What opinions merit front-page editorials?

The front page of The New York Times for Saturday, Dec. 5. pic.twitter.com/XsyKGA4Vrk

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 5, 2015

As LSU’s Director of Student Media, I occasionally fire off messages to student editors and station managers with suggestions that I usually expect them to ignore. They are independent and they are rightly in charge of their newsrooms, and I didn’t follow a lot of faculty advice when I was their age either.

I sent this message to the editorial board of our newspaper, the Daily Reveille, on Oct. 1:

I just checked. I didn’t carbon anyone from the New York Times on the message. But the Times ran a front-page editorial this morning, calling for an end to “the Gun Epidemic in America.”

My students sort of followed my advice (or moved that direction on their own), running some opinions on the front page but more frequently than I suggested. That’s OK, too: The Reveille’s front page and editorials should reflect their judgment, not mine. I’m proud of their work, which has included excellent opinion pieces by columnists and the editorial board on page-one this semester, about such topics as mental health and racial discrimination at bars near campus.

As Kristen Hare’s Poynter piece that I shared with the student editors indicated, newspapers are increasingly responding to important issues by stating opinions on newsprint once reserved for “straight news”: the front page. The New York Times is following this trend, not leading it (nor am I, obviously). Hare’s piece was prompted by this Chicago Sun-Times cover:

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The Reagan-Ford ticket: a historic front page that was never delivered

A Des Moines Register front page from 35 years ago. But we stopped the presses before any papers made it out of the building.

When I blog about historic front pages, I normally tell about papers that actually made it to homes and/or vending machines. This one didn’t make it out of the Des Moines Register’s building (except for the copies spirited out by a few editors for keepsakes).

Usually when editors stop the presses to update a story or dump a bad one, the papers that have already been printed go out to the early routes because the mistake is found too late. But all the papers were still in the building 35 years ago when we learned that a deal for a Republican presidential ticket of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford had fallen through.

The Reagan-Ford discussions had been the buzz all day. Ford, who was more popular after his presidency than during it, would add some heft to the ticket of a former actor at the top of the ticket who was genial and popular, but perceived as a lightweight.

As the presses started rumbling late the night of July 16, our front page proclaimed the ticket as likely. Appearing under the triple byline of three of the best journalists I ever worked with, Jim Risser, George Anthan and Jim Flansburg, was this lead:

Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan, in a stunning political move, reportedly persuaded former President Gerald Ford Wednesday night to be his running mate, after promising that Ford would not be a mere figurehead.

As I recall, Dave Westphal, who was editing the story, insisted on hedging with “reportedly.” Our three reporters, and everyone else covering the Republican convention, thought the Reagan-Ford ticket was a done deal.

A commentary by our editor, Jim Gannon, noted how the remarkable deal came together, first raised in a live TV interview of Ford by Walter Cronkite.

Eventually, Reagan decided he would be sharing too much power with his former rival.

With the newsroom floor vibrating from the fast-moving press below, Risser called with news that the deal had fallen through. News Editor Jimmy Larson called the pressroom to stop the presses. But before they could throw away all the outdated papers, I grabbed the one pictured above.

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Looking back on Nixon-resignation front pages from 40 years ago

I remember this day 40 years ago so clearly. The whole nation was expecting Richard Nixon’s resignation. But it took me by surprise.

As a student journalist, I followed with fascination the biggest story of my college days, the Watergate scandal that was engulfing the presidency of Richard Nixon. A House committee was considering impeachment and I was fascinated and eager to see how it all worked out. Then I missed the conclusion.

Mimi and I married on Saturday, Aug. 3, 1974. These days many honeymoons come weeks or months after the wedding, but we headed north for a cabin in Minnesota just a few hours after the wedding. The Monday of our honeymoon, the “smoking gun tape” was released, proving Nixon’s deep involvement in the cover-up. Well, my bride and I weren’t paying attention to the news that day.

In fact, we didn’t pay any attention to the news at all for the next few days. We enjoyed our rustic cabin and the beautiful lake. We didn’t have a TV in the cabin and we didn’t go to town for a newspaper. And this was two decades before the Internet was an option. My bride didn’t need to tear the cellphone out of my hand to unplug for a few days (though that has happened a few times since).

