It’s pins and needles once again for employees of Gannett newspapers across the country, including at five dailies in Louisiana. The company announced another round of layoffs as it grapples with an economy in recession, declining ad revenue — particularly in classified advertising — and rising overhead costs. The latest cuts — publicized on-line Wednesday and printed in today’s Daily Advertiser — will be 1,400 across the company. Gannett employs more than 41,000 people nationwide in both print and broadcast divisions. The company reduced its workforce by 10 percent in 2008.
Gannett owns The Advertiser and Times of Acadiana as well as The Daily World in Opelousas, The Times in Shreveport, The News-Star in Monroe and The Town Talk in Alexandria. It’s unclear at present how the 1,400 layoffs will fall among the dailies in the Bayou State. The company is also set to consolidate its copy desk operations in Monroe, a de facto staffing reduction.
In a memo to employees obtained by the INDsider, Leslie Hurst, president and publisher of The Advertiser and The Daily World, urges employees: “Please continue to give 100% every day. It is very important that we all focus on the goals at hand so that we can move the company forward during these tough times. We will emerge stronger, of that I am convinced. I appreciate your commitment and dedication to the company more than you will ever know.”
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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