Southern Bookman

Louisiana's Advocate swallows larger Times-Picayune

I was astounded that the Baton Rouge Advocate has bought out the New Orleans Times-Picayune and its NOLA web site.

Advocate owners and local entrepreneurs John and Dathel Georges announced Thursday that they are purchasing the Picayune from the much larger Newhouse Corp. The purchase deal came just a few weeks after the Baton Rouge Advocate won a Pulitzer Prize for a series that brought an end to Louisiana allowing guilty verdicts on 10-2 jury votes.

The Advocate moved into New Orleans in 2012 when the Newhouse Corp. decided to cut back the Picayune's print publication and concentrate on its digital edition.

The Georges' New Orleans Advocate moved into the space left by the Picayune, publishing a print newspaper seven days a week and establishing one of the few competitive newspaper markets in the United States. The New Orleans Advocate established a local office at a historic building on stately St. Charles Avenue.

That proved a winning strategy in the long run. Despite its poverty and low literacy rate, New Orleans preferred reading a daily newspaper rather than getting its news via computer or smart phone.

Beginning in June, a new newspaper bearing both the Picayune and Advocate names will publish a print edition seven days a week, a rare win in recent years for print journalism over the digital model.

While retreating from New Orleans, Newhouse will apparently continue its digital-first strategy in markets across the United States, including Birmingham, Ala.

The Advocate company also will take over the NOLA web site, which will combine with the Advocate's. The Advocate recently switched to a paid subscription model for its web site.

As a Louisiana native and alum of the Baton Rouge Advocate, I'll miss the spirited competition between the two media companies. The Georgeses promised to hire Picayune staffers and continue to run T-P features and comics. I hope that includes the excellent Picayune/NOLA team that covers Louisiana's coastal erosion and other environmental problems. Reporting on LSU sports and state government likely will grow less competitive.

The Georgeses are also strong-arming the competition in the Acadiana capital of Lafayette. According to the Advocate article announcing the purchase of the New Orleans newspaper, the Georges power couple recently doubled the staff of the Lafayette Advocate by raiding staffers from the venerable Lafayette Advertiser.

While the Georgeses' commitment to print newspapers is laudable, they apparently want to own the sole newspaper covering South Louisiana. The disappearance of independent local voices like the Picayune and Advertiser won't be healthy for the state.

 

 

Congratulations to Baton Rouge Advocate for Pulitzer Prize

I experienced an outpouring of pride at the Baton Rouge Advocate's Pulitzer Prize.

The newspaper where I began my career nearly 50 years ago received the local reporting award for a five-part series investigating Lousiana's unusual law that allowed juries to convict defendants on less than unanimous verdicts. An accused person could be convicted even if two jurors voted for acquittal.

Analyzing 3,000 court cases, the newspaper found that the system rooted in the Jim Crow era resulted in a 30 percent higher conviction rate for black defendants. The white supremacists who ruled Louisiana placed the jury procedure in the state constitution to strengthen "Anglo-Saxon" control, the newspaper found. 

Showing a local newspaper's power to bring positive change, the series resulted in legislation and overwhelming voter support of a constitutional amendment to require unanimous jury verdicts. The Advocate's editorial department was also cited as a Pulitzer finalist.

For years owned by the Manship family, which also published the late afternoon newspaper the State Times, which I grew up reading, the Advocate was always a good local newspaper without national ambitions. It extensively covered the Louisiana Legislature, LSU sports and local government.

The Pulitzer is affirmation of an unsually vibrant newspaper climate in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, which have grown closer together over the years. Bought by Dathel and John Georges in 2013, the Advocate began competing in New Orleans against the Times Picayune when it cut back on weekly print publication and moved to a more digital operation.

For a native Louisianian like me still fascinated by the state's politics and culture, the Advocate and Times Picayune are essential reading each day. While much has been made about the Internet killing newspapers, it allows long-distance access to local papers.