Finally on Thursday, Aug. 8, we decided to surface and go to the lodge nearby for dinner and a game of pool. As we were playing pool, a TV played in the background, but we paid little attention. Until we heard John Chancellor say something about the “Ford administration.” (Mimi recalls that she heard Chancellor and that I slammed my pool cue on the table, saying something unkind about Nixon, after she told me. The pool-cue memory is probably accurate, but I’m not sure you can trust all her details 40 years later.)

I took it very personally that Tricky Dick had resigned when I wasn’t even looking. We, of course, scrambled to catch up, buying the Minneapolis Tribune (above) and Duluth Herald (below). Hard to believe this was 40 years ago, but we just celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary, of course.

Duluth News-Tribune, Aug. 9, 1974

When we got back to Iowa, I was pleased to find that my parents had saved a copy of the Des Moines Register for me:

Des Moines Register, Aug. 9, 2014

Observations on those 40-year-old front pages:

Damn, 8-column pages were huge!

Headlines

The Tribune’s banner headline, “President resigns,” is weaker than the Des Moines and Duluth headline, “NIXON RESIGNS,” both because the Trib used the title, rather than the name, and because the Register and News-Tribune used all-caps.

I wondered first whether the Tribune was the old afternoon paper, which would have had second crack at the story (but would not likely have been delivered to northern Minnesota, where we were honeymooning). But I quickly confirmed my memory that the Tribune was Minneapolis’ morning paper and the Star was the evening paper. (They merged in 1982, becoming the Star Tribune.) I can see a “President resigns” headline in an evening paper if the morning paper had “Nixon resigns.” But I can’t understand why you’d go that way with the morning headline.

The Tribune and the Register gave the whole front page over to the resignation, while Duluth had two local stories and an international wire story on the cover. Bad call by Duluth. I don’t care if your emphasis is local news. When a story dominates conversation and attention the way this one did in every community, give it the attention it deserves, the full front page. The Tribune apparently bumped from the cover that day’s installment of a series on juvenile justice, which had to settle for a reefer to the story on Page 13A.

Washington bureaus

One thing that stands out today about those Minneapolis and Des Moines front pages is the number of staff Washington correspondents covering the story: Jim Risser, George Anthan and Richard Wilson for the Register and Frank Wright and Finlay Lewis for the Tribune. I joined the Register a little over three years later. Wilson, who started the Register’s Washington Bureau in 1933 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1954, had retired in 1970 but still wrote a syndicated column. His 1974 byline on that historic day identified him as a Register Washington correspondent. I’m presuming that he could contribute when he felt like it and who wouldn’t feel like it on that day? Wilson’s column ran on the editorial page and he also wrote an analysis for Page One.

Jim and George were in the Register’s Washington bureau for my whole first hitch with the Register, 1977 to 1985 (Jim left the same day I did in ’85 to lead the Knight Fellowship program at Stanford). I remember at least three other Washington correspondents at that time, plus columnist Donald Kaul, who worked out of the Washington Bureau. I don’t think they all worked there at the same time, but I think it’s safe to say we had at least five people in the Washington Bureau for most, if not all, of my first hitch at the Register. It might have been more, especially if you counted Wilson, in 1974.

When I worked at the Register, we had a close (but sometimes competitive) relationship with the Star and Tribune. The Des Moines and Minneapolis newspapers were owned by different branches of the Cowles family and were close but competitive like family members are. The Minneapolis Washington Bureau was bigger than the Des Moines bureau (or so we heard frequently in Des Moines). I’m not sure about the Minneapolis staffing, but no one covered the White House regularly for the Register (they primarily covered agriculture and the Iowa congressional delegation). But our people were credentialed and jumped in to cover big stories. And this was one of the biggest.

The Register’s Washington bureau dwindled over the years and finally was folded into the Gannett Washington bureau. The Star Tribune has only one Washington correspondent, Jim Spencer.

Photos

The Register used file mugs of both the incoming and outgoing presidents. The Tribune used a photo of Nixon giving his resignation speech on television and a photo of Ford speaking earlier in the day. Both were better choices than the News-Tribune’s local photo of local people watching the announcement on televisions in a department store. The only images of Nixon on the front page were tiny talking heads on the TVs. The local photo would have been fine below the fold (there is no art below the fold, and, as I’ve already noted, local stories that didn’t belong). That “NIXON RESIGNS” headline demanded a Nixon photo.

