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Screen grab taken from NOLA.com

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You know, I’ve had my fun taking jabs at NOLA.com and their (lack of) diverse online content, but I must say they are doing a bang-up job covering all things Super Bowl so far. Well, at least I thought as much until I saw them use a four-month-old photo taken by Jonathan Bachman on their front page (thumbnail on the bottom left-hand corner). That is, how you say?, bullshit.

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Of course, upon further examination it becomes apparent that the photo they stole from us is really a screen grab from a Saints tribute video that stole the photo from us first. Yes, that totally absolves a major metropolitan newspaper’s Web site from running an unaccredited photo from a credentialed photographer on their front page. Totally.

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Screenshot lifted from WallStreetJournal.com

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I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the Wall Street Journals’ core readership is not made up of NFL football fans. Or, at least, not fans of teams that play in New York, Minnesota or Indianapolis. How else to explain this ridiculous Jason Gay column?

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May I root against the New Orleans Saints?

No, you may not. Rooting against the Saints is like rooting against Elin Nordegren. They’re the Sentimental Team of the Century; if Dick Enberg were calling the NFC championship game, he’d need a trailer truck of Kleenex. Even if you forget everything that New Orleans endured during Hurricane Katrina—and how could you?—they’re the Saints, the former Aints, one of the most hard-luck franchises in the history of hard luck. Not long ago, newborns came into the world in New Orleans hospitals with tiny grocery bags on their heads.

If the Saints win this weekend, we expect the Louisiana Superdome to levitate off the ground, stop at Parkway Bakery & Tavern for a roast beef po’boy and fly straight to Miami for the Super Bowl.

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Yes, the Saints are indeed a feel-good story (especially for every Who Dat in the country) and this franchise has come a long way since it genetically altered newborn babies some years ago (or that’s how the story tells it, anyway), but have the Saints really reached a point where non-Who Dats would be remiss to root against them? A little competition never hurt anybody.

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Oh, and I get that the point of this article is to be funny. But it’s not. Also, it begs the question: why is the Wall Street Journal trying to be funny at all? They don’t have a dedicated sports or comedy section (sports is found under Life&Style) and they cater to people looking for serious news. Don’t they have way more important things to write about?

Hey, did you say you were looking for a place to eat tonight? I know a place: it’s called Chili’s. Have you heard of it?

Don’t worry — this isn’t the kind of place where you need to dress fancy or anything like that. I’m pretty sure they don’t have a dress code. It’s totally casual. You can even bring the kids! They don’t even care.

It gets pretty crowded sometimes — no worries, though. If they don’t have a table available, they give you this cool thing that lights up when one is ready. That way, you can walk around the mall or go to Baskin Robbins and still be waiting for a table at the same time. It’s so awesome.

The service is really great, too. The waiters are so nice and friendly. Sometimes, they’ll even come and sit next to you at your table! Ordering from a menu at a restaurant can often be difficult and confusing, so it’s great to have someone there to “take care of you,” as they say at Chili’s.

It’s not expensive to eat there, either. They have this “2 for 20″ deal going on now where two people can eat a whole meal for only $20. You can also get unlimited chips and salsa, which is another great deal. The last time I went there, our waiter Mike even let us have two margaritas (except they call them `Ritas there) for the price of one! How nice of him. I can’t promise they’ll do that for you, though.

The food is really delicious, too. However my favorite appetizer, the Awesome Blossom, isn’t on the menu anymore. Mike told us that they took it off because it has too many calories. That’s a shame, because it was really delicious and unlike anything I’ve seen or tasted before.

All in all, Chili’s is a great dining experience that holds up against anything you’d find in New Orleans or Louisiana in general. You don’t believe me? Well, don’t take my word for it! The major daily newspaper for our state’s capital likes Chili’s, too! Click here to see what The Advocate has to say about it.

I admit it’s easy to lean on to the crutch of snark. But when asked by the New York Times to give some perspective to the last decade — well, 2005, to be specific — and share credits alongside several other writers of note, it’s best to leave the Katrina jokes at home.

Jonathan Safran Foer earned his Golden Boy badge last decade after two critically and commercially successful, if gimmicky, original works (Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), but he closed out 2009 with a puzzlingly self-important (and admittedly contradictory) bit of nonfiction (Eating Animals). As one of 10 contributers for the Times‘ “The Decade We Had,” Foer spins a post-modern review of 2005, giving equal weight to trivialities and tragedies — it’s a testament to the information age in which we live, where major headlines run alongside celebrity gossip and YouTube-able memes in mere seconds. Hurricane Katrina is the punchline in one paragraph:

Exactly two weeks after the July 7 bombings, terrorists again targeted London’s public transportation system. All four bombs failed to detonate. The following week, and within two days of each other, a plane crashed in Greece, killing 121, and in Venezuela, killing 160. The week after that, Fiji’s High Court ruled that the island’s sodomy law was unconstitutional, and a mandatory evacuation was ordered in New Orleans. Two months after that, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping officially announced the new and more accurate height of Mount Everest: 8,844.43 meters above sea level — 4.5 meters taller than Everest was thought to be in 1856. That original measurement was not shared with the public. The British surveyors added 61 centimeters to avoid the impression that an exact height of 29,000 feet (8,839.2) was nothing more than a rounded estimate.

