Mardi

The Times-Picayune will no longer be a daily paper in the near future. According to a David Carr story on The New York Times website last night, Publisher Ashton Phelps' recently-announced retirement is set to precipitate a huge change at New Orleans' Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper of record. According to the report, which cites two newsroom sources, da Paper's publishing schedule could be cut to 2-3 days a week, and huge staff cuts are in the offing. Read the whole story here. Meanwhile, tweeting New Orleanians have already started campaigning to #SaveTheTP. Click through to see the full text of the internal memo from Publisher Ashton Phelps about the changes.

UPDATE (5/24, 9 a.m.): NOLA.com now has a post spelling out the initial changes. The changes are so tectonic that a new company is being formed called The NOLA Media Group. In the fall, da Paper will move to publication three days a week: Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. The focus will move to nola.com, but don't worry. The paper will be "more robust."

The focus will shift to digital news. As for those staff cuts, we think it says somewhere in here that people are losing their jobs:

While many employees will have the opportunity to grow with the new organization, Mathews said, the need to reallocate resources to accelerate the digital growth of NOLA Media Group will result in a reduction in the size of the workforce.

For analysis, we again turn to David Carr:

Weird part about digital-first change at Times Pic? They have always excelled in print and been horrible on web. A pivot to weakness?

— david carr (@carr2n) May 24, 2012

So what can we expect in the future? The shift has been most closely linked with the tactics that da Paper's parent company, Advance Publications, used in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the website is now the prominent way to get news. Writing for Forbes, Michelle Maynard provides a glimpse:

I have first hand experience with the model that Newhouse wants to follow in New Orleans. For those of us who live in Ann Arbor, it’s essentially meant we don’t have a newspaper, at least not the kind we grew up with. The Ann Arbor News closed three years ago in July. Its successor, AnnArbor.com, publishes a print edition every few days, but for most news about our city, we have to go online. No offense to its staff, but AnnArbor.com is basically a constantly updated blog, which gives equal play to impaled cyclists and rabid skunks as it does to politics and crime.

To round out what we find there, many of us turn to Twitter, which has been a vital tool in providing the sense of community and communication that our newspaper used to create. We’re able to find information, but the disappearance of The Ann Arbor News is a void that for many of us will never be filled. The loss is even bigger for less Web-savvy residents like my mom, who complains that she and her friends now don’t hear someone has died until after the funeral.

Uplifting. Meanwhile, historian David Ruys Smith talks about da Paper's history, and what it's meant to New Orleans over the years, here.

Now, here's the full text of an internal memo distributed this morning by Publisher Ashton Phelps Jr.: