Such A Very Good Thing

Some more explicit thoughts on our fair city's current newspaper saga, which was discussed in the previous post. Here are the most important features of the transition to daily home delivery and local focus by the brand-spanking-new Daily New Orleans Edition of the The Advocate.  This is what makes the incredibly brutal, ugly and crass attempt by the Times-Picayune to insult and push us around, sully our good name, and demote us to second-rate status such a very good thing.

First of all, the Times-Picayune's gambit has failed, utterly.  In fact, it has backfired, devastatingly.  The Picayune, instead of being able to cut overhead to the bone, pare back service to only three days a week home delivery without consequence, and generate higher profits at our and their former employees' expense, has effectively committed suicide; good riddance.

Best of all, that is in no way owing to any campaign or effort on the part of any of the know-it-all-entrepreneurial newbies, all come to town since Katrina to instruct us about all the things we've gotten wrong in the last 300 years, the slacker and eccentric indulgences we call a culture, and overall want of civic virtue.  No, all this group of clueless kids have done is foster a wholesale wreckage of any semblance of public education or effective health care for the poor and, along with it, the strongest medical training anywhere in the country, through its willingess to support coloring-book childish conservative leadership like Stacy Head here and Bobby Jindal in the state capitol.  They can't even unstick their eyeballs from their electronic light-up toys long enough to do the laundry.

Nor did the whining and polite letter-writing efforts of  big-ass wallets like Tom Benson and the uptown society page clubby swells have any effect.

No, Baton Rouge Advocate publisher, David Manship, stepped-in, stepped-up and invested in a New Orleans daily version of the Advocate for home delivery here because we are who we are, nothing more.  He has raided the remnants of the Picayune's offices, made off with the T-P Loving Cup chalice awarded annually to some goody-two-shoe local aristocrat, and used it to christen this wonderful new publication.  And it has all happened simply because, as I pointed out previously, we are who we are: a people, a culture, and a city.  -30-.