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About dash30dash

dash30dash is a fund to financially assist employees, freelancers and contractors of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans who will lose their jobs or significant portions of their incomes as the newspaper abandons daily publication on Oct. 1, 2012.

NOLA alt-weekly Gambit reviews Hell and High Water

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Kevin Allman, editor of New Orleans’ respected alternative weekly Gambit, drove coverage of The Times-Picayune saga, trailing New York TimesGambitLOGO media reporter David Carr by only a few hours in confirming the grim coming changes, in May 2012.

He recently offered his assessment of my book. My favorite quote from his review? “If newspapers are black and white and dead all over, in New Orleans they’re the walking dead, and Theim’s tale of how print still lives will be of interest to New Orleanians and the newspaper industry at large.”

You may read his review by clicking here.

New Orleans Magazine’s Errol Laborde weighs in again on the book

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ErrolLaborde_Headshot

New Orleans Magazine Associate Publisher and Editor Errol Laborde

New Orleans Magazine Associate Publisher and Editor Errol Laborde has been generous with his time (while I was writing the book), valuable real estate (in the pages of the magazine) and with his praise (first, a few weeks ago, on “Informed Sources,” the public television show he produces on New Orleans’ WYES-TV, and now on the magazine’s blog).

Sometimes a person is just having a routine day at the office, going through the usual motions, perhaps thinking of what to get for supper, and then BAM! something happens that suddenly bounces a life in a new direction.

That happened last year to Rebecca Theim a former reporter for The Times-Picayune (1988- ’94) who has most recently been living and working in Las Vegas. When she heard about The T-P being reduced to thrice weekly and about the accompanying layoffs, she was outraged. Being separated by distance she could have easily been justified for doing nothing, instead she got into action. She founded a group that raised money to divide among the terminated employees. She also uncorked her reporting skills and began following the story as a journalist.

One day when media historians study what the Newhouses did to journalism, Theim (pronounced “theme”) will be an important source, perhaps the most important. Now we are seeing the results of her work … The publication is an excellent, at times riveting, bit of reporting put together in an amazingly short time.

– Errol Laborde’s Oct. 7 column on MyNewOrleans.com, the blog of New Orleans Magazine

You may read the rest of Errol’s column by clicking here.

First review of the book, in Louisiana’s The Advocate

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The Advocate, the former Baton Rouge newspaper acquired by New Orleans billionaire AdvocateAppIconJohn Georges, who has continued its fledgling expansion into New Orleans in a big way, is a supporting character in my book, and by anyone’s admission, far from an objective observer in the New Orleans media landscape. That’s no doubt why the daily newspaper went to Andrew Burstein, LSU’s Charles B. Manship Professor of History, and commissioned him to review my book.

Burstein, a noted Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson scholar, tells me in an email that, “My main attachment to Louisiana politics and culture is of the era when Thomas Jefferson was weighing the strategic significance of the Mississippi River. I could read your book with objectivity because I had no idea who any of the players were, many of whom now work at the Advocate.”

“Rebecca Theim, who worked for the paper from 1988 to 1994 and now lives in Las Vegas, narrates the story of the paper’s demise with clear compassion and in journalistic detail — while wielding a pen as mighty as any sword … This is a book with attitude.”

– LSU historian Andrew Burstein’s review of
Hell and High Water

You may read the remainder of the review by clicking here.

Via Poynter, my take on post-daily newspaper mediascape in NOLA, Alabama

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I freelanced a lengthy (for the Web, but nothing after writing a book) take on the fractured media landscapes at The Times-Picayune and the three Advance Publications’ newspapers in Alabama.

You may read the report by clicking here.

New Orleans Magazine, Weld for Birmingham excerpt the book

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Coinciding with the first anniversary of the “digital first” changes in New Orleans and Alabama, NeNOM_Oct2013w Orleans Magazine and Birmingham, Alabama’s alternative weekly, Weld for Birmingham, publish excerpts from the book.

Read the New Orleans Magazine excerpt by clicking here.

Read the Weld for Birmingham excerpt (which is differeWeldForBham_Logont from the one published by NOM) by clicking here.

Birmingham media consultant Wade Kwon emailed me this evening to inform me that I provided an outdated title for him, and erroneously used “of” instead of “for” in a reference to Weld for Birmingham. Thanks for pointing out the errors, Wade, and I’ll make sure they’re corrected in any subsequent editions

Threat by Newark Star-Ledger publisher to close paper defused by contract settlements

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The Star-Ledger, Advance Publication’s largest newspaper, reached a deal with its unions Wednesday night ahead of last Friday’s contract deadline. (Image via NJ.com)

Richard Vezza, publisher of the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, Advance Publications’ largest newspaper, last summer threatened to close the newspaper if the company did not receive major concessions from the paper’s four unions. The unions and the newspaper last week reached contract agreements that keep the newspaper publishing, which union president Ed Shown acknowledged involved “a lot of painful and hard decisions.”

I had interviewed Shown in late June for my book, who was confident then that the paper would not close and that a contract agreement would be reached by the end of September. He made his deadline.

Read about the details – and the rather telling deletion of a quote from the newspaper’s publisher that mysteriously disappeared from the NJ.com’s online reports – in my book, in bookstores the week of Oct. 13.

“Digital First” has been very good to Advance Publications’ Donald Newhouse

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Donald Newhouse in 2005 in the newsroom of the Newark Star-Ledger, Advance Publications’ largest newspaper. (Image via NJ.com)

As I note in the Epilogue of Hell and High Water, information surfaced shortly after I began writing the book that Advance Publications’ “digital first” initiative appears to have  beenvery good to Advance exec Donald Newhouse. Between September 2012—when the carnage began at the New Orleans Times-Picayune and three Newhouse-owned newspapers in Alabama—and March 2013, the value of Donald Newhouse’s and his brother’s fortunes grew an estimated $1.4 billion, to $15.4 billion, Forbes magazine reported. The Newhouse fortune has continued to climb, according to Forbes‘ latest list of the 400 Richest Americans: it now stands at an estimated $17.1 billion, $8.9 billion belonging to Si Newhouse, and $8.2 billion credited to Donald. (Poynter.org’s Andrew Beaujon reported the new rankings.)

Although I calculated that digital first has been responsible for the loss at least 1,600 full-time jobs to-date at Newhouse newspapers nationwide (and countless part-time, freelance and contractor positions), the initiative has been very good to the Brothers Newhouse.

WYES-TV’s “Informed Sources” Calls Out Hell and High Water

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Thanks so much to Errol Laborde, producer of New Orleans PBS affiliate WYES-TV’s WYES_InformedSources“Informed Sources,” for his complimentary call-out Friday of Hell and High Water and noting it will be available near the first anniversary of the changes at The Times-Picayune, Oct. 1, 2013. (Errol’s kind words begin at 26:10 in the show’s replay available at this link.)

Pre-Order Hell and High Water Now through New Orleans’ Octavia Books

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Octavia Books, one of theOctaviaBooksLogo country’s great independent bookstores, will host the first signing of Hell and High Water, on Oct. 17, in New Orleans, from 6 PM-?. If you can come out for the event, I hope you will, but if not, please support Octavia by buying your copy of the book from them. You can do so at this link.