Louisiana Voice

John Georges may be about to strike again and that would be good news for the people of northwest Louisiana who still like the feel of a real newspaper in their hands.

You see, The Shreveport Times, for whom I wrote in my formative and naïve early journalism career, once boasted a daily circulation of somewhere north of 100,000 and a Sunday circulation of something like 150,000.

What’s more, The Times, under the leadership of Executive Editor Raymond McDaniel, boasted an investigative team – it was called the Enterprise Team – headed by Marsha Shuler that was second to none in Louisiana – including the Baton Rouge Advocate and State-Times or the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

There was also the Shreveport Journal, the afternoon competition to The Times that, at its peak had a daily circulation of 40,000 (it did not publish on Sundays). Its circulation shrunk to about 16,000 before finally doing what all afternoon papers were doing – calling it quits in March 1991.

Meanwhile, The Times was sold to Gannett, which publishes USA Today (along with the Monroe Morning World and News-Star), for a whopping $54.4 million and the budget cuts began almost immediately. Newsrooms across the board at Gannett publications, The Times included, were sacrificed on the altar of bottom lines. In the five-year period from 2012 to 2016 saw The Times circulation shrink even further each year, from 36,000 daily and 47,500 Sundays to 25,300 daily and a paltry 31,700 Sundays.

As newsrooms were shrunken, so were the circulation figures. At The Times, for the five-year period from 2012-2016, circulation dropped from 35,962 for daily and 47,490 for Sunday in 2012 to 25,324 daily and 31,702 Sunday. Its news content became a joke with only a lone general assignment reporter, one entertainment, and a single sports reporter.

For those of us who grew up in the business, it’s sad to see an industry you love taken down this way, leaving readers dependent on internet news that’s unreliable at best and pure garbage at worse.

Sportswriter Nico Van Thyn, a native of Shreveport and former writer for both the Journal and The Times (retired from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram), wrote about the DEARTH OF NEWSPAPER REPORTING way back in 2017. Little has changed since his critique of the abysmal decline in good reporting six years ago, except if anything, it’s gotten worse. The Times today more resembles a high school publication than the professional newspaper of its prime when owned by the Ewing family.

And so it was, according to LSU-Shreveport associate professor Jeff Sadow (with whom I seldom agree on any political subject) WROTE RECENTLY for The Hayride blog that Advocate publisher John Georges, who has already invaded other Louisiana markets in head-to-head competition with existing papers (New Orleans, Lafayette, Lake Charles), has come sniffing around Shreveport with an eye to encroaching on that market as well.

That would be a decided advantage for the news vacuum that exists in the Caddo-Bossier area. A Baton Rouge Advocate retiree related the story of visiting a friend in Shreveport where she learned of a pending tax election scheduled for the following Saturday. Curious, she called The Times and asked a reporter to explain what the tax would be for. The reporter, incredulously, didn’t even know about the election.

The call was terminated but a few minutes later, the reporter called back to ask if she could interview the Baton Rouge resident about the election in Shreveport.

The downside to a Shreveport Advocate, of course, would be the concentration of so much influence in the hands of one individual. Georges’ publications already shy away from hard reporting on the relationship between LSU and gambling interests.

Of course, Georges’ ties to organized gambling have been KNOWN for several years and DOCUMENTED again as recently as last December.

That should be a red flag for journalism purists, but on balance, the advantage of a new kid on the news reporting block outweighs the disadvantages.