By Chris Daly
The latest American newspaper to take a step back from daily print publication is the venerable Times-Picayune of New Orleans. Today’s New York Times reports that the 175-year-old newspaper is scaling back to printing three days a week. By doing so, the managers hope to capture the bulk of the advertising revenue they get from display ads in the print version, while reducing some of the “legacy” costs that go along with printing: the extra salaries for full-time printers and drivers; the cost of the newsprint paper; the overhead, etc.
The good news: the folks at the Times-Picayune have taken the first steps along the narrow, rickety, wobbly, rope bridge to the digital future. The Times-Picayune is not going out of business. Far from it. The cutback in printing is part of a larger strategy to save the paper, not destroy it. Just about every newspaper in the country is somewhere along that same timeline, whether they recognize it or not. They are all groping their way into the future — without a map (such as the map of New Orleans below, which was created by the Times-Picayune).
Bonus question: What does picayune mean? (answer below)
Picayune
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the obsolete Spanish coin. For other uses, see Picayune (disambiguation).A picayune was a Spanish coin, worth half a real. Its name derives from the French picaillon, which is itself from the Provençal picaioun, meaning “small coin.” By extension, picayune can mean “trivial” or “of little value.”
Aside from being used in Spanish territories, the picayune and other Spanish currency was used throughout colonial America. Spanish dollars were made legal tender in the United States by an act on February 9, 1793 until it was demonetized on February 21, 1857.[1] The coin’s name first appeared in Florida and Louisiana where its value was worth approximately six and a quarter cents, and whose name was sometimes used in place of the U.S. nickel.[2][3]
A daily newspaper published in the New Orleans market, the Times-Picayune, is named after the picayune.[4]
[edit]References
Wikisource has the text of the1911 Encyclopædia Britannicaarticle Picayune.
Look up picayune in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
- ^ Spanish Silver: General Introduction Coin and Currency Collections – University of Notre Dame, Retrieved on April 7, 2008
- ^ Picayune, Probert Encyclopedia, Retrieved on April 10, 2008
- ^ Picayune, World Wide Words, Retrieved on April 8, 2008
- ^ McLeary, Paul (2005-09-12). “The Times-Picayune: How They Did It.”. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 2010-07-27.
Filed under: Journalism, journalism history Tagged: journalism, New Orleans, newspapers, printing, Times-Picayune