Along with coverage of LSU sports, I enjoy the daily columns of the Advocate's Stephanie Grace and Lanny Keller. Keller was cited along with the nationally known writer Danny Heitman and editor Peter Kovacs for the newspaper's editorial support of its news series.

My pride at the Advocate's outstanding work is matched by gratitude at my native state making a rare stand for justice. Louisiana has an appalling history of racial inequality in its political and judicial system. Following the Advocate's leadership, Louisiana did the right thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary Indiana's "Vile Days" gives essential portrait of New York City's 1980s art scene

Gary Indiana's "Vile Days:  The Village Voice Art Columns 1985-1988" chronicles that crucial time in New York City when a burst of artistic creativity ended with domination by wealth and commercial power.

Edited by Bruce Hainley, who resurrected the columns from blurry microfilm and overcame Indiana's initial resistance to the project, "Vile Days" testifies that newspaper writing can stand as enduring literature.

Published by Semiotext(e), the book is artistically beautiful, with high-quality paper and the late Peter Hujar's endearing cover portrait, "Gary Indiana Veiled."

Along with Indiana's weekly reviews of the era's art exhibits, many in Indiana's home turf of the Lower East Side but ranging throughout the city, the book includes essays, book reviews, travel pieces, interviews with artists and journalistic accounts of concerts and art auctions.

While Indiana feared his work too transitory and that republishing it would be a fruitless exercise in '80s nostslgia, his aesthetic and cultural imagination give weight to the reviews. Even the most ephemeral command attention.

The brief period that Indiana served as the Village Voice's art critic followed the AIDS virus' devastation of a brilliant artistic generation.

As Indiana reflects in an introductory essay for the book, "while much neo-east village art was tepid, a fair amount of the earlier East Village's more risk-taking chutzpah had started losing steam circa 1982. We should never forget that vast numbers of New York's best people - Peter Hujar, Flaming Creatures director Jack Smith, Cookie Mueller, Robert Mapplethorpe, painter Nicholas Moufarrege - died fast in the AIDS epidemic or a few years into it."

Indiana shows how art grew safer after that creative outpouring. Well-known artists took fewer chances in hopes of appealing to wealthy buyers for whom art was a commodity. Along with the rich's expropriation of art, gentrification changed once marginal neighborhoods that had been revitalized by artists. The era of money and tawdry celebrity spawned Donald Trump, briefly glimpsed in all his vulgarity.

Championing women artists like Cindy Sherman and more experimental work, Indiana delights in puncturing the reputations of mainstream favorities like Julian Schnabel. He deftly skewers the New Yorker's Janet Malcolm for an ill-informed profile of Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy.

Other standouts among a wealth of brilliant pieces are an appreciation of a concert by Marianne Faithful, a classic New Journalistic account of a posthumous auction of Andy Warhol's possessions, and a takedown of the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Indiana also shows a hostility toward the increasingly cliched Neo-Expressionism.

While appreciating mainstream painters like William Wegman, Indiana shows a preference for performance pieces, video, collage and found-object installations and sculpture. Indiana's enthusiasm overcomes suspicions about such work's artistic value.

Every page glimmers with beautiful writing. Along with his thought-provoking, elliptical judgments, Indiana displays a shimmering irony. He's one of those essential writers whom I will keep reading, anticipating discovering his novels, plays, essays and memoirs.

To conclude, here's the opening to Indiana's 2004 autobiographical essay "One Brief, Scuzzy Moment," which opens the book:

"I lived in the East Village when it still had the narcoleptic desuetude of downtown Detroit, and was usually included with today's Loisaida under the less cozy moniker "the Lower East Side." (It had, of course, been called the East Village in the more interesting part of the sixties, but went back to LES in the grim seventies.) So, it's a little thorny for me to flip back a quarter-century to the three years I spent as an art critic at the Village Voice in the mid-eighties, or revisit the "East Village Art Scene" they loosely coincided with - a scene that, for one brief, improbable moment, made the neighborhood the West Chelsea of its day,  and forever banished the area's Detroit-like qualities.

