Less than 13 months after launching TPStreet, NOLA Media Group scrapped the three-day-a-week newsstand-only tabloid, instead restoring home-delivered publication of the broadsheet Times-Picayune on two of the four days a week it was eliminated in 2012.

Originally set to replace The Times-Picayune on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, TPStreet was scrapped effective Sept. 6 as the company partially backtracked and restored home-delivered, daily publication of the broadsheet on Saturdays and Mondays – but only through the end of the New Orleans Saints’ season, which not coincidentally also coincides with high-shopping – aka high-advertising – season. That brings to five days a week – all but Tuesdays and Thursdays – that the newspaper is home-delivered to subscribers, at least while the Saints are playing. “We’re delighted to give our readers this expanded offering of printed newspapers and online content and to help our advertisers reach their best customers,” according to an Aug. 1 announcement published to NOLA.com.There will also be home-delivered papers on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

Vice President of Content Jim Amoss told the Nieman Lab that “reader demand” – and primarily reader demand of Saints and LSU football coverage – drove the decision to revive Saturday’s and Monday’s newspapers:

“My take on it was that it was based on reader demand and that advertisers would welcome it, especially on Saturday … I think the impetus was readers telling us in no uncertain terms that they would really like to especially read about Saints and LSU coverage and have it home delivered to their doorsteps on days after games.” – NOLA Media Group VP of Content Jim Amoss

Amoss has consistently denied that NOLA Media Group’s almost constant adjustments to its publishing schedule has been in response to the challenge from The Advocate, which re-launched a daily New Orleans edition in conjunction with the Picayune’s Oct. 1, 2012, original cutbacks. Most recently, Amoss told Nieman Lab that NOLA Media Group “is primarily focused on ‘digital competition’ — from local TV station websites and other local and national online outlets.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich has done a series of cartoons for New Orleans magazine lampooning the changes at his former employer.

New Orleans magazine Editor and Chief Errol Laborde, a consistent critic of NOLA Media Group’s cutbacks, noted “the economic force of football, not only driving audiences to the news media but as a backdrop for holiday advertising. Many towns, New Orleans high among them, fill hotels during the slow weeks of Christmas by hosting bowl games. We suppose there’s something comforting about nations where games rather than wars are more pivotal to our everyday lives.”

Laborde went on to note, “Two years ago, we wished that The Times-Picayune would return as a daily. Now, with The Advocate in place, The T-P’s move to less frequency might be the better alternative. It could be that a town with a daily and a less-frequent alternative might be the way to go. Each could serve the city from its own perspective.

“Two years ago, it seemed like the city was going backwards with its newspaper coverage. Now it just may be leading the way.”