Before I give you the details, I thought this was an opportune time for a brief reminder about who we are and what you can and should expect from The Independent Weekly and all its endeavors.
For starters, we're locally owned. Publishers Steve May and Cherry Fisher May and Associate Publisher Odie Terry have been involved in Louisiana media their whole lives. They started this paper more than three years ago with one core belief: Acadiana readers deserved a newspaper that told the local stories that other media wouldn't touch. A paper that valued investigative reporting, top-notch writing and photography and told stories with an alternative, independent voice that wasn't beholden to corporate interests.
Every employee of The Independent Weekly lives in Acadiana. We're either natives or we've lived in Louisiana for decades. We raise our families here, send our kids to local schools and pay taxes here. We do it because we love it here and can't imagine living anywhere else.
For that reason, we always strive to make The Independent Weekly a reflection of your lives and our lives and the things that matter most in our community. We don't work at The Independent because we're angling for a job promotion from our corporate parent to go work and live in Boise, Idaho or Dallas, Texas. We don't have to follow corporate initiatives from New York or California and take a cookie-cutter approach to writing about our region.
We work here because we care deeply about Acadiana and Louisiana.
That means demanding accountability from our politicians. It entails covering hurricane recovery, health care, education, business, the environment, culture and arts and entertainment. It means taking a stand when we see threats to our quality of life ' and celebrating when we see people moving Acadiana forward in positive ways.
We like a good joke and poking fun when it's warranted, too.
Those philosophies that drive The Independent Weekly are the same ones behind our new daily news service ' The INDsider.
Here's how it works: Sign up online with your e-mail address, and every weekday morning we'll e-mail you our take on the top stories of the day in Acadiana and Louisiana. You'll get a mix of breaking news and succinct analysis of politics, business, arts and entertainment, culture and sports. You can also comment on and discuss any item in The INDsider.
You'll notice in this edition of The Independent that we've renamed our IndBrief news section The INDsider, because we'll be updating items that appear in The INDsider in the print edition each week.
And yes, The INDsider is free. No hidden catches. No online surveys to fill out or annoying pop-up ads to wade through. To sign up, just e-mail us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it indicating your interest or visit www.theind.com. You'll get a follow-up e-mail confirming that you'd like to receive The INDsider. Say yes, and you're all set. And if you ever want to send us a tip for The INDsider, e-mail us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it as well.
As always, thanks for reading. We hope you enjoy The Independent Weekly and The INDsider as much as we enjoy creating them for you.
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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