SmashMouth

One of the nation’s last local newspaper wars is officially over.

Owners of the New Orleans Advocate announced Thursday that they had bought The Times-Picayune, ending a six-year battle for media turf in a cultural capital grappling with inequality and the long-term fallout from Hurricane Katrina.

In the end, the upstart Advocate, a Baton Rouge-based organization that launched its New Orleans edition in late 2012, overtook the 182-year-old Times-Picayune, which wilted in recent years under wayward ownership of the national chain Advance Publications. The purchase announced Thursday promised to create a unified daily newspaper and website — publishing under both organizations’ flags — held in local hands.

“This is a trophy,” John Georges, the New Orleans grocery wholesaler who now owns both publications, told VICE News. “We've been competing with the Times-Picayune for the past six years, and we were very successful. But despite that success, there is overlap.”

In an industry where companies are frantically consolidating to cut budgets and stay afloat, that’s code for job losses. “I bought the assets yesterday,” Georges added, as opposed to the newsroom.

YOU'RE FIRED
An official from Advance told Times-Picayune employees Thursday afternoon that they would all be laid off as part of the deal, according to three staffers. The journalists will keep their jobs for the next 60 days as the deal is finalized and the merging of the brands is completed, they said. Staffers will have the chance to apply for new jobs in the unified newsroom. But the details of that process, including how many positions might be available, remain thin.

Times-Picayune staffers were shocked, employees told VICE News, with some crying in the newsroom and others tweeting out the sad news. The staff went to a bar across the street to commiserate about the work the newspaper had produced amid intense financial pressure in recent years.

“We’re drinking now,” one former staffer said on Thursday night. “There’s not much else to do.”

Peter Kovacs, editor of The Advocate, told VICE News in an email Friday that he was “not privy to what Advance Publications told their employees yesterday.” Advance Publications and Mark Lorando, editor of The Times-Picayune, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“We will be expanding our New Orleans news operation and have held open some positions in Baton Rouge as well,” added Kovacs, a former Times-Picayune editor. “We already have some interviews scheduled with some of them.”

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jeanpierre

Dangerous all that power in one man's hands...

st thomas

Years ago I d get excited to work or pass thru the big easy area just to buy that paper. Of coarse it was anything Saints news which were loaded with info and incite on my team. Locally I’d go to the library to see week old copies . It’s a little bitter sweet. Today I listen to 1280 am streamed thru iHeartRadio . It’s just this world evolving , evolve or sink.