Oh, no! Don't let the house fall down!

There was a crooked man and he had a crooked smile.

Had some crooked fortune and he walked a crooked mile. Had a crooked cat, and he had a crooked mouse. And after Miss Katrina, they left their crooked house.

Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! My roof's got a hole in it and I might drown! Oh, yes, my roof's got a hole in it and I might drown!

And when Isaac's rain came down -- and when his wind blew hard -- the crooked, empty house came down, and the neighbors' house was jarred.

It gave those neighbor folks a start. It made their house a mess. For the crooked, empty house could not pass the acid test!

Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! My roof's got a hole in it and I might drown! Oh, yes, my roof's got a hole in it and I might drown!

And then the shutterbug from New Orleans' Picayune came to snap this picture and, thus, I cribbed this tune. For a fallen, crooked house comes but once in a blue moon!

Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! Ah, ah! Oh, no, don't let the rain come down! My roof's got a hole in it and I might drown! Oh, yes, my roof's got a hole in it and I might drown!

-- Apologies to the Serendipity Singers

What is dumbth?

WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, Louisiana News, Weather, Sports
I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.

Oh, look! Here's a great example caught on camera as Hurricane Isaac turned Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain into a swollen, storm-tossed tempest -- which, of course, is to moron 20-something males as a light bulb is to a moth. And with similar results.

Plaquemines Parish's watery passion play

Seven years to the day after Hurricane Katrina, Plaquemines Parish, La., is going under the waves again.

As I write, authorities and private citizens in private boats are pulling people off of their roofs and out of their attics. We see what has become of a subdivision in Braithwaite, La., in this photo posted to Facebook by the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

Hurricane Isaac, by the way, came ashore as a Category 1 storm. And this house, by the way, is three stories high.


ONE HAS TO WONDER how much longer whole swaths of coastal Louisiana, for all practical purposes, will remain habitable absent a massive federal effort to extend the hurricane-protection levee system and an even larger effort to restore Louisiana's lost wetlands. Of course, then you have to consider the reality of coastal subsidence, climate change and rising sea levels.

Between nature, neglect and the failure of state and local government to effectively govern -- and let's not even get into Washington's special brand of dysfunction -- my home state, day by day and bit by bit, literally is becoming a no man's land.

Lord have mercy. Mercy now.

The dog days of hurricane season

I believe in God and country. I also believe in baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Toyota automobiles.

And I damn well believe in a television anchorwoman who brings her dog to work during a hurricane.

In this picture from WWL television in New Orleans, Eyewitness News legend Angela Hill is shown behind the scenes of the station's ongoing coverage of Hurricane Isaac with her personal assistant, Diesel the Dog. Channel 4's news director may have other thoughts, but I think it's pretty much mandatory that Diesel be given some on-air role in keeping folks up to date on the storm.

TV news never lets a pretty face go to waste and, with one like Diesel's, it would be a doggone crime if it started now.

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.

Pride and paradox in New Orleans

"Uncle Lionel" Batiste, I imagine, never made nearly as much money as he did sweet jazz music.

And when Katrina hit New Orleans, the co-leader, vocalist and bass drummer for the Tremé Brass Band floated to safety from his ground-floor apartment in the Lafitte project by hanging onto his drum.

Floating with Uncle Lionel in that big bass drum, some say, was the pulse of the Crescent City. That pulse survives him, as evidenced by the massive "second line" Sunday night on Frenchmen Street in the city's Faubourg Marigny district, outside some of his favored musical haunts just hours after Uncle Lionel died of cancer at age 80. Above is a picture of that.

In any other American city, there would be something deeply nonsensical about Paragraphs 1 and 2 naturally leading into Paragraph 3. A poor man, chased from public housing when the federal levees gave way and the waters rushed in, bore the pulse of a great city, kept the beat of the music of its soul and is sent to his heavenly reward with an outpouring fit for an earthly king.

In this country, in these times, that is just foolishness.

