NRJ Book Review: Hell and High Water: The Battle to save the Daily New Orleans Times-Picayune

Abstract

Rebecca Theim, Hell and High Water: The Battle to Save the Daily New Orleans Times-Picayune (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican, 2013). Hardcover, 320 pages, $26.95.Advance Publications has ventured into the forefront of the digital first movement in newspapering that sees the future as online, with a diminished presence in print. Advance has cut back on the publication frequency of its once major dailies in New Orleans, Cleveland and Portland, Oregon, along with smaller newspapers in Michigan and Alabama, to three or four times a week. Industry watchers are following the reaction in those markets with interest, as it could well determine whether the bold moves by Advance will start a trend away from daily publication. Judging by the experience in New Orleans, as chronicled in Rebecca Theim's remarkable Hell and High Water, much pain will be experienced by all involved. The transition there, according to Theim, was nothing less than bungled. The way Advance executives and Newhouse officials treated employees, readers and advertisers in New Orleans is almost a textbook example of ineptitude and insensitivity. The problems began when David Carr of The New York Times scooped the company announcement of the change in May 2012. Executives were caught offguard and were thus constantly on their heels in dealing with the ensuing community outrage, much of which centered on the company's longstanding pledge not to lay offemployees. The 200 or so Times-Picayune workers who lost their jobs were required to remain at work for months and, in some cases, to train their more tech-savvy replacements. Morale at the newspaper was poisoned as a result. After more workers quit than Advance wanted to lose, the company attempted to re-hire many of those it had laid off, but most of them balked at returning. The moves prompted the Advocate newspaper in neighboring Baton Rouge to begin a daily New Orleans edition, which hired many of the Times- Picayune's castoffs and quickly gained a circulation of 23,500. That caused the Times-Picayune to counter by printing a tabloid called T-P Street on the days it had ceased publication. All of a sudden, New Orleans had more newspapers than ever.While Theim focuses on the situation at the Times-Picayune, she also monitors the transition to non-daily publication at Advance's three newspapers in Alabama, which also took place in 2012, and subsequent transitions at Cleveland's Plain Dealer and Portland's Oregonian. Advance pioneered the move to non-daily publication in economically distressed Michigan, where it reduced publication at three of its eight dailies to three times a week in 2009 and cut back its Ann Arbor News to twice weekly. …