By Sean Cockerham, McClatchy Newspapers –
NEW ORLEANS — Clifford Burchfield sleeps in an abandoned building in the Algiers section of New Orleans, with no plumbing, electricity or running water. He can’t afford television, much less the Internet. But Burchfeld still devours the news every day from The Times-Picayune. Or at least he will until this fall, when New Orleans becomes the largest metro area in the nation without a daily paper.
(PHOTO: Times-Picayune readers learn about the newspaper moving to a “beefed up” online presence and a reduction to a three day a week paper at Betsy’s Pancake House on Canal Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, Friday, May 25, 2012.)
“That’s my only way of getting the news,” Burchfeld said, shirtless in the 90-degree heat and incredulous at the Times-Picayune headline announcing across the front page: “PAPER LAYS OFF 200 EMPLOYEES.”
New Orleanians have reacted with shock, sadness, outrage and a jazz funeral of laid-off reporters, editors and photographers to the June 12 announcement that the paper was cutting half its newsroom staff as it as goes to three days a week in print and an emphasis on online news. Mayor Mitch Landrieu said it made New Orleans look like a “minor league city.” The president of the city council called it “totally unacceptable” and urged the New Jersey-based owners of the paper, Advance Publications, to reconsider.
The Times-Picayune has been part of the rhythm of life for 175 years in New Orleans, a beautiful but tragic city with a history of corruption and crime, poverty and natural disasters. New Orleanians relied on the paper to shine a light in the city’s dark corners, to bring the city together through its pain and to chronicle its celebrations and offbeat culture. There’s a connection between readers and newspapers not seen in other metro areas. That’s visible in the statistics showing the Times-Picayune with the highest rate of readership by population of any paper in a major U.S city, and in the visceral anger at what’s happening.
Irina McCallister, who packages coffee at a plant in New Orleans, said it seemed as if The Times-Picayune was giving up on the city that loved and needed it. She was so moved by the coverage of New Orleans cops gunning down unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge after Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent police cover-up that she cut the pictures out of the paper to save them.
McCallister evacuated to Lafayette, La., when the levees failed and the city flooded. She was riveted by the news coverage as Times-Picayune staffers stayed on in the apocalyptic city, even as many of their own homes were underwater.
“They were like bloodhounds. It was my lifeline,” McCallister said.
But there’s little love for the NOLA.com website in New Orleans, and many readers expressed skepticism that getting rid of half the existing newsroom would lead to a good result. Richard Campanella, a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, called the change to three-day-a-week publishing traumatic for the city.
“What went into the headlines and on the front page formed a common civic discourse,” Campanella said. “More so than most American cities, this city benefited from a common civic discourse because we had such deep-rooted problems. The notion of that disappearing four-sevenths of every week leaves a huge gap.”
Martha Kegel, who leads a consortium of nonprofit agencies that fight homelessness in New Orleans, said it was “infuriating” to watch what was happenin