The only whole paper that I saved was the Register, and it has a full page of Nixon photos inside and a half-page of Ford pictures, all from the archives. The only fresh photo the Register had of either man was a back-page official White House picture of Nixon hugging his daughter, Julie Eisenhower, after telling the family of his decision.

The famous photo of Nixon waving as he boarded the helicopter to leave the White House didn’t come until the next day.

My favorite art was not a photo, but Frank Miller cartoons through the years, a half-page display of eight cartoons on Page 7 and then two more — a fresh one and a 12-year-old cartoon that was timely again — on Page 10 with the text of Nixon’s resignation speech. Frank was a great cartoonist and Nixon gave him a lot of material.

Leads

Jim Risser had the best lead of the three people writing the lead stories, straightforward and clear, just 14 words. That’s not surprising. Jim, a two-time Pulitzer winner, needed less editing than any reporter I ever edited. He shared the byline here with George Anthan, a great reporter. But I’m sure that was Jim’s lead:

Wright’s lead for the Tribune was more labored. While I prefer Risser’s simple lead, I’m OK with the last part here, noting how quickly Nixon’s presidency changed directions. But the “irresistible blight” was overwriting and ignored how long Nixon did resist the blight.

William Bloom of the Ridder News Service, the wire service for Ridder-owned papers, couldn’t choose which of two points to feature in the lead from Nixon’s speech. So he chose both. Bad choice.

Especially when writing leads, more is not better. Jim’s lead at 14 words was stronger than Wright’s at 28 or Broom’s at 26. I’m guilty of writing long leads sometimes, too. I rewrote the lead on this post after writing this section. It’s easier to spot the too-long lead by someone else.

Local stories

The Tribune had the strongest front-page local story, a Robert Franklin interview with a Twin Cities Watergate figure, Kenneth Dahlberg. If you’ve read the book or watched the movie “All the President’s Men,” you may remember that Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were trying to find out why a $25,000 cashier’s check from him ended up in the bank account of Bernard Barker, one of the Watergate burglars. Dahlberg was a Nixon fund-raiser. Woodward (played by Robert Redford in the movie), called Dahlberg and asked him about the check. Dahlberg said he handed the money over to Maurice Stans (former Commerce Secretary, who was finance chairman of Nixon’s re-election effort). Dahlberg told Woodward/Redford, “I’ve just been through a terrible ordeal! My neighbor’s wife has been kidnapped!” (which was true).

Dahlberg also came up in the “smoking gun” tape. White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, told Nixon about the Dahlberg check and Nixon asked, “Who in the hell is Ken Dahlberg?”

That was a great local angle to pursue for the Tribune and a worthy front-page story. I love this quote in the Franklin story, explaining why Dahlberg worked for Nixon’s re-election: “I kind of had the idea, right or wrong, that if McGovern was president I might see what’s his name — William Kunstler — as attorney general and Jane Fonda as secretary of state.” (Conservatives trying to scare each other about liberals is not a new feature in American politics.)

The local story in the News-Tribune is just dreadful. It carries no byline so I can’t blame the writer by name. It may be the worst “man-in-the-street” story ever written in reaction to a historic event. The first 13 paragraphs quote a guy who would vote for Nixon again. I’m not saying that guy shouldn’t be in the story, but to give him more than half the story before the jump was nuts. A reaction story should convey a variety of views, not give one person that much space. If he was representative of most of the reaction, which I doubt, it’s OK to lead with him. But move on to someone else. Kenneth Dahlberg is worth several quotes (he got eight from the Tribune). This 21-year-old student got seven quotes. Atrocious news judgment by the reporter and the editors.

And the student was the only person named in the story. Other people quoted are “one downtown shopper,” “a dental assistant,” “a saleslady,” “another shopper” and so on. A similar story didn’t quote anyone by name. A local reaction story needs names. This story shouldn’t have been published, much less on the front page.

We sometimes romanticize the good, old days of newspapers, especially now when the whole industry seems endangered. And this was a great time for journalism, when the Washington Post helped bring down a corrupt president. But when you take a close look at old newspapers, you find yourself cringing pretty often, too.

If the journalists responsible for this were identified, I’d Google them to try to contact them and get some reaction. If you know someone from the News-Tribune at the time, please tell them I’d welcome a response, if they were involved or can shed some light.

