As if the Times-Pic needed to remind New Orleanians that its absentee owners have brought in an outsider to gut their hometown paper, Publisher Ricky Mathews leads with it. And where he directly addresses the protests over going to a three-newspaper-a-week schedule, he doesn’t bother to mention the much more serious complaints about the paper firing half its newsroom (with nebulous and not exactly confidence-inspiring promises to add about half of the headcount back, presumably with titles like “buzz reporter”) and trying to shift readers to a website that everybody thinks is awful.
