

Sebring had been in line to become the leader of the Omaha school district, Nebraska’s largest district. However, she resigned from that job on June 2 after the emails surfaced.

Of the 115 emails released Friday, 26 were sexually explicit, while another 17 included references to sex acts or sexually explicit photos.

Although Sebring, who is married, has said the affair didn’t interfere with her district duties, the emails indicate the conversations spanned the clock on some workdays. One message, sent at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, was nearly 700 words. The emails also indicate that the two met at least twice during working hours.

The man, in one email exchange, cautioned Sebring to be careful about not revealing their relationship.

“You are a public figure … and I’m in the military. I will ensure you that our close friendship remains a quiet … close friendship,” he wrote on April 24. “This means that every test, email, picture… anything will be gone the minute I am done reading it.”

He also told Sebring that he would be “cautious” not to reveal their relationship, adding “…and I expect the same from you.”

OOPS. Her bad.

The debt Omaha owes the Register for exposing this stuff -- and what a reckless flake its almost-superintendent turned out to be -- is, to say the least, enormous.

Ricky Mathews shot Tupac, too

I'm usually not one to post NSFW gangsta rap
videos, but this was too delish to pass up

New Orleans' alternative weekly, Gambit, has been indispensable reading -- especially the past three weeks.

Here's a gem from its Blog of New Orleans today, sticking it to the shameless corporate hacks -- Advance Publications hatchet man (and incoming Nola Media Group publisher) Ricky Mathews, for instance -- presently nosediving the city's venerable daily newspaper straight into the Gulf of Mexico:

At this hour, NOLA.com is fronting a major journalism award it has received for its recent 8-part series "Louisiana INCarcerated," which spotlighted conditions and financial incentives in the state's Byzantine, for-profit prison system:

A team of Times-Picayune reporters was awarded the June "Sidney" award, a monthly journalism prize given out by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, for the newspaper's recent eight-part special report on Louisiana's highest-in-the-world incarceration rate.

The series, "Louisiana Incarcerated," was reported by Cindy Chang, Jan Moller, Jonathan Tilove and John Simerman. It spotlighted how rigid sentencing laws and a strict pardon and parole system conspire to keep the jails full.

Not mentioned in the NOLA.com story: the contributions of photographer Scott Threlkeld, graphics artist Ryan Smith, copy editor Katherine Hart, designer George Berke and managing editors Dan Shea and Peter Kovacs, all of whom were fired from the paper yesterday by the newly formed NOLA Media Group.

Tilove was also fired. Special sections reporter Chang, whose byline appeared over most of the stories, has been offered a job in the general reporting pool.

HEY, if you're shameless enough to do what ownership is doing to The Times-Picayune and its staff, you certainly are shameless enough to exploit, for promotional purposes, the people you just fired or demoted.

Ukfay ouyay, ouyay uckingfay ucksfay.

Hell, no, we ain't all right!

Long before anyone busted the first rhyme, put on the first piece of bling or intentionally tried to walk down the street with his pants moving south and his drawers creeping north, my old man invented rap on the back patio of our house in blue-collar Baton Rouge.

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard!

All it took for the old man to go old school (before it was even the new wave), was a wayward hammer head on his thumb and not the nail. Or a balky lawnmower engine. Or a balky dog.

Oftentimes, it was a balky teenager of my intimate acquaintance.

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! Gotdamn sonofabitch, c********* bastard!

Though he little realized it, the old man was a human beatbox in coveralls -- as blue as 2 Live Crew, with a purple thumbnail to boot. If only he'd had his own personal DJ to punctuate his raptastic freestyles with some mad scratching and killer mixes.

Eh . . . he would have told him to "cut that goddamn shit off" right in the middle of a performance.

BUT THIS ISN'T about my old man, though I am my father's son -- which pretty much scares the holy living hell out of my wife. No, this is about the carnage at New Orleans' newspaper, The Times-Picayune.

It wasn't the work of a madman, but it was close. It was the work of a bunch of executives at corporate who left not bodies strewn across the newsroom floor, but instead careers.

By the end of the day Tuesday, 201 employees of the Picayune had been told that come Sept. 30, they would be shit out of luck -- not to mention shit out of a job. Of the 201 people getting the old heave-ho, which I think we're supposed to call "right-sizing" now, 84 came from the newsroom.

Firing 84 out of 173 newsroom employees, if we do the math, comes to 49 percent of the people actually responsible for covering the news that south Louisianians need to read. That's how Advance Publications makes sure that "essential journalism" endures in this star-crossed American city in direst need of it.

That's how cheap men in expensive suits "continue our 175-year commitment to covering the communities we serve."

