AXED!

The call came in the late afternoon. It was an executive with the Times-Picayune. I knew who he was and he knew who I was, but when I worked there for nine years I do not think he ever made eye contact with me or said hello. But hey, that’s corporateland, right? I was a lowly staff writer and he was…well an exec. But yesterday his voice on the phone was almost friendly. See, I left the Times-Picayune in 2002, but since the 1990s I have written a weekly column for the paper on job searching and career changing. When I left my job, I continued to produce the weekly column.

"Paul, this is (name of exec). I'm sure you have heard about all the chnages that are taking place at the newspaper. I'm calling to let you know that your services won't be needed any longer after September 30."
 
The exec was clearly reading from a prepared script that was being used to inform all “occasional” employees of impending editorial doom. He went on to read to me that a member of management would contact me in the coming weeks to let me know if there might be an opportunity for me to apply for a position with the newly formed media company that will include the Times-Picayune under its corporate umbrella.

 Since I left the paper 10 years ago, I have worked full time for a university. So I won’t be applying for a new position with the company, (but I must admit I will miss the monthly check for my column). And I must also admit that I really enjoyed doing this column. It was this column that later led to my working as a contributing writer for Monster.com, the premiere online site for job searching. It was also this column that landed me several speaking engagements at local schools and other organizations. The exposure was good, and the subject matter was something that really interests me. To be frank, I’m disappointed that I was so unceremoniously AXED – and on the phone! My loss pales in comparison to the 200 employees who lost their full livelihood this week. If you are not in New Orleans, here is a recap of what happened this week from WWL-TV:
 I worked at the paper full time for nine years, and I left just as digital media was in its infancy. While I was there I observed a company that was over-staffed and unusually generous in its compensation packages. I saw an upper management team comprised mostly of older white males who were largely uncommunicative with the labor force. I knew people who had worked there for upwards of 40 years, who had probably outlived their self-motivational shelf lives, but who were hanging on until retirement. It was an old-world type of business, one in which the business model really hadn’t changed in at least a half century or more. Even then I wondered how long it could carry on that way. In annual meetings the publisher would tell us how rapidly costs were rising, that even the cost of newsprint had doubled in just 10 years. In response to the astronomical costs of production, the paper was reduced in physical size multiple times during my tenure. Major advertisers dropped out one by one by one. Meanwhile, the 24-hour news cycle had reached a saturation point with the general public, and newspapers were obsolescent.

Still, a more forward-thinking organization than the Times-Picayune would have actively studied the future of media and slowly, gradually altered its business model to accommodate the evolving tastes of the public. They did not do that. Instead, they waited until 2012 to abruptly and recklessly change the business model in a way that callously eliminated some of the best of the best staffers and angered the reading public in an unprecedented fashion. When I found out who some of the individuals are that are being eliminated, I was dumbfounded. And I wasn’t alone. The collective voice of New Orleanians is fairly screaming in discontent today. Note to the newly-established “Nola Media Group”: In making the radical alterations to your enterprise, you neglected one very important group – the consumers of your product. Big mistake.

 In the years to come, I believe media organizations will point to the Times-Picayune as the model of what not to do in transitioning to the digital age in media. The elimination of hundreds of employees in one day is not only bad business, but seriously inhumane. In the end, it is the humanity, or lack thereof, that will stay in the memories of the readers. It is the insensitive manner in which the owners treated the bright minds that produced the product for so many years that will shape the public image of the new company. It bears mentioning that those who were eliminated are required to work until September 30 in order to collect their full severance. How would you feel going to work every day for the next three months knowing that you are considered fully dispensable and unnecessary to the organization?

 Shame on you, Times-Picayune, or Nola Media Group or whatever you like to be called these days. Shame. You did a very bad thing here and believe me, New Orleans will long remember it.

DISASTER! Brought to you by Digital Media

Anybody who was exiled to another part of the country after Katrina will tell you how hungry they were for information. We were glued to our TVs, just as we had been earlier for 9/11. At the time, television was still the main source. But the Katrina refugees will also tell you how inaccurate and limited TV coverage was. During the most dynamic days of the Katrina crisis, CNN, for example, showed the same footage of water overtaking the exact same levee hour after hour. This time, during the Gulf Oil spill, digital media has come of age, and interestingly enough, we seem to be far better informed than we were five years ago.

So, why then does it seem we are having difficulty getting the full story about this calamity? It is probably because digital media allows anybody and everybody to weigh in on anything and everything. So, as the media consumer, you have to decide who to pay attention to. If you pay attention to syndicated columnist Froma Harrop,you might see Louisiana as inept and unable to handle its own business. In a recent column, Harrop wrote:

“The federal government should take over Louisiana…But whatever the cause, every calamity that befalls Louisiana is made worse by its corrupt civic culture. A protectorate could provide the structure of governance its people need.”