"The Reagan era scene itself ignored much of the far more interesting East Village art world that had come before it. Until hordes of trust-fund bohemians and storefront art salesmen invaded to give the nabe an entrepreneurial makeover - and lay the groundwork for an explosion in real-estate values that eventually wrecked its wealth of rent-stablized apartments - the East Village was an ideal refuge for any artist born without a silver spoon. Contrary to its wild and crazy latecomers, they didn't make a rose garden from the Atacama Desert. There was plenty of life in the place before anyone thought to squeeze cash from it."

 

 

 

Black hole mission a model for effort required to fight climate change

That black hole image was great.

Now, scientists need to get busy to find a solution to global warming.

As the Event Horizon mission revealed the dark orb's photo from 55 million light years away,  the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that Alaska's March temperatures averaged 20 degrees higher than normal.

A high of 42 degees Farenheit, 30 degrees above the usual, was recorded on March 30 in Kotzebue, according to The New York Times.

Alaska's spring heat wave was the result of the Bering Sea losing its ice and the jet stream shifting to the south, the Times said, adding that the Arctic is experiencing more extreme temperature increases than any other region. That will bring more melting, and an escalating chain of climate change reactions.

If urgent action is not taken soon, climate change will reach its own event horizon, or point of no return.

The black hole image from the Messier 87 galaxy in the Virgo constellation emerged from a global network of telescopes, according to media reports. A young graduate student, Katie Bouman,  played a leading role in a team developing an algorithm to link the telescope data.

Such a concentrated global effort will be required to prevent the worst devastation from climate change.

But the Trump administration's climate change denial, support of fossil fuel industries and budget cuts to agencies like NOAA threaten humanity's future.

A sustained political, economic and scientific mobilization against climate change is needed or else our world will turn as desolate as a black hole swirling in space.

 

 

U.S. reviewers underwhelmed by Sally Rooney's "Normal People"

Is the Sally Rooney boom already receding?

In recent weeks, the Irish writer acclaimed as the first great millennial novelist for her debut, "Conversations With Friends," has received less than laudatory U.S. reviews for her second book, "Normal People."

In the New York Review of Books, Madeleine Schwartz discounted both novels as run-of-the-mill coming of age sagas. Setting the stage for later U.S. reviews, Schwartz saw Rooney's language as pedestrian, and her characters as cliched.

The New York Times assigned "Normal People" to the middle-aged Dwight Garner. Showing his age and gender, Garner like Schwartz found "Normal People" quite ordinary. At the close, he sought to hedge his criticism with the reviewer's old "she's got promise" dodge. 

The review didn't even appear on the Arts section's front page. It'll be interesting to see if the Sunday New York Times Book Review runs its "Normal People" review on the cover, or if it's buried inside.

Lauren Oyler, whose main literary achievement is ghost-writing a memoir and an essay collection attributed to an Obama aide, continued the Rooney deflation in Book Forum. Oyler sees Rooney as just another pop writer rather than the latest literary master.

Rooney's sudden fame is reminiscent of that achieved by F. Scott Fitzgerald 100 years ago. With "This Side of Paradise," and his Jazz Age stories, Fitzgerald was heralded as the voice of his generation. But his reputation waned, even as he was writing the novels later recognized as masterpieces, "The Great Gatsby" and "Tender Is the Night."

With the rise of TVs and movies, novels are no longer the dominant cultural force in America. Many of Rooney's generation will render their judgment of her work when her books are made into films.

 

Baseball box scores herald a new season

I wasn't that excited at the start of baseball. But the opening day box scores made me happy.

Good for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to still print the box scores, which old baseball and newspaper fans like me grew up perusing.  

Here's a few things I learned from around the major leagues:

When you give up four home runs and seven earned runs in 3.2 innings, as the Diamondbacks' Zack Greinier did against the Dodgers, your ERA is 17.18.