I get it — as terrorism and government failure rock the globe, we’re still linking bullshit science news on our Facebook friends’ walls. I’m just not so sure America deserves anything less than a retrospective pummeling of our “mandatory evacuation” down here. Brad Richard of New Orleans agrees — the paper published his letter to the editor, writing “Katrina was the most important domestic story of 2005, and the story of its aftermath is far from over. Not to acknowledge this, and to make a long joke instead, strikes me as poor judgment on Mr. Foer’s part.”

While news readers steadily lose access to investigative journalism (writers with resources, time and money for quality reporting), The New York Times‘ “Toxic Waters” series offers just that. The ongoing series exposes the dangerous shortcomings of the Safe Drinking Water Act — a dinosaur of a health provision that overlooks thousands of contaminants in municipal water supplies.

The online version includes a resource pool (with help from the Environmental Working Group) for readers to see what conditions are like where they live. Of course, Louisiana’s information isn’t present — “Louisiana did not provide recent data to The Environmental Working Group,” the site says. Neither did Colorado, Georgia, Kansas or Mississippi. Another search on the EWG site by entering a New Orleans ZIP code produces this result, showing the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals’ failure to report its 2006-2007 information. Going through the department’s Web site, you’ll find that, hey, they’ve scheduled to do a water quality test after all: Tests at the Carrollton Waterworks plant begin… February 2010.

A quick check on the Environmental Protection Agency’s link to Louisiana water boards provides a dead link to New Orleans’ recent water quality reports, while those of Jefferson Parish are readily available. Backtrack to the Sewerage & Water Board’s main page, and there you’ll find the 2008 water quality report released in June.

The report found relatively safe levels of contaminants, but found that “some homes in New Orleans have elevated levels of lead in their tap water.” The number is fairly insignificant, though the Times as well as the feds recommend a good filter.

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I’m not sure what it is about perfectly excellent journalists producing questionable online videos, but NOLA.com seems like a breeding ground for it. Last week (and many before that, actually), it was the otherwise-commendable David Hammer’s Madden 10 highlights gracing the front page, and now we have Doug MacCash presenting us with Bill Harris a.k.a. “The Unknown Who Dat.“

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The video, which runs just under two minutes, shows Harris arriving…well, somewhere. Close inspection reveals that it’s Louis Armstrong airport, but the viewer not informed of this, nor why he or she should care that Harris is arriving. He shouts and people take pictures and he screams about the Saints and “waiting 43 years” for this and when it’s all over we know nothing more than the name of a loud, incoherent Saints fan. Somehow, the news hook is lost on me.

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A news hook, for the uninitiated, is what makes a story compelling or worthy for publication. I first learned of this concept on, and this is no joke, the Nickelodeon program “Nick News W5“. It simplified what all news should contain: a who, what, where, why, and when. Anyone who reads MacCash’s pieces in the Times-Picayune can tell he has a mastery for answering those five basic questions in every story, many times in compelling ways. “The Unknown Who Dat”, though, leaves many questions unanswered.

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Aside from his name, what do we know about him? Who is he? A Saints fan. OK, what makes him unique? He wears Saints apparel and waves a Saints blanket? Where is he coming? Where is he going now that he’s here? When did he get here? When did he first leave? Most importantly: Who the hell cares?

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Perhaps these are all to be answered by a companion article in Saturday morning’s paper. That’d be a clever device, though there’s no mention of that anywhere. The only apparent companion article is the one that runs to the left of the video on NOLA.com’s front page. The one about the old Miami Dolphins players not minding if the Colts or Saints have a perfect season (NOTE: Before I finished this post, the new lead article was this one about NFL Network and WGNO having extended pre-game broadcasts. No mention of the “Unknown Who Dat”). The one that has nothing to do with “The Unknown Who Dat” other than NOLA.com decided to run a picture of the man next to an article he has nothing to do with.

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Truly astounding journalism.

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Screengrab from NOLA.com at 5:00 p.m. Saturday

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So I head over to NOLA.com today to read up on Drew Brees being named King Bacchus (preemptive move to more easily turn Bacchus into a championship parade? I think so) and I come across another headline that catches my eye: “Madden 10: Turner burns the Saints again”. Curious, I click on the video and am treated, nay, exposed (like a flasher exposes people) to a silent, 14-second video of Michael Turner’s digital avatar burning the Saints defense in the video game “Madden 10″. I then find out that NOLA.com has been running these videos regularly this season.

