• Newseum

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which distinguished itself amid great adversity during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is about to enact large staff cuts and may cut back its daily print publishing schedule, according to two employees with knowledge of the plans.

Newhouse Newspapers, which owns the Times-Picayune, will apparently be working off a blueprint the company used in Ann Arbor, Mich., where it reduced the frequency of the Ann Arbor News, emphasized the Web site as a primary distributor of news and in the process instituted wholesale layoffs to cut costs.

A request for comment late Wednesday night from the newspaper’s editor, Jim Amoss, was not returned.

The plans have been kept under wraps, but the newspaper will likely publish two or three times a week rather than daily, according to the employees.

In the current national context, particularly, I don't think it a stretch to call the T-P a great newspaper. It continued to cover the news of record deeply with a large, vigorous and educated staff under the guidance of leaders who never lost sight of big pictures — prisons, coastal erosion, the New Orleans schools, government dereliction in Katrina. Beyond that, I can't think of a newspaper in the country more knitted up in the fabric of the city and region in which it worked. You want to know about po boys? The T-P knows po boys. I'm sentimental because I grew up reading the Picayune, but I've read it recently and that experience only heightened my admiration. A sad day for New Orleans and all who love newspapers.

PS — And then there's the matter of the New York Public Library removing books to turn libraries into cybercafes.

I'll just throw this out and step back so that mud throwing may begin.

Survey says, in summary: Fox News watchers are less informed. NPR listeners are the best informed. From a Poynter report on the survey:

People who watch no news at all can answer more questions about international current events than people who watch cable news, a survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind finds.

NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative news outlets, while exposure to partisan sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC, has a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge.
People who watch MSNBC and CNN exclusively can answer more questions about domestic events than people who watch no news at all. People who only watch Fox did much worse. NPR listeners answered more questions correctly than people in any other category.

The survey of 1185 random people conducted by landline and cell phone in early February follows a similar poll FDU conducted last November, which surveyed only New Jersey residents and returned similar results.

PS — Good suggestion from a reader: A listing of those restaurants that force those who choose to eat there to watch Fox News. It's under consideration.

You tell your kids, don't you, that the Internet is immortal? That anybody with a computer can see what you've posted on Facebook and Twitter? That future employers might look askance that things you might put there?

I hope people who work in higher education are driving that message home, even if they aren't always practicing what they preach.

Like Anthony Chelte, the fired UALR College of Business dean, whose travel activities are under scrutiny, including conversion of a ticket charged as a business expense to a Hawaiian journey. Maybe he needs a new Facebook photo?

For now, you can also see a few photos and posts from his trips to France on his Twitter account. For example:

In the Eurozone this week. working with partner business school, Sup De Co Amiens, France.

The Twitter account went silent Dec. 29, days before he lost his deanship.

New York Times media columnist writes today about the rarity of on-air corrections on TV news. He focuses on NBC's misleading edit of police tapes in the Trayvon Martin case. The network investigated and took a number of steps to remedy the error, but never announced it on air.

What is it with television news and corrections? When the rest of the journalism world gets something wrong, they generally correct themselves. But network news acts as if an on-air admission of error might cause a meteor to land on the noggin of one of its precious talking heads. NBC used all of the powers at its disposal to amend the mistake, except the high-visibility airtime where the bad clip ran in the first place.

I wonder if Fox News will correct the misleading impression one of its announcers left by manufacturing a quote by Barack Obama related to his silver spoon remark.

The big morning news appears to be a round of co-ordinated attacks and suicide bombings in Afghanistan, where a hotel and foreign embassies in Kabul have been hit.

No local angle, other than Arkansas's shared investment in life and treasure in this unending conflict. But I have to note that the Taliban apparently has a spokesman and announces its news developments, such as sneak attacks, via text message and Twitter. #quagmire

In the latest Oxford American, editor Marc Smirnoff devotes his editor's note to a 3,600-word screed against the Southern magazine Garden & Gun, which he accuses of, among many other things, "whitewashing the South."

In an interview with the blog Mr. Magazine, Smirnoff defends his position, takes a few more shots at G&G and talks about the future of print in the digital age.

There have been numerous such attacks in the history of magazines, and the writers who have attacked before me—like H.L. Mencken, Elizabeth Hardwick, Dwight Macdonald, or A.J. Liebling, to name just some—did so with lasting meaning.

In any case, I am sure you’ve noticed that magazines attack A LOT OF OTHER THINGS all the time. Since you don’t seem to have a problem with that, the implication is that you just don’t like media-on-media attacks. What the BLEEP, Samir? We in the media shouldn’t act like we are members of a Good Ole Boys Club; we shouldn’t just dish it out to strangers.

...

The online or electronic experience is not conducive to serious reading of the kind THE OXFORD AMERICAN strives to offer. To paraphrase Harold Bloom, serious reading allows us to create a deeper relationship with ourselves. And the online experience, with all its chattering and blipping, and pushy, pulsating neon advertisements, is not friendly to the kind of prolonged, profound soul-exploration that serious reading provokes.

Garden & Gun editor David DiBenedetto's response.

Re Limbaugh/Maher/Nugent/Huck/Hannity/Fox News/rightwing cult of victimhood. No elaboration necessary.

Many of those featured are doing interesting things online. Strangely, none of this content appears on E&P's website.

AR Dem-Gaz, paraphrasing Bloomberg News headline: "U.S. economy grew less than forecast in fourth quarter"
Washington Post: "U.S. GDP grew at fastest pace in 1.5 years in fourth quarter 2011"

• OSCAR NOMINEE: "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory."

Here are all nominees.

It's hard to see how Paradise Lost can lose and not just because of its celebrity (Depp-Jackson-Maines-Vedder) cachet. It's the culumination of 19 years of work that saved the life of an unjustly convicted man.

Academy Award for best picture? An odd lot of choices to this low-brow moviegoer. I vote by my usual standard, entertainment, for "The Descendants." The not-as-bad-as-I-feared award to "The Artist."

A New York Times analysis makes the case that the sudden rout of so-called Internet piracy legislation yesterday represented a triumph of the new era information industry over old dinosaurs such as the movie lobby and, significantly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

You know the tech guys marshaled some significant forces to get the likes of Rep. Tim Griffin and Sen. Dr. No Boozman to turn tail and run from their support of the dangerous legislation. They usually stay harnessed to the victorious end with the Chamber of Commerce.

The moral here is that the Chamber and its allies went too far with legitimate efforts to combat foreign thievery of copyrighted material. But they always do. The other moral is that other people have big money, too, and a more effective way of rallying opposition than letters to editors of dead-tree publications.