The Register handled its local stories just right. None was good enough to merit the front page, so the editors didn’t force a local story on Page One (though a brief noted that Ford would be visiting the next month). Cover stories are all on important topics: A look at Ford’s record from Congressional Quarterly (the same story was on the Tribune front page); a wire news story on Ford’s press conference after Nixon’s speech (I’ll bet photos from that press conference ran in metro editions of both the Register and Tribune; the events unfolded right on deadline for the early editions of both papers that I got); a wire story with Special Watergate Prosecutor Leon Jaworski saying he had no immunity agreement with Nixon.

The local stories inside were good, though, and the bylines brought back a lot of memories: Excellent journalists I worked with for many years:

• Gene Raffensperger wrote a story on Nixon’s time stationed in Ottumwa, Iowa, in the Navy for eight months during World War II. (Yeah, I know, a navy station in Iowa.) Raff was a Register legend who served as city editor and sports editor. But he was best known for his quest as a reporter to reach every county courthouse in Iowa. But a mere toe-touch in the courthouse would not be enough. Raff’s ambition was to use the restroom facilities in every courthouse in Iowa, which has 99 counties. A colleague developed a map to chart Raff’s quest. I believe he retired without reaching his goal, but he certainly entertained us along the way.
• Jerry Szumski wrote a sidebar, with remembrances from Ottumwa neighbors and an image from the 1943 Ottumwa city directory, recording Richard and Pat Nixon as residents (she was a teller at Union Bank and Trust). I was Jerry’s editor a few years later and played softball with him for several years. We’re Facebook friends today.
• Chuck Offenburger, who hired me to my first journalism job at the Evening Sentinel in Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1971 and moved to the Register the next year, wrote a story for Page 12 about the reaction in the little town of Henderson, Iowa. I’m pleased to report that Chuck quoted people by name. Chuck was named the Register’s “Iowa Boy” reporter a few years later and became one of the most beloved and recognized people in Iowa. He’s now an Internet entrepreneur and we remain friends. He invited Mimi and me to participate (and we did) at a Writers’ Jubilee for last year’s Shenfest back in Shenandoah.

An unnecessary “keeper” typo

Sometimes the big typos will sneak by copy editors who catch every stray comma in the body type. This front page was displayed for decades in the elevator lobby on the fourth floor of the Register’s old downtown Des Moines building. I don’t think I ever passed it without a smile about the “specal section” promo. I didn’t smile smugly, but with that-could-have-been-me sympathy for whatever copy editor(s) wrote the reefer and proofed the front page. Journalists know when we are working on historic front pages that will be “keepers,” stored away for decades as I’ve done with these. We want everything to be perfect. And when an error happens in big type, it stands out for decades as a reminder of our imperfection. We had no spellcheck back then, just sharp-eyed editors. And even sharp-eyed editors let one slip past now and then. (BTW, I just rechecked my headline for this post, in case anyone checks it in 10 years. And Mimi caught several of my typos.)

What’s especially unfortunate is that it wasn’t really a special section. In newspaper jargon, a section comes off the press folded all together, separate from the rest of the paper. But the extra coverage of the Nixon resignation was inside the A section. And it wasn’t just six pages. The back 10 pages of the 14-page A section were dedicated to Nixon-Ford coverage.

Other Nixon-resignation front pages?

Did you save a Nixon-resignation front page? I welcome you to share it here, with or without your commentary.

Update:

David Lewis commented below and I asked him to share photos, so he emailed them with this further comment:

In the summer of ’74 at the Register, I was on the “corporate staff” at the Register, along with Jim Hopson and Charlie Edwards. We analyzed and managed various projects for the top execs (like I headed up the conversion in classified to a front-end system that allowed us to take ads on computers!). I knew Norm Rosenberg well, and on the 9^th, I persuaded him to let me have a couple of the lead stereo plates. I think each side of the cylinder plate weighs around 70#. But when put together, they make somewhat of a circle and inspire interesting conversations with a plant between them.

No journalist of our era could ever forget the coverage and impact of Nixon and Watergate on our lives.

Oh, as you can see, I’m still enjoying the business. (I used to refer to my job as being in the “newspaper business,” but like the term instead that I am in the “content engagement business.”)

David A. Lewis,

Group Publisher, Wick Communications

David Lewis’ plate of the Nixon-resignation front page.

David Lewis’ framed copy of the Register’s front page.