A protectorate? Gosh Froma, should we put a Federal protectorate in place in every city that has civic corruption? How about New York’s legendary police department? Oh, and did you read a total of 52 human beings were shot in the city of Chicago last weekend? And Detroit…well, don’t get me started…they need a Big Brother, too, wouldn’t you say?

Wait – it gets worse:

“Much of southern Louisiana is under sea level and periodically floods. No sane person would build in these low-lying areas were it not for the federal taxpayer, who subsidizes flood coverage where private insurers would never tread.”

Harrop, who is stationed in New York, has most likely never seen Louisiana, and has no concept of the culture and determination of its people. The same thing happened to Louisiana during Katrina, when legislators and talking heads discussed the folly of rebuilding New Orleans. Here in Louisiana, we just shake our heads and ignore them. So, Froma, you’ve been placed on “ignore.”

As if uninformed media types were not problematic enough, the voices are now rising up in Washington, as well. Consider Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK, below-right), who can’t figure out why Louisiana has not spent all of its recovery money from Katrina yet. Said Coburn,

“…serious questions need to be asked about whether this money was appropriately designated as emergency funding."

Coburn, and others in Washington who have not really experienced or seen the devastation in Louisiana, somehow feel that in five years a state’s entire infrastructure can be rebuilt. He evidently did not believe the experts who forcasted it would take at least a full decade to restore Louisiana. Add to that a fully incompetent Mayor in New Orleans (Ray Nagin) and a governor who was in way over her head when Katrina hit, and you’ve got $3 billion left unspent in Federal dollars. Tom, come see us in Louisiana and we will fill you in on how this stuff works. Until then, reserve comment please.

Between massive media and uninformed elected officials, Louisiana is getting an undeserved bad rap. The most extreme statements and stories are the ones that make headlines. Take Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi(below,left), our next door neighbor, who complained this way:

“ The biggest negative impact for us has been the news coverage. There has been no distinction between Grand Isle and Venice and the places in Louisiana that we feel so terrible for that have had oil washing up on 'em.”

It is old school reasoning at its worst. It bases itself on this maxim: Keep us out of the headlines and we’ll handle our own business. Barbour, 63, mostly allocates his time these days to promoting anti-obesity campaigns with Michelle Obama, and supporting other Southern state governors who like to celebrate “Confederate History Month.”

Barbour rose to the occasion during Katrina, but his short memory apparently keeps him from recognizing that millions of Federal dollars may not have reached Mississippi, had it not been for competent media coverage of Mississippi, where 231 people died during and after the storm and thousands were rendered homeless. Louisiana was the focus at the time. Media broadened the view to include Mississippi.

Interestingly enough, the public seems quite tuned into the media right now. PEW research conducted polls that indicated, “Fully 67% say they have a lot (20%) or some trust (47%) in information on the oil leak coming from news organizations. That compares with 51% who have at least some trust in information from the federal government and 39% in information from BP.” (Ahem…are you listening Haley and Tom??)

The trust level among the public has much to do with the emergence of digital media. If you want to see how effective new media is in covering this disaster, take a look at the Washington Post’s “Time & Space” tool.

After you have spent some time there, check out “Information is Beautiful,” in which the spill is put in perspective. It is here you will learn things such as the fact that the spill encompasses an area that is bigger than the entire country of Jamaica.

For an interactive map that allows you to see the various effects of the spill, check out the Louisiana Bucket Brigade's topically divided tool. Here you can see focused impact graphics. For example, if you would like to see the exact areas where residents’ livelihoods are threatened, you can zoom in on just that. Or, perhaps you would like to see just the affected areas where oil has been seen on shore so far. Further, you can zero in on the areas where birds or marine wildlife are threatened.

These are just a few examples, but the result is this: Traditional media is working hard to convey information to you about the spill. But digital media is allowing you to truly learn about it through interactive visual representations. So, what would you rather? Pundits or pictures? Politicians with misguided agendas, or graphics that you control in your quest to understand the biggest environmental disaster in our history? What the talking heads (syndicated or elected) fail to recognize is that we citizens now have resources we did not have in the past. We can click and drag and link to our heart’s content. And sometimes we can even find the factual errors in columns like…say…Froma Harrop’s. (Froma, for the record, Katrina’s devastation was mostly caused by ill-conceived levees that were poorly constructed. So to call it an “act of nature” is incorrect. Oh, and about Texas being able to “move beyond its dependence on oil?” Where do you think the money came from for Texas to industrially diversify? BIG OIL!)

The moral of this story is clear: Traditional media is doing a respectable job of reporting and chronicling this spill. But even print media's greatest proponents know it is almost impossible to compete with technology that allows us to watch the disaster unfold -- on our cell phones. It is history in the making, just as Vietnam was notably the first televised war. Digital media is making it possible for you to see it in real time with your own eyes, and to monitor its progression. We need this confluence of information. Now, get going…you’ve got a lot of surfing to do.

