I saw the headline and thought about the reporters, photographers, editors and staffers at the Times-Picayune and what this means for them. I wondered how they felt reading about their fate in another publication, not their own.

Then I began to think about the news we wouldn’t be reading in the refashioned Times-Picayune and what it means for us, the community that depends on its daily newspaper.

When I first came back to New Orleans on the last day of 2005, I would walk the three blocks to Carrollton Avenue in the morning to pick up that day’s copy of the T-P. Home delivery had been suspended and vending boxes had sprouted at  intersections across the city.

Hungry for news, I stood on the Carrollton neutral ground and devoured the front page. Every day, without fail the T-P came through with vital news.  The very reason for its being was validated on a daily basis, there at the corner of Apricot and Carrollton.

Eventually the paper returned to my front porch signaling another step towards the “new normal.”

I encouraged my friends to subscribe. I wasn’t just a consumer, I was a believer.

Squandered Heritage was born in part because of a burning question that I had about the remaking of New Orleans neighborhoods, a question that was, to my mind, inconsistently addressed in the T-P.

The granular reality of the post Katrina land use issues in neighborhoods both small and large, while rarely front-page news, was regularly reflected more subtly back in the classifieds ads and legal notices.

They became a primary source of information that rewarded close study.

When the paper published over 20 pages of notices signaling the city’s intention to demolish over 1,700 structures, the only editorial mention was a piece by Judy Walker, the food writer. In a piece entitled “Hallelujah! An eyesore is on the way out,” she exulted in the pending destruction of one house that had offended her.

“In the old pre-K world, this house was on the city’s blighted and adjudicated list (whatever adjudicated means),” Walker wrote. What she didn’t seem to realize – nor did City Hall – was that the FEMA money had not been allocated to bulldoze every blighted house in the city, many of them salvageable. By law it was meant to address only those properties that had been damaged by Katrina.

Greedy for what it could get from FEMA, the city had cobbled together a catalog of every house with a code-enforcement complaint against it – this at a time when there were more than a few reasons why your property might be out of compliance as you struggled to put it back together.

But I digress.

The story as reported by Squandered Heritage made its way into print publication by way of The Wall Street Journal, but what the Wall Street Journal couldn’t provide were the classifieds that were the basis of my own reporting. For that I was dependent on The Times-Picayune. The lesson: in this brave new digital world, sometimes it takes a lot of slices to make a sandwich.

Recently my own hard-copy subscription to the T-P lapsed. Not long afterwards I received an enticement to come back:

Dear Neighbor:

We know that you have been a long-time subscriber of The Times-Picayune and we miss delivering to your home.  And to prove it, we are offering you the first month FREE to restart your home delivery.  That’s right, we will give you the first month free to enjoy all the savings from the inserts, weekly ads, coupons, and so much more…

Not once was “news” mentioned in the enticement.  The chatty e-mail referenced “inserts, ads, coupons, and so much more” as a reason to come back.

It’s a sad day when the actual news is relegated to the “so much more” bin.