ALMOST 2,000 years ago, the people of Corinth probably thought much as Americans do. So much so that the apostle Paul had to set them straight with a little crazy talk -- a little nonsense now preserved in the New Testament to benefit wise guys such as your average American.

18 Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you considers himself wise in this age, let him become a fool so as to become wise.

19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God, for it is written:

“He catches the wise in their own ruses,”

20 and again:

“The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.”

21 So let no one boast about human beings, for everything belongs to you,

22 Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world or life or death, or the present or the future: all belong to you,

23 and you to Christ, and Christ to God.

IF NOTHING ELSE, we Americans think we know it all, that we possess the wisdom of the world. Especially since August 2005, we've been pretty sure that New Orleans folk are pretty foolish.

Foolish to live in a saucer too near the rising sea.

Foolish to rebuild after -- And isn't it all too obvious? -- God, or Gaia, or Mother Nature, or climatological science . . . or the wisdom of human civilization, for Socrates' sake, strongly suggested that rebuilding the next Atlantis might be a colossal waste of resources and federal funds. How dumb can you be?

Dumb enough to re-elect Ray Nagin, that's for sure. I think Paul would be on board with us "wise" Americans on that one.

In short, the Crescent City is a sinking ship of fools, according to "the wisdom of the world."

The Almighty's mileage may vary, however.


FOR CERTAIN, in a paradox of biblical proportions, it would seem the meek have inherited the cultural landscape in this caste-riven city near the drain plug of the class-obsessed American South. This in a riddle of a city, ensconced in an enigmatic region that has played so large a role in status-obsessed America's long-running mystery -- which revolves around how we reconcile our status-obsession with "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . . ."

Common sense holds these truths to be self-evident, that there are bunches and bunches of ways in which we really don't want to follow New Orleans. We don't want to tolerate endemic poverty, for one, or endemic insouciance about the value of a good education, for another.

We don't want to be the nation's murder capital.

We want to believe that "Can we all just get along?" is a game plan worth implementing as a society. That's not one the Crescent City has been particularly committed to, not across the racial divide and not across the class divide, either.

They say if you's white, should be all right,
If you's brown, stick around,
But if you's black, well, brothers, get back, get back, get back.

IN NEW ORLEANS, the white, brown and black in the chorus of Big Bill Broonzy's "Get Back" transposes to white, Creole and black, a racial and caste system once rigorously enforced . . . and which holds considerable social, if not de jure, relevance even now. About as relevant to -- as defining of -- a sinking city near the mouth of the Mississippi as a dapper black bass drummer who embodied the soul of a city as he pounded out its heartbeat in second lines and night spots from the Tremé to Times Square. Sometimes, the heart of New Orleans beat on the two and the four . . . other times on the one and the three.

The Big Easy usually isn't -- not when so many bullets have someone's name on them, not when so many have so little, and not when the idea of hope sometimes seems about as tenuous as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' levees.

About.

New Orleans hasn't mastered so many things. Honest and effective government, it probably never will. But it has paradox nailed. Pride of place, too. And soul. And heavenly music. And heavenly eating. And home . . . and Mama an' dem. And, Lord, those second lines!

It understands -- understands in a way we "wise men" never will, metaphysical fools that we are -- that the worth of a man isn't necessarily his net worth or how much power he amasses. It understands that, yeah, Warren Buffett might be a bazillionnaire, but Uncle Lionel was a hell of a drummer, and a mean dancer, and a great mentor for generations of musicians, and a faithful keeper of the cultural flame . . . and damn, Cap, didn't he look sharp?

Oh! didn't he ramble, ramble?


YOU CAN'T BUY that shit, brah. And you can't buy a sendoff like the one Uncle Lionel has earned from the city whose pulse he kept. Not any more than you can buy an immortal soul -- or the profound, life-giving wisdom of holy fools.

Long may they ramble.