The battling Gurriel brothers of Cuba took the field for another year, Lourdes Jr. in Toronto, Yuli in Houston.

Marwin Gonzales has landed with the Twins.

Zach deGrom, who recently signed an extension with the Mets, finished the day with an 0.00 era as the Metropolitans beat the Nationals and Max Scherzer, who did record 12 strikeouts. The Astros' Justin Verlander and the Phils' Aaron Nola, the pride of Baton Rouge's Catholic High, also had good first-day outings.

The Red Sox's Chris Sale bombed.

Buster Posey still plays for the Giants. Albert Pujols still plays for the Angels. Miguel Cabrera still plays for the Tigers.  Martin Prado still plays for the Marlins.

Machado's with the Padres, Puig with the Reds.

The Phils have Andrew McCutcheon, as well as Bryce Harper. Harper struck out twice, but McCutcheon homered.

The Yanks, Dodgers, Astros, Cubs and Brewers look good. The Mariners won too, but....

It was good to see Brian McCann in the Braves lineup. With Ronald Acuna and Freddie Freeman, the Braves might be OK. Or not.

Shortstop Carlos Correa was missing from the Astros lineup. But George Springer, Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman were still there. Springer and Altuve homered.

While I'm thankful at the box scores' return, the complete list of batting averages and pitching records that used to run in the Sunday paper is long gone. The AJC still runs the top 10 in batting averages, home runs, RBI, era and wins, but I used to love seeing how every hitter and pitcher in the National and American Leagues was doing.

Guess I'll have to follow the box scores.

 

 

 

Christian Lorentzen takes temperature of book reviewing in "age of algorithm"

Literary critic Christian Lorentzen in a long article in Harper's magazine diagnoses the decline of book reviewing in the United States.

Lorentzen's "The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm" cites a dismaying personal example: He's lost his contract to write book reviews for New York magazine.

That's sad news for admirers of the magazine, whose longtime editor Adam Moss recently left. While New York is expanding book coverage, Lorentzen claims that he was told that book reviews no longer serve the magazine's editorial purpose.

Instead, the magazine has moved to author-friendly profiles and Q and A features, such as an interview with Irish author Sally Rooney on the magazine's web site in which she gushes about her favorite books. With Lorentzen gone, the magazine apparently will avoid a serious review of Rooney's new novel, "Normal People."

"The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm" indicts a similar philosophy at The New York Times, whose Sunday Book Review is a weekly debacle. Lorentzen slams the Times Book Review as anti-intellectual, citing its feel-good features such as "By the Book," in which celebrities and authors chatter about their favorite books and answer such trivial questions as which famous writers they would invite to a dinner party. As Lorentzen points out, the feature often serves as a publicity vehicle for a new book by the subject.

The Times' brief book reviews also lack intellectual depth, mostly handing out fulsome praise and lacking sustained analysis. While the newspaper's daily reviewers give books more in-depth consideration, with analysis of weaknesses, they too write with an overall rosy tone. I never thought I'd miss Michiko Kakutani's critic-speak, but at least she was unafraid of skewering an author's work.

Lorentzen's piece is a 21st century echo of Elizabeth Hardwick's 1950s diatribe in Harper's that found the same shortcomings in book reviews of the time. Harper's reprints Hardwick's fusilade, which served as the manifesto for the New York Review of Books, which she co-founded in the early 1960s.

While the Times book review is now mainly a publicity vehicle for publishers, serious reviews remain in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic and the London Review of Books, where I first encountered Lorentzen's work. I expect his reviews to continue in the LRB and elsewhere.

Unmentioned by Lorentzen is one of the best book review sections to have appeared in recent years, The Wall Street Journal's Saturday Review section. While WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch is often blasted for journalistic horrors such as Fox News, he has broadened the WSJ's cultural landsape. The Saturday WSJ gives the thoughtful, analytical and balanced reviews that the Times Sunday Review lacks. Under Murdoch, the Times Literary Supplement has sustained its quality.