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard!

Thus goes the first act of a newspaper company transitioning to the "digital future" -- firing half the people who "cover the communities we serve." Trading a seven-day print schedule for a three-day one. Shifting the lions' share of the "news coverage" to the paper's really, really bad website. Letting the vast majority of the newsroom layoffs fall upon the news and business sections.

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard!

MEANTIME, one might be curious about where this "bold move" into newspapers' digital future will take place.

Nothing notable, just your average midsize city more murderous than "pre-surge" Baghdad that also happens to be Latin American corrupt, Latin American uneducated and absolutely Latin American poor. With a small ruling coterie of Latin American-rich types who got that way either through business or genetics.

Also, the digital strategy is aimed at a city where lots and lots of people have no broadband service -- New Orleans has just a 40- to 60-percent subscription rate for Internet service fast enough to fully access a multimedia website. For the poorest areas of town -- which are mostly all-black -- the subscription rates hover somewhere between zero and 40 percent.

It seems to me that it's one thing to argue that most poor folks don't subscribe to the paper, but quite another to, for profit's sake, raise the bar higher and higher to even aspire to be an informed citizen. Like this Harvard professor, one wonders exactly when did we cross the line between having a market economy and becoming a market society -- one where everything has a price.

Even those things that oughtn't.

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard!

By the way, the Picayune isn't exactly losing money. It's still plenty profitable -- just not profitable enough for the Newhouse family, owners of Advance Publications.

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard!

OH . . . and then there's this sad reminder amid the economic and emotional carnage inflicted Tuesday on employees of The Times-Picayune: This is the "new economy," bucko. Loyalty is a one-way street that always runs in management's direction. Channel 8 in New Orleans illustrates this principle vividly for us:

"It's almost like a funeral inside, like a wake," said commercial artist Patricia Gonzalez after she got word she was being let go. She said she has worked at the TP for four decades.

Even though employees knew it was coming, Tuesday's developments still hit some like a brick.

"Next to my father's death, this is second in my life. I feel like I lost my family, somewhat ashamed that I lost my job, or will be losing my job," continued Gonzalez.

Staff writer Danny Monteverde also received bad news about his job.

"It's rough today, and it's sad to see all my co-workers and friends, really, and family go through stuff like this, but I had a good six years, I really did. I wish I had a lot more," he said.

Workers who have been axed are getting severance packages, but some were too distraught to pay attention to the details right away.

"I really haven't checked into the package, but I can't talk," Gonzalez said while choking up.

(snip)

Amoss said laid-off workers can apply for jobs that will be posted.

"When we launch the new company we will have a significant number of journalists, especially newsgathering, reporters, photographers, videographers, graphic artists," he said.

"I'm never going to give up. I will be reapplying for whatever is available, even if it's to cut the grass outside; that's how dedicated I am to the company," Gonzalez stated.

GOTDAMN sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! Gotdamn sonofabitch, c********* bastards!

Freestyle THAT, Advance.

Dear God. There's more out there.

OK, reporters. Let's put on our thinking caps, shall we?

The Fun Superintendent is suing her former employer, Des Moines Public Schools, to prevent it from releasing any more emails she thinks are "purely personal." Which, of course, she illicitly sent and received via her work account, often using school-system computers.

Nancy Sebring may be stupid, but she's also arrogant and ballsy. It must be from . . . never mind.

According to a report Wednesday in the Omaha World-Herald, the incredibly horny (not to mention reckless and foolish) woman who missed being Omaha Public Schools' next superintendent by this much appears to be suing to close the barn door after the brood mare already has made a break for it. After all, the whole thing already has made The Smoking Gun on the Internet, where you can read all the naughty bits the Des Moines Register and the World-Herald censored out.

ANYWAY, said the World-Herald's report:

Sebring filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Public Schools in Polk County, Iowa, District Court. She filed the request for an injunction Monday, after The World-Herald and Des Moines Register published selected emails over the weekend. Sebring resigned Saturday from the Omaha superintendent position.

The Des Moines district, responding to public records requests from the newspapers, provided the emails last week with some information redacted, including the identity and email address of Sebring's lover. Both newspapers removed certain sexually-explicit content from the emails before publishing them.

Des Moines officials acknowledged last week that the district's discovery of those emails was the reason Sebring resigned abruptly May 10, despite being under contract through June 30. At the time, Sebring said she needed more time to make the transition to the Omaha job and to help prepare for her daughter's wedding.

(snip)

In her lawsuit, Sebring claims that other individuals have requested or will ask for full, unredacted copies of her Des Moines emails.