'The mask I polish in the evening, by the morning looks like s***'

From Moscow on the Hudson, Omaha's Conor Oberst tries to

keep up with underprivileged New Orleans teenagers busking
on a French Quarter street corner. Metaphorically, at least.

The other night at TD Ameritrade Park, Omaha officially -- in my mind, at least -- exposed itself as too big for its britches.

Simultaneously -- again, at least in the mind of this 24-year Omaha transplant -- it exposed itself as the cow-town version of a "hill William." You know, a hillbilly with pretensions. That often happens when your own great PR goes to your head like straight double bourbons on your 21st birthday.

To be fair, though, Omaha was goaded into it. It was confronted with something that wasn't A) Journey, B) Keith Urban or Kenny Chesney, C) Conor Oberst whining in the key of Z about how woebegone is his life to an audience of angst-filled emo navel gazers . . . for a six-figure paycheck.

I should have figured that when a band like Cowboy Mouth is slated to be the entertainment sandwiched in between the TD Ameritrade Home Run Derby and the start of the Omaha World-Herald 's Fourth of July fireworks show, nothing good could come of it.

To begin with, who thinks a band that lives somewhere near the corner of Joe Strummer and Professor Longhair (just a short block from Lynyrd Skynyrd Avenue) will appeal to a general audience in a town that touts itself -- somehow -- as "the new Seattle" of the indie-rock world . . . but can't support one decent radio station? Where Saddle Creek -- the little record company that nearly made Omaha almost-famous -- can only get one act onto the playlist at the closest thing we have to an "alternative" FM station?

C'mon. This was an event where people willingly forked over $7 for really bad beer and enjoyed it. Where Journey droned over the PA system like a Dave Heineman press conference, and people sang along. Like Dave Heineman.

Because they like it . . . and him.

Where people itched for that grand moment in the fireworks show where the pyrotechnicians blow shit up to yet another "patriotic moment" of Lee Greenwood schmaltzing his way through "God Bless the U.S.A." And the crowd . . . goes . . . wild!

Because we're hip that way in the Big O. Er . . . I mean "O!"

After Cowboy Mouth's mistaken decision to willingly walk into such an ambush -- one where Journey- and Lee Greenwood-lovers booed and yelled "Nooooo!" when drummer-frontman Fred LeBlanc asked "Do you want us to play one more song?" then tweeted and Facebooked about how the band and the show "sucked it hard" -- the New Orleans quartet's only consolation (other than what one hopes was a big paycheck) had to have been "God Bless the U.S.A.'s" omission from the fireworks extravaganza.


I'LL GIVE the naysayers this: The audio mix for the miniconcert was awful . . . because nobody turned off the stadium PA system, which caused an unbearable echo. Presumably, Cowboy Mouth wasn't in charge of the speakers ringing the ballpark in addition to its own sound system in front of the center-field stage.

Presumably, that was an all-Omaha clusterf***.

Still, the ugliest audience this side of Bob's Country Bunker may have forgiven all if only Fred LeBlanc would have counted down into a stirring version of the Rawhide theme. Or maybe "Stand by Your Man."

But a rude audience and a disaster of a booking isn't what's pissing me off.

There's no accounting for taste, or cultural differences (and on that account, Nebraska and Louisiana might as well be on different continents) . . . or even for what percentage of the booboisie ends up attending big events that feature bad beer and relatively cheap admission.

And fireworks.

To overuse an overused phrase just a little bit more -- it is what it is.

What pisses me off, for the record, is arrogance tag-teaming with invincible ignorance. What pisses me off is when someone, thinking he's stating a fact as obvious to all as "The sun rises in the east," says something that's instead as gobsmackingly arrogant as it is unspeakably stupid. Like a local newspaper acquaintance after the fireworks show announcing to all who could hear that Cowboy Mouth wasn't his "cup of tea," which is fair enough, but then that "there must be 1,000 bands in Omaha better than that."

You probably best know me as someone with a raging love-hate relationship with Louisiana, my native state. And as a Nebraska transplant who generally is thrilled to be one.

