Adrastos, Current Affairs, New Orleans

Taking it to the TP Street

TJ-Hooker

TP Street or TJ Hooker: you decide.

I thought that the fools who run the Picayune had abandoned their idiotic and confusing plan to publish a tabloid called TP Street. I was wrong.Here’s the latest as reported by Kevin Allman over at the Gambit blog:

The Times-Picayune will launch its new tabloid print edition,
TP Street, next Monday, according to a memo this evening from NOLA Media
Group Vice President of Content Jim Amoss.

After going to thrice-weekly publication last fall as part of its
move to a “digital newsroom” (and later adding a Monday sports tabloid
during New Orleans Saints football season and a Saturday “bulldog”
edition in the subsequent months), NOLA Media Group announced in April
it would return to printing a news product on the days that The Times-Picayune was not printed.

That tabloid print product, which was named “TP Street,” was largely
greeted with dismay in the newsroom and confusion and derision
elsewhere, due in part to publisher Ricky Mathews’ spin on the tabloid.
Mathews had called TP Street “the latest milestone in our evolution as a
multimedia news organization,” when it was clear that the move was a
retreat to daily printing.

Adding to the confusion was NOLA Media Group’s statement that TP
Street was a response to subscribers’ demand for a paper — but TP Street
would not be delivered to subscribers, but available only on
news racks for an additional price. (The final version of TP Street will
carry The Times-Picayune‘s familiar “flag,” or front-page logo.)

That non-delivery plan, Gambit learned several weeks ago, has also been reconsidered as NOLA Media Group pondered the possibility of returning to daily delivery of a daily print product with the name Times-Picayune,
effectively positioning the physical paper where it was a year ago
before the “digital transition” — albeit a physical paper with a
severely damaged brand and new competition in the form of The Advocate‘s New Orleans edition.

I don’t have much to add other than the whole concept makes me think of Bill Shatner as cheesy teevee cop TJ Hooker, and of this hit song by a band with one of the silliest names ever:

3 thoughts on “Taking it to the TP Street”

  1. Whilst serving in the Army in Germany in the early 70s (I was one of the last draftees), I listened to an Armed Forces Radio Network interview of The Doobie Brothers.
    Q: How did the band get such a strange name?
    A. Uh. Um. I, uh, I think most of your listeners know what a “doobie” is.

  2. Two competing newspapers in NOLA would not be a bad thing, but the TP brand will have some catching up to do. My question: Who would want to work with owners and managers who are so stupid and unresponsive to those who are the source of their profits? Geez Louise.

  3. I have been a subscriber to The Times Picayune for forty years. What a disappointment to find out that although a daily edition is now available,
    but I will have to go out to a newsstand to purchase a paper to which I am
    already a subscriber. What is this??
    What happened to loyalty to the readers? I am now paying the same amount for
    a three-times-a week paper that I was paying for daily delivery. Now I have
    the honor to not only continue to pay this amount, but also to purchase it
    again on the street. What is the Times Picayune thinking?

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