 

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Remembering the death of the Kansas City Times

I was present for the deaths of two newspapers: The Des Moines Tribune in 1982 and the Kansas City Times 24 years ago today.

The first time I was an editor at the surviving paper, the Des Moines Register. It was rough watching our sister paper die and it was rougher watching 50-plus journalists on both staffs lose their jobs. But it was unquestionably better, if you kept your job, to work for the surviving paper.

In Kansas City, the death was shared between the two staffs. The evening paper was dying, but that was the Star. And the name of the surviving paper was the Star, so the Kansas City Times was dying, too.

The company pretended that both papers would live on somehow in the new morning Star. The final edition of the Times didn’t even merit an above-the-fold mention. The story is at the bottom of the page, with the bullshit headline: “Death of a newspaper? No, a grand rebirth”:

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Historic front page: ‘AFL Comes Of Age As Jets Upset Colts’

Most of the historic front pages my father saved from the 1960s were weighty matters of the world: Vietnam, assassinations, elections, protests. And then there was Super Bowl III.

When the New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts, Dad knew that paper was a keeper. This was the game that made the Super Bowl the Super Bowl. (In fact, neither of the Page One headlines in this Jan. 13, 1969, front page used the term, which wasn’t yet in wide usage.) Dad knew it was big and tucked the paper away for posterity.

I don’t write about this today to suck up to my boss, Jim Brady, who was a toddler during Super Bowl III but followed his father’s loyalty and became a lifelong Jets fan. My father wasn’t a Jets fan, but cheered for them that day and predicted their victory.

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LBJ’s death pushed Roe vs. Wade aside on the front page

Two big stories happened 41 years ago today. One would affect the nation’s politics for decades to come. But it didn’t lead the front page of the next day’s Omaha World-Herald (or very many morning newspapers, I suspect).

Note the Roe vs. Wade story squeezed under a two-column headline off to the left, getting a tiny fraction of the space devoted to the death of former President Lyndon B. Johnson.

I’d be interested to know how many morning newspapers made a similar call that day. The story by Eileen Wirth (now chair of the Creighton University Journalism Department) says the initial reaction in Nebraska was a promise to keep their abortion laws as strict as the Supreme Court ruling allowed. (I’ll send Eileen a link to the story and invite her to add any memories of that story and that paper.)

Update: See Eileen’s response toward the end of this post.

But I doubt any of her sources or the editors who downplayed the story had any notion that we’d still be fighting about Roe vs. Wade in our fifth decade after that ruling.

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Historic front pages: Hostage release eclipsed Reagan inauguration

I had fun reviewing the front pages my father saved from the Kennedy assassination. So I’ve decided to make a look back at historic (or just interesting) front pages an occasional feature of this blog.

Since this is Jan. 20, I have to remember the day a bigger story pushed a presidential inauguration to secondary status: Jan. 20, 1981. Ronald Reagan taking the oath of office was a huge deal, but after 444 days of captivity in Tehran, the release of American hostages from Iran was bigger.

Of course, the capture of the hostages and Jimmy Carter‘s failure in attempts to free them by a military surprise rescue mission or by diplomacy was a key reason Reagan was taking his first oath as president rather than Carter taking his second. (Soaring prices and interest rates were other reasons, but the hostage crisis was the biggest humiliation and failure of the Carter presidency.)

I worked at the Des Moines Register at the time, and the Register and our sister afternoon paper, the Des Moines Tribune, worked frantically to cover the varying developments over the last days of the Carter presidency and the first day of the Reagan presidency.

The stories and pictures of both events came from the wire services, but this was a local story, too: One of the hostages, Kathryn Koob, was a native of Jesup, Iowa, and both papers had covered her captivity intensely for more than a year. And, of course, one of the thrills of working on a newspaper is putting together a historic paper, whether the story comes from your staff or not. The local staff writes the headlines, edits the stories and lays out the whole paper, including that historic front page.

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Kennedy assassination front pages: A close look 50 years later

I am under no illusion that my thoughts or memories of the Kennedy assassination are any more insightful than all the others you’ve already read and heard for the last month or so.

But I do think the front pages my father saved from November 1963 are pretty interesting.