On a hopeful local note, I have noticed a small resurgence in Sunday book reviews at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The AJC no longer employs a staff book critic as in the past, but the newspaper's freelance and wire reviews give attention to books often neglected by the national media. Unlike the Times, the AJC's reviewers plumb deeply into a book's strengths and weaknesses.

Lorentzen ties the decline of book reviewing, if it really exists, to the rise of television as a serious cultural force. Book lovers will enjoy his puncturing of the overinflated reputation of "The Sopranos" and other so-called "peak TV" shows.

The book review demise is also linked to the frequently pronounced death of the novel. Such panic-laced post mortems are often given by novelists themselves, such as the late Philip Roth, who seemed to connect the novel's critical condition to his retirement.

While studies show a decline in reading, sure to burgeon as video streaming eats up more and more leisure times, books keep appearing, and finding readers.

 

 

 

 

 

Apple streams forward into brave new world

Steven Spielberg, Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey lauded Apple's new video streaming venture at a lavish corporate event Monday.

Oprah's appearance spurred a frenzied response, Witherspoon is a major Hollywood figure as an actor and producer, and Spielberg remains a box-office hit-maker. But aren't they a bit long in the tooth as celebrities?

Not that I know much about who appeals to the new generation of teens and young adults, but it seems Apple could have brought out a few younger stars to introduce its grand streaming plan to rival NetFlix, AmazonPrime and the soon arriving Disney.  The new Apple operation is seeking to draw the rising generation already bored with the Iphone and happy to spend hours video binging.

Apple will introduce original shows and offerings from HBO and Showtime beginning this fall. Wall Street Journal and New York Times reports implied that Apple will take more of a targeted HBO-Showtime approach, rather than Netflix's swollen flood of offerings. As The New York Times report noted, Apple is coming late into the streaming game, although it has been trying to develop Apple TV for years.

The Times and Wall Street Journal reports were unclear whether the Apple's TV subscription service will be available to cable holdouts, or limited to cable-cutting  services like Roku. What will matter in the end is which shows will generate media and audience buzz. With streaming options multiplying beyond the point of coherence, a show will find it difficult to break out of the pack. In the content-hungry streaming universe, old Hollywood westerns and 1960s TV shows stay evergreen. Unfortunately, classic foreign films are disappearing.

Interesting that an HBO show like "Barry," beginning its second season Sunday, still receives strong critical attention. And the buzz is building for the last season of "Game of Thrones," beginning next month. Will those be HBO's last triumphs?

Meanwhile, Apple also introduced its Apple + news app, which will give access to 300 magazines and The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Toronto Star for a monthly fee of $9.99, beginning Tuesday. The Toronto Star!

The WSJ in a print article trumpeted its participation, taking pains to assure readers that the Apple partnership won't bring competition with its own online subscription site, which costs $39.99 a month. WSJ execs said business news will be limited for Apple subscribers, although they will be able to search for financial articles not given prominent display.

WSJ execs hinted that the Apple deal might be the start of further ventures between the companies, curious since Rupert Murdoch's Fox recently sold off its movie and TV production operation just as Apple is getting into the business. And one wonders how the deal will affect the WSJ's objectivity in writing news stories about Apple.

The Los Angeles Times also sees the Apple site as beneficial to building online subscriptions. The New York Times and Washington Post, which have seen a huge spike in online subscriptions during the Trump reich, have refused to join the Apple venture.

The plan is tempting, but who needs 300 magazines? And reading a long New Yorker article on an Iphone or MacBook screen holds little appeal. An Ipad might be OK.

As N + 1 movie critic A.S. Hamah says in the title of his brilliant new collection of reviews, "The Earth Dies Streaming." (Look for a later Southern Bookman review).

With my head streaming, I think I'll go read a good book.

 

 

Wall Street Journal joins Apple news-site venture

Apple has signed The Wall Street Journal to its subscription news service, the first major news company to join.