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There are no words - but I’ll sure as hell try.

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What, exactly, is the NOLA.com/Times-Picayune thinking in this scenario? What service are they providing their readers by posting silent clips of video-game simulations that have no real context? The practice of having video games predicting the outcomes of real-life games is nothing new, but here NOLA.com went in another direction and decided that they would just show just one arbitrary highlight without showing the result.

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Now, I could go off the rails on how this can be interpreted as a pathetic ploy for NOLA.com to lure readers thinking they’ve found some sort of game highlight or even some sort of well-balanced analysis of upcoming Saints games. I could also rant about how this is yet another example of how traditional print media really still has no idea what it’s doing when it comes to providing fresh, original multi-media content on their Web sites.

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But I’m not going to do any of that. I’m just going to question the validity of a paid, professional journalist playing video games and presenting highlights of said games online as news. I’ll also question the editorial decision to post these videos on the FRONT PAGE of the Web site even though the 20 most recent videos posted have garnered a grand total of four comments and zero recommendations. Judging by how nearly every NOLA.com video has a different introduction (or none at all) it’s clear they have no apparent production standard for their videos. A major metropolitan news Web site should hold itself to a higher standard.

Editor & Publisher, the monthly trade magazine that’s covered the newspaper industry for 125 years, announced this morning that it’s shutting down operations by year’s end, according to its editor, Greg Mitchell.

E&P is the latest casualty in the troubled print media, which is ending 2009 with major hits. For a look at the carnage both national and local, check out our blog category The Media’s Lovely Corpse.

R.I.P., E&P.

Lolis Eric Elie, former Metro columnist and current reporter for The Times-Picayune, has joined the wave of employees who have chosen to take the paper’s buyout offer. Elie, who has worked at the T-P since 1995, will be leaving at the end of this week.

“I’m fading into the sunset,” he joked this morning. “And I’m taking a week or two off after that. But, really, it’s exciting. I’ve got a lot of things going on.”

Elie, a contributing writer for The Oxford American, says he plans to do more writing for that publication. He’s also a staff writer on Tremé, David Simon’s HBO series currently shooting in New Orleans. While a T-P columnist and reporter, Elie wrote Smokestack Lightning, a book about the culture and folkways of barbecuing, and last year was the co-producer of the critically acclaimed documentary Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans.

Elie’s departure is just the latest of several high-profile departures at the T-P this year, where employees have been taking early retirement and company-sponsored buyouts. The list of the departing and departed includes longtime fixtures David Cuthbert, Angus Lind, Susan Finch, Walt Philbin, James Gill, Chris Rose, Susan Larson, Millie Ball, Lynne Jensen, Brian Allee-Walsh, Valerie Faciane and Chris Bynum.

A noted political science professor at the University of Louisiana-Monroe — in the heart of U.S. Sen. David Vitter’s north Louisiana stronghold — has penned a scathing criticism of Vitter’s fast-and-loose treatment of the facts surrounding various issues (particularly health care reform) in his desperate attempt to win re-election after getting caught chasing whores (again).

Prof. Joshua Stockley of ULM is past president of the Louisiana Political Science Association. In a Nov. 14 op-ed for the Monroe News Star, he predicts that the 2010 Senate race between Vitter and Congressman Charlie Melancon will be “a knockdown, mud-slinging affair.” He goes on to note how Vitter has routinely distorted Melancon’s record on health care reform as well as the facts behind a pending climate-change bill.

“Whatever happened to campaigning honestly?

“Another story about Vitter caught my attention this week. Paul Anastas, a former White House environment director, was unanimously approved in July by a Senate committee to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development. However, Vitter placed a hold upon his nomination that will effectively prevent his nomination from being confirmed for several months.

“It turns out that the EPA has signaled plans to assess formaldehyde’s health effects and its concomitant usage in building materials and household products because studies have found a link between formaldehyde and cancer. An EPA under Anastas would likely restrict the use of formaldehyde in building materials, like the FEMA mobile homes that sickened thousands of Katrina evacuees.

“It turns out that Vitter has received $9,000 from Dow Chemical’s PAC, $5,000 from Monsanto’s PAC, $5,000 from ExxonMobil’s PAC, and $2,500 from the American Forest and Paper Association PAC. The American Forest and Paper Association is a member of the Formaldehyde Council; the other companies are known producers of formaldehyde.

“Money talks, cancer victims don’t.”

That a political science professor would put forth such analysis is not surprising. That it would appear in the daily newspaper in the middle of Vitter territory is surprising — and refreshing.