The Des Moines district is no longer informing her about new records requests, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit acknowledges that free and open examination of public records is generally in the public interest.

But the suit argues that a small number of the emails were purely personal and their content is of no public interest.

The lawsuit says some of the emails were sent by a private individual who would not have sent those emails “had they known the information would be available for general public examination.”

In the lawsuit, Sebring also alleges that the Des Moines district has refused her repeated requests to delete her emails, which she contends is the district's practice for former employees.

Sebring is asking a judge to find that free and open examination of the emails is not in the public interest because “it would cause substantial and irreparable injury to the persons involved.”

Sebring wants the judge to block the release of personal emails until a judge can rule on her request. She also wants to be notified of any public records requests made to the Des Moines district involving her.

YOU KNOW what this means, right?

Even Sebring doesn't think you can unring a bell -- that a lawsuit will magically erase all those X-rated, Not Safe to Be Sent From Work emails between her and her married lover from The Smoking Gun or newspaper websites . . . or Google's Internet cache. If you want to titilate yourself with the lowlights of the Fun Superintendent and her man friend talking dirty to one another on the public dime, you don't need to file a public-records request with the Des Moines school board.

Nobody's going to put those d*** pictures in a box.

Everybody's going to be reading about Sebring's love affair with a penis, spanking, No. 69, butt licking and her desire for a chair with an attached "suction-cup dildo" for a long, long time.

So, what the hell? With the lawsuit, I mean.

Easy. There's more of this stuff out there . . . or on there, meaning server hard drives (which sounds suspiciously like a line from one of Sebring's oversexed missives).

Note that the Register and the World-Herald were searching for emails having something to do with Omaha. What in the world was she saying that wasn't about Omaha somehow?

Inquiring minds want to know.

IF I were one of the reporters covering this hot mess, I would submit a public-records request for every bit of correspondence to and from Sebring from her then-lover's email addresses. I'd also request all emails to and from Sebring containing a laundry list of words and phrases I cannot mention here.

Just like it should have been obvious that the Naughty Schoolmarm had something to hide when she unfortunately convinced the Omaha reporter to narrow his records request, it likewise ought to be obvious that the woman is at it again, this time trying to "sucker" the Iowa district court.

Because.

There's.

More.

Out.

There.

Or at least there's ample reason to think there might be.

X-rated film at 11.

It's a Boomer (wild) thing

Picture a world in which you get almost all the way through The Music Man, only to find out that Marian the Librarian has a thing for kinky sex and arouses herself by gazing at magic-lantern pictures of Harold Hill's . . . baton.

So to speak.

Welcome to Omaha; we'll show you around. And then we can then slide on down I-80 to central Iowa to the horndog digital world of a 21st-century schoolmarm -- Des Moines' former- and Omaha's almost-superintendent, Nancy Sebring . . . complete with throughly modern, thorougly naughty "magic lantern" shows.

Who knew what passions which lay beneath the plastic-rim glasses and sensible suits of the plain-Jane, middle-aged educator? And you thought spanking was yesterday's news in the public schools.

Not only that, but who knew what entertaining reading would result from the Des Moines Register's simple public-records request to the local school district for any emails Sebring sent or received mentioning "Omaha"?

Who knew that a professional reporter could be dumber than the ceaseless horde of amateur journo-bloggers who -- we are told -- are no substitute for "real" journalism, as practiced by "real" journalists at "real" newspapers? Don't answer that.

That's a lot of questions floating around in one measly blog post -- one by an amateur idiot, no less, who's no substitute for his betters at The Daily Blab. Not that he particularly cares to be.

But I do have one answer. Hire more horny schoolmarms and let them talk dirty to -- and traffic in Favreian crotch shots with -- the guys they're screwing instead of their husbands, let them do it during office hours and on school computers . . . and you'll get people critically interested in public education again. They won't let Junior withing a country mile of a public school, but the more adventuresome of America's parents might like to make the Fun Teacher's acquaintance.

Not to mention the Fun Superintendent.


I MEAN, read this stuff. After I did, I kept thinking of the "nurse" who showed up at Ferris Bueller's house in the movie . . . but school administrator-y:

Click on email for higher-resolution version.

BUT CAN she take his (censored) home to meet the family? Is his (censored) in love with the Fun Superintendent, too, or is this just another "third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous"?

Mainly, I'm just picturing Nancy Sebring standing at the altar with a giant penis. Is that wrong of me?


I DON'T WANT to imagine how Nancy's Special Friend might attempt to type a reply if he did.

Click on email for higher-resolution version, go to Friday, Mar. 30.

O! Dear. Me.

