NOLA.com / The Times-Picayune

What you're reading

NOLA.com is the digital home of The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, the daily newspaper of record for New Orleans and southeast Louisiana. The Times-Picayune, founded in 1837, was for most of the 20th century the dominant paper in the Gulf South; it merged with The Advocate (a Baton Rouge daily owned by the Manship and later Georges families) in 2019 after Advance Publications cut Times-Picayune print frequency and Georges Media bought the masthead.

The combined paper operates newsrooms in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette, covering Louisiana state government, city hall, the Sewerage and Water Board, Saints and LSU sports, hurricanes, the petrochemical corridor and the courts. The Times-Picayune won the 2006 Pulitzer for Public Service for its Hurricane Katrina coverage. Today the paper reaches roughly 100,000 print Sunday subscribers plus a few million monthly digital readers, with a print edition still publishing seven days a week — unusual for a mid-size US metro.

Ownership & funding

Georges Media Group (private). Funded primarily through subscription + ads.

Subscription-and-ads with a private local owner (John Georges, a Louisiana businessman with political interests of his own) is a different incentive shape than chain ownership or nonprofit funding. The paper has to keep a paywall-worthy New Orleans and Baton Rouge reporting flow alive — meaning real investment in statehouse, City Hall and investigative beats — but the owner's local commercial relationships create at least the appearance of conflict that the newsroom navigates with explicit firewalls. Print is still revenue-meaningful here in a way it isn't at most US metros, which helps fund a larger reporting staff than a digital-only outlet of comparable audience could sustain.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places NOLA.com / The Times-Picayune at Center with a factuality rating of High.

nwsly places NOLA.com / The Times-Picayune at Center because the news desk covers Louisiana's idiosyncratic politics without a consistent partisan lean — the paper has been tough on Democratic mayors of New Orleans (LaToya Cantrell), Republican governors (Bobby Jindal, Jeff Landry) and Democratic governors (John Bel Edwards) in roughly equal measure, and its coastal-erosion, criminal-justice and Sewerage and Water Board accountability reporting reads more as a public-interest beat than an ideological one. The editorial board endorses candidates of both parties depending on the race.

Where it shows lean: the paper's investigative work on environmental harm in Cancer Alley, criminal-justice reform, and the Confederate-monument removals tilts toward outcomes that progressives prefer, and its New Orleans culture coverage reflects the city's liberal social tone. The High factuality rating reflects the Katrina Pulitzer, a careful corrections policy, and decades of statehouse reporting that the rest of Louisiana media treats as the canonical record on state government.

Editorial vs news side

Traditional daily-newspaper split. The news desk covers state and local government, courts, sports and culture as straight beats with no partisan signal. The opinion section runs editorials, signed columns from a politically mixed roster and reader letters; it endorses candidates and takes positions on Louisiana ballot measures. The split here is unusually visible because Louisiana politics doesn't map cleanly onto national left-right axes — the opinion page often takes positions (against state corruption, for coastal restoration, against new petrochemical plants) that don't sort neatly by party.

Why we include them in nwsly

New Orleans daily of record; news desk straight.

NOLA.com gives nwsly the Louisiana slot — a state with its own legal system (Napoleonic civil code), its own party dynamics, its own catastrophic-weather and petrochemical stories — that no national Center outlet covers with comparable depth. Hurricane response, coastal land loss, the petrochemical corridor, New Orleans crime and culture, and LSU all show up in nwsly briefs through this feed. It fills a regional gap that AP and Reuters can only skim.

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