WhoDat!656

So many of us in the journalism business have had to get used to new things. New age of versatility that has us do print, Internet, radio and TV. Twitter. The 24-hour news cycle. The whole business has changed, and we all probably knew this day was coming. But it'll be an eerie day this fall: The storied New Orleans Times-Picayune, born in 1837, will stop publishing seven days a week. It'll publish three days a week -- Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

The Saints are the biggest story in the city, all fall. But you won't read about them away from a computer until Wednesday every week in New Orleans. There'll be a Super Bowl in New Orleans in February. Will those folks not inclined to read online have to wait 'til Wednesday to read about the biggest game in America?

The paper will cut about 50 jobs from the 150-member staff and begin devoting most of its energy to the online product. This cannot be good for journalism, no matter which way the parent company, Advance Publications, spins it.

On Friday, one of the best NFL reporters in our business, the T-P's Jeff Duncan, was mulling his future. He'll find out soon if he still has a job, or if he'll have to re-interview for it, just like the rest of the 150 journalists on staff. He hopes the paper's love for sports gives him a path to stay.

He was reminiscing about covering the city in the days after Katrina, when he saw a dead body wrapped on a porch, interviewed petrified zookeepers at the New Orleans Zoo who were afraid of looters invading their place, bathed in a neighborhood swimming pool because there was no running water for days, reported on gang members taking care of an older woman who didn't have access to her medicine (they broke into a pharmacy to steal it for her) ... and felt more alive than he ever had as a reporter -- even though he'd never been a news reporter before.

"I'll never forget going down to the Convention Center with our old sports editor, David Meeks, bringing the papers to a group of people at the Convention Center,'' Duncan said. "They were overjoyed. They were crying. It was a connection to their old lives, because they didn't know what their lives held, with all the doomsday reports they were hearing. It was like we were giving out money.''

I'll never forget after the Saints lost to the Bears in the 2006 NFC title game, and the team returned home to find this blaring headline in the paper the next day: "BLESS YOU BOYS.'' There's a great connection between paper and city and paper and team. And it'll never be the same, sadly.



Read more: Kyle Orton's 2011 proof what impact trade deadline move can have - Peter King - SI.com

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