DECEPTION: The Lessons of John Edwards

When I think of John Edwards, I am reminded of a 1967 film, “Guide for the Married Man.” In one scene, Ed (played by Walter Matthau) tells Paul (played by Robert Morse) that if his wife ever accuses him of cheating, “Deny, deny, deny.” Denial and deception are what John Edwards is all about. This week’s John Edwards headline (there’s something new every week about this guy) is that Elizabeth met the lovechild, and finally decided she had had enough. They’re now legally separated.

This is one of the more extreme stories of our time. We’ve seen sleaze and/or really poor judgment before (Bill Clinton?), but the American public has not had the John Edwards experience until now. Edwards was running for President as Mr. America, when behind the scenes he referred to some of his constituents as “fat rednecks,” instructed an aide to “handle it” when he found out his mistress was pregnant, and later made a sex tape with her. All of this occurred just as Elizabeth Edwards was battling cancer. Somehow John Edwards convinced himself that we Americans would not see beyond the façade. We did. We do. He’s a low life.

What’s the lesson here? I think there are all kinds of messages that come through this story. For one thing, if you’re a high profile person today, and you consciously decide to do something stupid, the prolific nature of digital media is probably going to get you.The very media you depend on to market yourself to the country will be that which sends you into obscurity. This is just the story that media hungers for today. It has all of the ingredients: Politics, sex, tragedy, cheating, lying and deception. You could not make this up. Edwards underestimated the media, the risk he was taking and the collective wisdom of the American people.

But there are bigger lessons to be learned here for American voters. Edwards had the kind of movie star good looks and Clintonesque charisma that intoxicated voters. He preached a grass roots, populist-like agenda so appealing to middle America. He seemed to be ‘one of us,’ even though we knew of his $400 haircuts, 25,000-square-foot estate and multi-millionaire status. None of it mattered when we saw him announce his candidacy in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans outside of a house he was helping to restore from Hurricane Katrina. The lesson is age old: look beyond the obvious. What is behind the carefully coiffed and rehearsed image? As voters, we may have to demand a more intrusive investigation of our candidates. The new age debate about privacy may have to come to a halt at campaign time, and we may simply have to insist that we know more of a candidate’s personal life.

Had we done more digging, we would have uncovered the fact that Edwards was something of a high class ambulance chaser in his earlier life. He was a plaintiff’s attorney who represented a number of people who brought suits against doctors and hospitals after their children had been born with defects due to alleged mistakes made in the delivery room. Edwards made tens of millions of dollars with these cases, and legend has it that he was very dramatic in the courtroom. The story is told that in one of his closing arguments, he actually brought up the subject of his own son, who was killed in a car accident at age 16. There wasn’t a dry eye in the jury box. With his distinctive Southern accent and ability to deceive, Edwards was a powerhouse attorney, and one who collected one-third of each plaintiff’s favorable judgment. In some cases those judgments went as high as $25 million. You know that guy in your own community who goes on TV and says, “Hurt in a car accident? Get all you deserve and get it fast?” Essentially, that was John Edwards, and some of us might have cringed at his aggressive, manipulative courtroom tactics.

Had the media or even private citizens groups dug a bit deeper into Edwards’ personal life, we may have discovered the fact that Elizabeth Edwards was as ambitious as or more so than John. Now we know how badly she wanted to be First Lady. So badly that she stumped smilingly with Edwards on the campaign trail, never letting her image or her demeanor belie her rage about the affair she knew Edwards was having with Rielle Hunter. In the much ballyhooed, recently released book “Game Change,” authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann claim, “…that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.” Andrew Young, the aide who Edwards enlisted to pretend he was the father of Hunter’s child, paints a duplicitous picture of Elizabeth in his new book, “The Politician.” She comes off as temperamental, controlling and prone to histrionics. A recent piece in the New York Times seems to further that impression.

Does it matter to us, the voters, if Edwards cheats on his wife and lies about it, and that his wife is not what she seems? It does. We were supposed to have learned our lesson years ago from the Richard Nixon debacle. As it turns out, his own words revealed that he was racist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic. We needed to know that, but we didn’t until he was dead. These are not the John Kennedy days, when a Presidential candidate can carry on secret trysts with lots of women and the press knows about it, but does not report it. We’re in the digital age. The press owes us full disclosure, and deep investigation. And we owe ourselves the discipline to pay attention to a candidate’s behavior and character. Had the stars aligned themselves just a bit off center in 2008, John Edwards would be President of the United States right now, moral warts and all. Presumably his secret squeeze and love child would be safely ensconced in an undisclosed location. Elizabeth Edwards would likely be berating the White House staff, just as she reportedly did to her husband’s campaign staff. And who would suffer most for their personal indiscretions and personality flaws? That would be you and me.