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65 National versus Local Disaster News Wearing recycled newspaper hats saying “Save the Picayune,” roughly a hundred citizens turned out one June morning in 2012 to let their local journalists know they cared. One homemade sign by rally protestor Jerry Siefken read “Publish seven days or sell to owner committed to the common good.” The word went out like an echo across media outlets lining the Gulf Coast. Seventy civic and business groups signed a petition to get Advanced Publications to keep their hometown paper as a daily. From WWL-TV in New Orleans to KPLC-TV in Lake Charles, television anchors, radio announcers, and even local bloggers rallied citizens of all stripes behind Louisiana’s leading news source. Word had just hit that the Times-Picayune, after 175 years, would no longer be a daily newspaper, birthing a love story between locals and their paper. The grassroots effort that was later organized under the Times-Picayune Citizens group hit the blogosphere, propelling “the TimesPicayune ” as the number one searched item on Yahoo!’s Trending List on May 24, 2012, at 1:30 p.m.1 The scene at Uptown coffee shops was somber. The place where people come daily to swap sections of the newsprint was in an uproar. Businessmen turned up at a Times-Picayune board member’s house to lobby the owners to sell to a local coalition. From the heads of Entergy New Orleans to the Ochsner Health System, from the president of Tulane University to local banks; they all tried in vain to hold off the pending plan of the paper’s owner to print the paper only three times a week and to experiment with posting the news online instead.2 It was not like the news was going away, but for Louisianans, and some in Alabama, where a similar experiment was taking place with three of its major newspapers, they felt like they would no longer be seeing a best friend every day. In New Orleans, Tulane University President Scott Cowen wrote in the citizen group’s press release that the local media remained a vital engine in attracting attention to major events in the city. Regarding the 2013 NFL Super Bowl, the NCAA Women’s Final Four, the NBA All-Star Game, Katrina’s ten-year anniversary, and New Orleans’s three hundredth 3 National versus Local Disaster News 66 birthday, Cowen wrote that “these events, along with the downtown opening of two new $1 billion-plus hospitals, deserve a more robust approach to news delivery.”3 Anne Milling, founder of Women of the Storm, reminded the owners of the importance of the state’s leading news source when disaster hit. “A daily Times-Picayune has been the backbone of the community in our postKatrina environment and provides the foundation for all civic dialogue and discourse,” Milling wrote. “It is our hope that the owners will respect the voices and desires of the community which has been so loyal to the printed newspaper for generations.” Veteran New Orleans restaurateur Leah Chase of Dooky Chase wrote about how the paper best explained to outsiders the uniqueness of the city, and gave insiders the scoop on the local who’s who. “People like Sheila Stroup, Judy Walker, Doug MacCash, and Brett Anderson provide me with information about the things I love, and I can relate to what they write about,” Chase wrote. “For people my age, this will be a terrible loss.” When it came down to dollars and cents, Michael Hecht, the CEO of Greater New Orleans, Inc., wrote, “New Orleans was recently named the ‘#1 Fastest Improving Economy in the Nation’ by the Wall Street Journal. The drastic reduction of our paper is not only inconsistent with this economic renaissance , it also sends a negative—and erroneous—message to the rest of the world.” Even the city’s mayor, Mitch Landrieu, calling the paper “a part of our identity,” made a heartfelt plea to preserve the paper he once tossed as a delivery boy.4 “The First Amendment keeps America strong,” Landrieu said. “We don’t always agree, but the newspaper provides a critical service for our city by helping to keep the public informed.”5 Ordinary citizens at the rally to Save the Picayune called the paper the “pulse of New Orleans,” cited the jobs that would be lost, the elderly who do not have Internet access, and the need for a robust staff producing investigative reporting on the city’s...

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