(Credit: Ted Jackson)

@johnmcquaid Says it all: photo of Times-Picayune staff meeting yesterday, by Ted Jackson bit.ly/LuVONW

Letter to Romenesko

From BRUCE VAIL: Photo of the Times-Pic staff getting the bad news is grim indeed.

It also struck me how white this crowd is. I thought NO was a city with a lot of black and brown people?

Another example that America’s old-fashioned newsrooms never took the diversity idea seriously (except to bring in a lot of lower paid females).

[Anyone from the Times-Picayune care to share some newsroom diversity stats?]

-- Mobile Press-Register

I asked Press-Register editor Mike Marshall if he wanted to explain/defend his paper’s widely criticized headline. He wrote:

I helped write that headline and guess I got caught up in the moment. The reduction of publication days to three per week had been the storyline all day Thursday. I wanted to make sure our readers got that we are also building a digital future. In my mind, that’s the big story.

COMMENTARY ON YESTERDAY’S NEWS ABOUT NEWHOUSE’S NEWSPAPERS:
* “This is a forced march to digital,” says Ken Doctor (New York Times)
* Times-Picayune changes bring strong reactions from subscribers, others (NOLA.com)
* Dear Mr. Newhouse: New Orleans needs a daily Times-Picayune (Capital New York)
* Rieder: If ever a city needed a vibrant journalistic presence, it’s New Orleans (AJR)
* The whole state of Louisiana is corrupt; why would it need journalists? (Philly.com)
* Some public officials tweeted support for Times-Picayune, others were silent (Gambit)
* A digital medium can’t do what the Times-Pic did after the flood (Chicago Reader)
* Editor at Buffett-owned paper on Times-Picayune and boss’s memo (Buffalo News)
* Times-Pic and the completely logical collapse of the newspaper industry (Gawker)

(h/t Matt DiRienzo)

“2 Shits, 14 Faceoff Wins”

* Earlier: “Series Shits to Boston” hed gets into paper (JimRomenesko.com)

In mid-March, Albany police raided a spa owned by the wife of Albany Times Union investigations editor J. Robert Port, who had been directing his paper’s coverage of the sheriff’s department’s use of criminal forfeiture funds, including purchasing take-home vehicles for investigators. (The unit was eventually shut down by the sheriff.)

J. Robert Port

Port tells the New York Times he believes his wife’s business was targeted in retaliation for those stories.

“Obviously I have pissed some people off enough to the point where they would send in jackbooted thug police officers to do an anal search on someone I believe they thought was my wife,” says the investigations editor. “I am enraged, I am angry.”

The Times Union didn’t run a story about the March 15 raid until Thursday night, when it knew the New York Times was about to publish its piece.

Editor Rex Smith explains why: “Applying the same standards to our staff and family as we would to anybody else, we concluded that it would be inappropriate” to report the raid. “We think there’s a broader story here. We don’t have all the facts we need to publish the full story yet and I suspect The New York Times doesn’t, either.”

The sheriff now says he’s going to conduct an investigation of the raid.

* Albany Times Union journalist alleges police retaliation (New York Times)
* Police raid draws internal review (Albany Times Union)