A brand new day in the newspaper world

Is the newspaper biz eating its own in this time of upheaval?

Well, take a look toward Ba-ton-Rouge. TheAdvocate is apparently not crying over the decision to scale back printing of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. The Baton Rouge daily plans to rework its front page giving New Orleans its own edition of the Advocate.

Plans to reduce printing of the once stalwart New Orleans daily from 7 days to 3 days has set off a lot of animosity toward the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications Inc., and the Advocate  has every intention of taking advantage of the big change in the Crescent City’s newspaper world. This includes placing staff back in NOLA, something that the Advocate has lacked there for almost three years. How many staff the paper intends to hire to populate a New Orleans bureau has not been made public.

Folks from off the street to the captains of New Orleans business have proposed everything from selling the T-P to buyers such as Warren Buffett to roughing up the fancy-pants owners of the newspaper. Well, I just made that latter part up but I can see someone in New Orleans thinking about it. New Awlens folk be laid back but don’t piss them off.

So, we wait and see if the Baton Rouge paper becomes THE daily news for New Orleans.

Speaking of Buffett, the media arm of his Berkshire Hathaway company has now assumed ownership of the Waco Tribune-Herald. Only one noticeable change on its Web page that I spotted, which was the orange strip under the Wacotrib.com brand was solid rather than noting that it was a “Robinson Media” product. The front page sometimes appears on Newseum’s “Today’s Front Pages” but wasn’t there today. I don’t know if the flag still contains “In God We Trust” that the former owners, the rich family Robinson, had installed there.

BH Media people said they don’t intend to make any big changes. Yet, editor-publisher Donnis Baggett left the paper before the paper changed hands. It will be interesting to see whether a new E-P takes over or whether a new publisher and editor is named. I guess I will stop there before I go into questionable territory. It’s an inside joke that’s not very funny. So sorry.