We lived in Sunset, Utah, at the time. I was a fourth-grader at Doxey Elementary School. My father saved the front page above from the evening edition of the Ogden Standard-Examiner, the daily paper delivered to our home. It apparently started Dad (and then me) on a couple lifetimes of saving historic front pages. This is the oldest of dozens of papers Dad saved over the next 15 years before his death. As the journalist in the family, I got his collection and added dozens (maybe hundreds) more.

Take a look at the front page above. Kennedy was shot at 12:30 a.m. p.m. Central time, 11:30 a.m., right on (or perhaps after) deadline for an evening paper. Clearly they just had enough time and material for one wire story (from UPI) and a file mug shot of the president. There isn’t even a wire photo from Dallas.

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Lessons from the life and death (30 years ago) of the Des Moines Tribune

I learned a lot when the Des Moines Tribune died 30 years ago. The last edition of the Trib published Sept. 25, 1982, but that followed a summer filled with lessons (some of which took some time to sink in).

A little background before I review the lessons: I started working at the Des Moines Register in 1977. The Register, distributed each morning in each of Iowa’s 99 counties, covered the whole state. The afternoon Tribune covered central Iowa.

We competed feistily in a few areas such as Iowa politics, state government and Des Moines news, but it wasn’t exactly a fair competition: The Register had a larger staff and a national reputation. Even though the Tribune had several outstanding journalists who measured up with the best anywhere, the Register simply had more firepower. It also wasn’t a genuine competition: However fiercely we competed as journalists, we were owned by the same company. Whatever profits we made helped the same bottom line and whatever resources we wasted hurt the same bottom line.

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RIP Neil Armstrong, star of the first big story of my news career

My first job in the news business was as a paperboy (I don’t remember any girls or adults carrying papers then) for the Columbus Citizen-Journal from 1968 to 1970. As I dreamed of someday being one of those journalists telling those historic stories on the front page each day, Neil Armstrong was my biggest story.

It was a newsy time with lots of stories about Vietnam, civil rights, LBJ, Richard Nixon, political conventions and the USS Pueblo. But Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the moon with Buzz Aldrin was the story that riveted my attention. (I started carrying the paper after the two assassinations of 1968: Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.)

Space exploration was the continuing story of my childhood: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard being the first to fly in 1961, John Glenn orbiting the earth Friendship 7 in 1962, Ed White making the first  space walk in 1965, the fire that killed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chafee in 1967, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders reading from Genesis aboard Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968 as they circled the moon. I watched them with fascination on TV and read about them in the newspaper.

Once I got my paper route, I would read the paper at about 4:30 a.m., before I hopped on my bike to deliver the papers. If a space flight was approaching or under way, that would be the first story I would read.

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The Cedar Rapids flood: Hard to believe it was four years ago

The Gazette’s double-truck front page from June 13, 2008

Wow, I didn’t think this date would sneak past me, but it did. Not until Chuck Offenburger tweeted did I realize that this was the fourth anniversary of the Cedar Rapids flood:

@stevebuttry Where were you 4 years ago today? Just heard the anniversary mentioned on Iowa Public Radio News and thought of you.

— Chuck Offenburger (@chuckoburger) June 13, 2012

I’m not sure whether I’m amazed that it’s already been four years or that it’s only been four years. But it doesn’t seem like four years ago.

Maybe next year I’ll anticipate the anniversary and write something more thoughtful. But here are some quick reflections:

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A salute to the Times-Picayune: I hope they again provide an example for journalism

I couldn’t comment right away on this week’s announcement that the New Orleans Times-Picayune is cutting print frequency back from daily to three days a week.

In part I waited because I was finishing timely posts on copy editing and student media and doing some other work, but I could have set things aside to weigh in on the New Orleans news. I waited mostly because I wanted to reflect on this a while.

Some observations after thinking this through for a couple days:

1. The New Orleans Times-Picayune will always hold a special spot among journalism heroes because of its staff’s performance in covering Hurricane Katrina.
2. I have a personal fondness for the Times-Picayune journalists, recalling their support for my staff in Cedar Rapids when we experienced and covered our flood of 2008.
3. I always ache when a newsroom staff is cut, and this is a severe cut, following earlier severe cuts.
4. Advance Publications deserves praise for continuing its commitment to the New Orleans community during and after Katrina.
5. Most newspapers’ future probably is not daily. When a newspaper cuts its frequency, I hope it is not just cutting back, but making the right steps to build a digital future.

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