The New York Times, which has so far resisted Apple's entreaties, reported the news in a brief article Thursday.

Along with the Times, The Washington Post has also declined to place articles on the Apple app. The Times and Post are balking at Apple's offer of a 50-50 split in revenues, the article said. The newspaper companies want a 70 percent share.

The Times and Post also want a bigger slice of subscriber data such as credit card information and purchasing preferences. The article doesn't mention why the Times and Post would be permitted to receive such personal information when privacy concerns have been raised over similar practices by Facebook and Google.

Subscribers will pay $10 a month for the Apple news site, receiving a choice of articles from different publications. Apple says its app will generate more traffic for media companies. The WSJ's participation is intriguing, since newspaper owner Rupert Murdoch has completed a deal with Disney, which will compete with Apple in video streaming and TV and movie production.

Like the Times and Post, the WSJ has an online paywall for those not subscribing to its print newspaper. Whether Apple subscribers will get the full range of WSJ articles remained unclear.

An increase in WSJ readership and ad revenue from the Apple deal might come at the expense of the Times and Post, forcing them to join the Apple site. Or maybe the Times and Post will enter into a partnership to form their own news site, perhaps associated with Amazon, owned by Post publisher Jeff Bezos. The media/digital dance swirls on.

 

 

Gwinnett shows its colors, rejects MARTA expansion

Gwinnett civic leaders thought Tuesday night's MARTA election would be close, but county voters once again soundly rejected the transit system's expansion into Georgia's second-most populated county.

“I was surprised,” Gwinnett Commission Chair Charlotte Nash said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I thought it would be closer. I thought that if it failed it would be closer to 50-50.”

Like the Georgia Democratic Party, MARTA supporters in Gwinnett counted on younger, more diverse voters. But once again, the millennials' turnout fell behind that of older residents determined to fight off another progressive invasion.

The conservative opposition proved better organized and more strategic than the county's business and political community. According to reports, robocalls claimed that MARTA was planning to build hundreds of apartments, which presumably would be filled with young socialistic Democratic voters. Older county residents' anti-tax attitudes also made a difference, according to statements made to the AJC by those who voted "no."

With such sophisticated opposition, transit supporters might wonder whether the Koch brothers were involved, as they were in defeating transit elections in Nashville. The Gwinnett referendum added to a disturbing trend of voters ignoring the ravages of climate change. Voters in environmental Democratic presidential candidate Jay Inslee's Washington state rejected a carbon tax proposal, even after devastating fires in California.

Long a bastion of suburbanites who associate Atlanta and MARTA with blacks and crime, Gwinnett has now rejected MARTA expansion three times, the last before Tuesday night in 1990. The county's population has tripled since then, with an influx of younger Democratic voters who have shaken the GOP's longtime control of the county.

But as with statewide Democratic candidates, MARTA will wait for a promised golden future. According to political observers, the county will vote again on transit in 2020.

Georgia's Democratic Party, as led by defeated gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, still receiving national media acclaim, place their hopes on younger ethnic voters moving into the state. But the rush of new residents to metro Atlanta has slowed, according to a recent AJC article. And young voters don't participate in elections as older generations do.

Young voters consider the voting process too cumbersome, beginning with registration. Standing in line, showing an i.d., and making election decisions is too difficult when they can be posting photos on Instagram. Perhaps the tide will turn if smartphone voting is ever allowed. Grim Republicans like Mitch McConnell and the GOP-packed courts will only shake their heads at that.  A big negative is that such a system likely would be even more vulnerable to Russian manipulation.

Gwinnett's threatened GOP leaders moved the MARTA referendum from the November general election ballot to Tuesday's stand-alone vote to suppress turnout. A total of 91,921 voters participated, a 17 percent turnout. The referendum lost by 7,951 votes, according to media reports.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your SUVs. The county's 900,000 residents will continue to use their cars and trucks to go to work, to shop, to have fun. They rejected a 1-cent sales tax for MARTA so that they can sit in traffic.