It may surprise you, on the other hand, to know that I'm someone who, more often than not, just keeps his mouth shut instead of interfering with a body's God-given right to make himself look like an idiot, an ass . . . or both.

IT USUALLY surprises me when -- and where -- my inner pissed-off, ready-to-kick-Yankee-butt coonass from Baton Rouge erupts with full force. And as a native Baton Rougean, it surprises me even more when it's in full-throated defense of New Orleans.

"A thousand Omaha bands better than Cowboy Mouth"? Really? Leaving issues of musical taste aside . . . really?

What I told the guy, rather loudly, was this: "I'll guarantee you that 999 of those Omaha bands aren't anywhere as good as Cowboy Mouth. And I'll lay money on that."

I can say that because I've actually listened to Cowboy Mouth apart from an ill-conceived gig with shitty sound. For example, in the case of the band's 2006 "Voodoo Shoppe" release, I was left dancing and crying in the space of a single CD. And all you need to defeat a know-nothing is to know a little.

The guy walked away kind of stammering after I committed the ultimate Midwestern sin of being impolite in the face of complete bullshit. The effect is enhanced when someone thinks they're stating the obvious -- and then you call bullshit.

On the Plains, that moment when a blowhard is left defenseless by the belief that he couldn't possibly require one might be called "All hat and no horse." When I was a kid in Louisiana, we had a more colorful way of putting it: "His mouth overloaded his ass."

We Louisianians may have our problems -- and God knows our native state has more than its share of bad ones -- but one of them is not being boring. Boring might be more of a concern someplace that aspires to be the next musical Seattle instead of the next musical New Orleans.


DELUSIONAL, arrogant and silly are definite immediate-action concerns for people in "the next Seattle" who think any but a couple or three local bands could hang for five minutes with a ragtag assortment of teenagers from the Tremé (or the Ninth Ward, or Central City, or the Seventh Ward) learning how to be a proper brass band on a French Quarter street corner in "the first New Orleans."

It would be like Nebraska touting far and wide the quality of its football program and the warmth and classiness of Memorial Stadium fans, only to have the "sea of red" raining Jack Daniels bottles upon visiting opponents after the Cornhuskers lose yet another game by 75 points.

Let's you and me examine some facts, Omaha.

Cowboy Mouth has been together for two decades. It's made more or less a go of it nationally. More importantly, it has made a go of it in New Orleans which, for all of its myriad problems and poverty, probably has more inherent cultural depth and musical talent in an average neighborhood than 21st-century Omaha has had to work with altogether as it pulls itself up toward the emo-wracked cultural nirvana of . . . Seattle.

I dunno, maybe a venerable and successful New Orleans rock band might get more respect here in Coolsville if Fred LeBlanc and company wore more plaid flannel. Sang more about the sheer psychic hell of living life in one's pasty white skin. Drank more Pabst Blue Ribbon and less Abita Turbodog.

And likewise, maybe people might really start to think Omaha really was Coolsville if Omahans started acting a lot less like Hicksville.

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.

Adventures in speling

Unless, of course, the incident at the New York hospital somehow involved tequila, salt and lime wedges. . . .

No, probably not.

Jeez, that's one word you'd think everyone in New Orleans knew how to spell.

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.

Quote of the day

Getting back to Louisiana . . . did I mention that the whole state is corrupt? Fabulously so. It's the state that's given us, um, colorful politicians like Edwin Edwards and Rep. William "$90,000-in-the-freezer" Jefferson. There was massive malfeasance or ineptitude at the heart of both the Katrina disaster (botched evacuations, levees) and the more recent Deepwater Horizon spill from which the Gulf Coast is still struggling to recover. This is a state that has a higher concentration of chemical and oil plants than anywhere in the world, and a state government that does a poor job regulating it. Even their pro football team turned out to be corrupt, for God's sake.

Why would they possibly need journalists?

-- Will Bunch,
Philadelphia Daily News

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.