Catching up on a few other items,

Tag teams fail to impress

In late June, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune announced that it was enlarging a previously established partnership with WVUE-TV to provide collaborative reporting that would be featured in both outlets.

Just a few days later, The Advocate and WWL-TV announced a similar linkup.

The partnerships bragged that their deals would result in “greatly enriched … content on all of our combined platforms” (Picayune/WVUE) and “excellent coverage of important issues to viewers and readers throughout the region” (Advocate/WWL).

But the results have been infrequent and less than dazzling, amounting mainly to the outlets giving credit to their partners when delivering a collaborative report, in a format that is otherwise indistinguishable from what they were doing before.

So far, it’s a big “so what”.

Nell Nolan tells the Picayune to shove it

Nell Nolan’s “Goodbye” column in the Picayune contained a subtly delivered message to her long-time employer, which can be summed up as “Thanks for nothing”.

With a gracious nod to her young successor, Nolan summarized her accomplishments:

Dear readers,

This is my last column for the Social Scene, a column that I have loved writing for 34 years. I wish Sue Strachan all the best as the next columnist.

My innovations within the approximately 10,000 columns I scripted were accompanying photos, diverse groups, increased color pages, new fundraisers, and celebrities, such as U.S. presidents, British royalty, international dignitaries, cultural and sports icons, and movie stars.

I attended thousands of your events, spoke about my column and the newspaper to dozens of social and community groups, and made a host of friends. After all, this is your column, but in many ways, it became my life.

What Nolan didn’t write about, but that insiders knew, is how shabbily she had been treated by the NOLA Media Group. As reported by Dash30Dash, despite all those achievements they fired her in last summer’s purge, hired her back as a much lower paid contractor, and then refused to allow her to work out of the paper’s offices.

In the understated style that is her trademark, Nolan ended her goodbye with two sentences that stuck the knife in and gave it a good twist. The expert on the social graces pointedly omitted any thank-you to her soon-to-be former employer, while inviting her readers to dump the Picayune and join her at The Advocate, which had announced just a week earlier that her column would soon find new life in that publication:

And so, farewell with thanks for your support, readership and friendship. May our paths cross again.

Nicely done, Nell!

Steven Newhouse says everything is hunky-dory

Stephanie Riegel wrote in the Baton Rouge Business Report earlier this month that

Steven Newhouse—chairman of Advance Media, which publishes The Times-Picayune and Nola.com—tells Daily Report he is “absolutely pleased” with the success The Times-Picayune has had since reducing its print circulation to three days a week.

“We are committed and have no intention of doing anything other than stay the course and continue to work hard to earn the patronage of our readers,” Newhouse said in a telephone interview.

You do that, Steve, but don’t look over your shoulder, because The New Orleans Advocate is gaining on you.

When the editors of today’s TPStreet printed an Associated Press story, they removed any hint that another newspaper might be encroaching on their turf.

With a few name changes, the headline and lede as originally published by the AP could have been written about what’s going on in New Orleans:

California city becomes rarity: a 2 newspaper town

The latest experiment in American journalism is a throwback: a new daily newspaper to compete against an established one in a big city.

The front page of Monday’s debut edition of the Long Beach Register featured stories under the headlines “Welcome to your new local paper” and “A glimpse into Long Beach’s future.”

With the newspaper, the ambitious owners of the Orange County Register are expanding their bet that consumers will reward an investment in news inked on paper and delivered to their doorsteps — that their newspaper will be a big part of Long Beach’s future.

The competition is the Long Beach Press-Telegram, founded more than a century ago.

Sound familiar?

Later, the story continues (with emphasis added),

Media business analyst Rick Edmonds said the last time he can recall a major U.S. city adding a new daily paper was around World War II, when Chicago got the Sun-Times and New York got Newsday. There have been scattered other instances in smaller cities, but since newspapers entered their recent troubles, the creation of a new rivalry is itself news. A brewing newspaper war in New Orleans between that city’s Times-Picayune and a challenger based about 80 miles away in Baton Rouge, La., is the closest to what’s unfolding in Long Beach.

But here’s how that paragraph reads on page A20 of the August 19, 2013, TPStreet:

Media business analyst Rick Edmonds said the last time he can recall a major U.S. city adding a new daily paper was around World War II, when Chicago got the Sun-Times and New York got Newsday. There have been scattered other instances in smaller cities, but since newspapers entered their recent troubles, the creation of a new rivalry is itself news.

I mean, who do they think they’re fooling?

For the record, the AP story is here, and the TPStreet version is shown below.

Thanks to former Picayune columnist Chris Rose for the tip.

TPStreet, Monday, August 19, 2013, Page A20