The Times-Picayune in a Changing Media World

The Times-Picayune in a Changing Media World begins with a wonderful cover—a color photo of a bearded man reading a paper while next to him a young child is looking at her iPod screen. The book appears in only four chapters—a quick history of the traditional printed paper, its role in the 1960-61 school desegregation crisis in its home town of New Orleans, its first year of digital publication, and a content analysis of news before and after the decision was made to go to digital publication instead of paper (the latter appeared only three days a week as of 2012) . . . . [This] study sheds light on the universal question at newspapers these days—what works? * Communication Booknotes Quarterly *
Assembled by a commendable team of four media scholars, [The Times-Picayune in a Changing Media World:] The Transformation of an American Newspaper...is a worthwhile read. . . .Instead of attempting to fully analyze the newspaper’s transformation before completion, the authors offer generous helpings of the paper’s rich history and colorful descriptions of the unique public outcry that greeted The Picayune’s otherwise banal restructuring plans. The book’s highly technical 'content analysis' of news coverage—before and after the 'digital decision of 2012'...completes the book. * America: The Jesuit Review of Faith & Culture *
S.L. Alexander, Frank D. Durham, Alfred Lawrence Lorenz, and Vicki Mayer have written a breakthrough examination of the complex forces transforming newspapers in the twenty-first century. This rigorously researched book places the oft-cited economic collapse of many local newspapers into an insightful context of the simultaneous shifts occurring in news production, consumption, and distribution. Told through the story of the changes reshaping The Times-Picayune, this new book should be required reading for anyone interested in the future of journalism. -- John V. Pavlik, Rutgers University
This book traces the entire sweep of modern American journalism in the form of one of its grand newspapers, The Times-Picayune. It covers the days of the party press to the rise of professional journalism, the civil rights to the digital era. Along the way, the authors account for what we gained and what we lost when journalism emerged, and what we are losing today with its steady demise. -- David Ryfe, University of Iowa
The story of The Times-Picayune encapsulates 175 years of American newspapering, from the penny press to the Internet age. This book shows the central civic role of a paper that has survived war and occupation, plague and flood, but is now threatened by digital revolution. -- Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review