You get the drift, and you get the staggering, incomprehensible stupidity involved in a) doing this s***, then b) emailing about it incessantly on the job, while c) using your company email account and your company computer, when d) you work for a public entity subject to your state's open-records law.

All entertainment value aside, Omaha is lucky a reporter in Des Moines was paying attention to this stuff and not susceptible to being "suckered," as the Los Angeles Times put it. We dodged a bullet.

Though one might feel compassion (above and beyond the compulsion toward snark) for a reputedly talented educator who now must oh-so-publicly -- not to mention pubicly -- stew in her own hormonal juices, one "fun" fact trumps all: Nancy Sebring is too much of a "Fun Superintendent" for her -- or our -- own good.

Stupid is as reckless does.

Caveat eBaytor

I've been spending time looking at cool old electronics on eBay rather than send myself into a depressive spiral thinking about -- and blogging about -- the state of the world today.

Obama or Romney. Romney or Obama. If I had a handgun, the barrel probably would be in my mouth right now. Since that wouldn't be such a good thing, I've been looking at (and buying) cool old electronics on eBay instead.

Being, however, that any damn fool can buy or sell on eBay -- or anywhere else, I must add -- sooner or later, you're going to come across a bill of goods worthy of a Washington pol. Or even a Louisiana one.

At the top of this post, I present to you a "VITAGE- MID CENTURY AMBASSADOR TV & AM/FM TUNER. WORKS EXCELENT, RARE FIND ---5IN. TV SCREEN. SET IS PRE 60s."

(Sic), (sic), a thousand times (sic).

IF THAT TV is any older than the late 1970s, I'll eat a vacuum tube. Personally, I'm pretty sure it's no older than the 1980s.

If just looking at the thing isn't clue enough -- How many teeny-tiny television/alarm clock/ AM-FM radio combos running on "D" cells were there in, say, 1958? None, that's how many -- the very modern standardized label is a dead giveaway.

Word to the wise: U.S. addresses didn't include ZIP codes until 1963. Neither did labels of "PRE 60s" television sets.

Oh, by the way. . . .

$180.00????????
At 20 percent off???

$18 . . . maybe. If it works well.

Caveat emptor, y'all. Now more than ever.

Men in suits do what Katrina couldn't

You'll likely never notice the moment you were saved from the abyss -- or were cast into it.

For a couple of cities and their daily newspapers, that moment came in 1962. And a half century later, the Omaha World-Herald is still standing, still locally owned and the flagship of a chain of dailies and weeklies across Nebraska and -- now -- across the country.

The other newspaper, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, has not been so fortunate. In 1962, what had been locally owned since its founding in 1837 (cover price, one picayune) became part of Newhouse Newspapers, a division of S.I. Newhouse's Advance Publications. And now the New York-based corporation has decided New Orleans doesn't need a daily newspaper anymore. Or the Alabama cities of Birmingham, Huntsville and Mobile, either.

Instead, the Picayune, for one, will publish only three times a week -- Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Speculation is that at least 50 people in the newsroom will lose their jobs. That's what it means when spin like this comes down from on high:

Amoss acknowledged that for those who rely upon the newspaper as an integral part of their lives, the transition to three days a week would be difficult. But as emphasis in coverage moved online, he vowed that the essential journalism of The Times-Picayune would endure.

"We will continue our 175-year commitment to covering the communities we serve," Amoss said. "We will deliver our journalism in print, through NOLA.com and on our mobile platforms 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and we invite our readers to become a part of the conversation."

Mathews said details of the new digitally focused company are still being worked out, but the transition will be difficult. While many employees will have the opportunity to grow with the new organization, Mathews said, the need to reallocate resources to accelerate the digital growth of NOLA Media Group will result in a reduction in the size of the workforce.

"ESSENTIAL journalism" does not endure when you fire dozens of the people who produce it. And you cannot "reallocate resources" that you have just discarded like yesterday's newspaper.

"Yesterday's newspaper." That pretty much describes The Times-Picayune now.

Instead, what New Orleans will get come autumn is less news on a crappy website. What the city will receive three times a week in print is less news reported by fewer local journalists.

Corporate may or may not try to put a little lipstick on that particular pig, but if Advance follows the path it trailblazed in Ann Arbor, Mich., it will end up just cutting the pretense and butchering the pig. Like Ann Arbor, that would leave New Orleans as a no-newspaper town.

With a crappy website.


I WAS born in south Louisiana, grew up there, too -- in Baton Rouge. I grew up reading the State-Times and later worked there for a while.

