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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?

According to Da Paper this morning, Tim Tebow (maybe you’ve heard of him? young fella from Florida?) makes that dirty bum Drew Brees look like the demonchild of Chris Brown and Roman Polanski.

“The dashing face of college football is the anti-Tiger Woods,” the T-P tells us, and “Sometimes, it seems that there is a ‘Tim Tebow,’ who exists apart from the person — Mother Teresa in eye black with a devastating jump pass.”

You want more? They got more (except, oddly enough, the famous story about Tebow’s 2008 spring break trip, which he spent circumsizing orphans in the Philippines while wearing Gator-colored Crocs).

Here’s a list of encomiums from other sportswriters and coaches (”I’d never bet against Tim Tebow. He’s a winner, period. That guy’s a stud. S-T-U-D. Stud.” — unsurprisingly, Jon Gruden), as well as a list of the Bible verses Tebow wears on his eyeblack and what they mean (yes, seriously).

For Valor in Sports Reporting Pander, we hereby present today’s T-P sports section with the Holy Tebow Grilled Cheese Sandwich:

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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.

Is it the full moon? Stress? Too much newsroom coffee?

• PUNCHOUT!: Manuel Roig-Franzia, the former T-P reporter now at The Washington Post, got into a fistfight with veteran Post editor Henry Allen in the newsroom on Friday. Seems Allen threw the first punch after Roig-Franzia called him a…well, it starts with ‘C’ and has 10 letters.

• “WE DEEPLY REGRET”: The Philadelphia Inquirer boo-boos:

A Philadelphia newspaper has apologized to readers for mistakenly running an ad congratulating the Philadelphia Phillies on winning back-to-back World Series titles.

The Yankees held a commanding 3-1 lead in the championship as of Monday, the day the ad was printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The three-quarter-page Macy’s ad is on the back of the front section and features a T-shirt with the Phillies logo, the commissioner’s trophy and the phrase “Back To Back World Series Champions.”

Sadly, the paper doesn’t apologize to its readers and let it go, but grovels to its advertiser:

Macy’s is a great corporate citizen, supporter of this region and our sports teams. We apologize for this error and any inconvenience this caused.

• “KATRINA SHORTHAND”: New Orleans CityBusiness runs a bizarre editorial taking on ACOE gadly Sandy Rosenthal and her Levees.org group, which is currently watchdogging the press on the difference between Hurricane Katrina and the federal floods:

It is unfortunate that Rosenthal has chosen to take her worthwhile battle to a front where there seems to be little resistance to her cause. It’s also a borderline insult to local newspaper readers and TV news viewers, implying that they require explicit and redundant detail to understand where the finger of blame for Katrina flood damage needs to be pointed.

It is especially unfortunate that she takes umbrage with the work of journalists, many of them having braved the conditions of post-Katrina New Orleans to provide an accurate account of the events that transpired in the wake of the federal government’s shortcomings.

But what’s most unfortunate was that the City Council thought it a worthwhile use of their time and effort to chide the media via nonbinding resolution, the same instrument used to congratulate Little League teams for a banner season.

Deep breath. Back on the Prozac, journo-people. We’ll get through this.

From nola.com:

During a presser for his upcoming documentary Capitalism: A Love Story at the Toronto International Film Festival, filmmaker Michael Moore offered his take on the newspaper industry — which, according to Moore, is surely dead  within the next couple of years. Moore, with a David Simon name drop, argues that without an education system promoting (with more than adequate funding) basic reading comprehension, newspapers are doomed:

We live in a nation of 40 million functional illiterates: that’s 40 million adults who cannot read and write above a fourth grade or fifth grade level. We have another probably 40 million adults who can read and write above a fourth grade level but don’t have the comprehension beyond that very much. So if you have literally that many tens of millions of adults who either can’t read and write above a fourth and fifth grade level or can’t comprehend what they do read, you’ve created a nation of people who are not going to be reading the newspapers.

… we have made education such a low priority in the United States. And what party has led the way? The Republican Party. Every convention they have a thing in their platform about dismantling the Department of Education. … In the 17 elections between 1940 and 2004, the majority of American newspapers endorsed the Republican candidate for President 14 of the 17 elections. 14 of the 17 elections the majority of American papers … endorsed the party that was going to cut back on the very thing that their readers needed in order to read the newspaper, which was literacy and education. … It would be like General Motors funding candidates who promised to get rid of Driver Education. As dumb as General Motors is, what car company would support the elimination of Driver Education, and yet America’s newspapers in 14 of the 17 elections between 1940 and 2004 supported the candidate that would guarantee their ruination.”

Many speculate potential solutions for saving newspapers, but obviously, none are more fundamental than supporting education in generating interest among students to participate (and be able to actually read). But his big push in his argument is that capitalism has driven the long-coming nail into the daily newspaper (”it is capitalism that has taken our daily newspapers from us”), a nudge to his new doc which early reviews suggest is more skewer than roast.