But when I was in junior high and high school, most days I would hop on my bicycle (or into my old man's '67 Mercury) in the evening, go down to Villa Oaks grocery store and pick up an afternoon State-Times . . . and a New Orleans States-Item . . . and the old gray lady of the bayou morning, The Times-Picayune. From them, I learned about the world.

And from them, I learned what little I know about writing. It was an ink-stained apprenticeship of a fashion.

I had been married for the better part of a decade and had lived in Omaha for three years already when the State-Times died 21 years ago, and it broke my heart. I had always considered it the better (and livelier) of Baton Rouge's newspapers -- for whatever that is worth -- and I know the city is diminished by the loss of its voice, and by the loss of the internecine journalistic free-for-all with its sister publication, the Morning Advocate . . . now just The Advocate.

As I contemplate a struggling, rebuilding New Orleans without the Picayune -- having only a crappy website and whatever the hell the "print edition" is going to be -- I find myself thinking there but for the grace of Peter Kiewit goes Omaha. That's Peter Kiewit's picture above.

In October 1962, as America endured the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis, newspaper titan S.I. Newhouse offered $40.1 million for the World Publishing Co., then-owner of the Omaha World-Herald. The board of directors liked the money, and the deal was almost done.

Kiewit, president of Peter Kiewit Sons', Inc., the family construction business, didn't like anything about what he had read in the Wall Street Journal. The World-Herald deal, as opposed to the Cuba thing.

During an Oct. 12, 1962, layover at the Denver airport, Kiewit learned from a story in the Wall Street Journal that his hometown newspaper was about to be sold to New York publisher Samuel I. Newhouse.

World-Herald directors were willing to sell the paper to prevent the stock, largely held by heirs of founder Gilbert Hitchcock, from being diffused.

Four days later, Kiewit called a friend, banker W. Dale Clark, who also was chairman of the newspaper board, and asked to see the newspaper's balance sheet. Clark told Kiewit that the board had a buyer and was satisfied with the offer.

The newspaper's directors weren't interested in other offers, Clark told Kiewit, who later said he realized Clark felt a moral obligation to Newhouse.

But Kiewit persevered. Unknown to him at the time, Kiewit had a strong ally in his wish to keep The World-Herald in local hands. Martha Hitchcock, widow of founder Gilbert Hitchcock, felt strongly that ownership should remain in Omaha.

Kiewit spent nine days gathering the financial information he wanted. He was impressed with what he found.

Kiewit called Clark again on Oct. 26, saying he had the necessary information.

"Fine," Kiewit later quoted Clark as saying. "You had better come down and see me.''

Two days later, Kiewit and company colleague Homer Scott met World-Herald directors in an all-day Sunday meeting.

Monday night, Kiewit worked out an offer of $40.4 million. Newhouse's bid was $40.1 million.

Tuesday morning, Kiewit was the owner.

HAD KIEWIT hated the idea of his hometown paper being run from a New York office any less, the name of the World-Herald's anniversary website -- 125 Years and Counting -- might sound rather mordantly ironic about now.

Kiewit, who died in 1979, understood what few in business or the public understand today: Newspapers are not just another business. Newspapers are in the business of earning more dollars and cents than they spend, yes . . . but they also are in the business of community. And the business of democracy. And the business of education. And the business of accountability.

When a newspaper -- whether it appears in printed form every day or not -- is diminished, as Advance Publications proposes to diminish the Times-Picayune and its other Southern papers, it's never just the newspaper's light that grows dimmer. There will be vitally important stories in New Orleans that won't get told now.

There will be vital information that New Orleanians won't get, and good decisions won't be made because of that. Corruption will become even easier in the Crescent City, because there will be dozens fewer journalists keeping vigil over the public's funny business.

And a city that loves its traditions will be at a loss over the radical wreckovation of a big one in town.

I guess New Orleans just hasn't suffered enough, what with all the crime, killing, poverty, ignorance, corruption . . . and Katrina.

FINALLY, let's not even get into the foolhardiness of Advance putting all the Picayune's eggs -- this in the age of foundering Facebook IPOs and a soft online-advertising market -- in a highly uncertain digital basket.

Obviously, there are good ways to make money in the digital universe. There are ways for newspapers to profit online. I just don't trust the Picayune's corporate masters to look for them . . . or to look much beyond the shaky Internet-advertising model.

What could go wrong?

In New Orleans? Pretty much everything. And today, as a newspaper's employees and its city stare into the abyss, it's becoming clear who gets to pay S.I. Newhouse's bill from May 1962 that just came due.

Here in Omaha, I think it would be appropriate if the employees of the Omaha World-Herald -- and the citizens of the city it calls home -- spring for a giant spray of flowers for Peter Kiewit's grave, God bless him.