NEW ORLEANS —
In the early days of New Orleans, newsboys would rush down an alley behind the 300 block of Camp Street, home to the newspapers of the day, with bundles of freshly-printed papers under their arms.
Their goal was to get their paper into the hands of readers on the streets.
But the papers they sold were always changing.
Banners that were once The Daily Picayune, The New Orleans Times, The Democrat, The States and Daily City Item all eventually merged.
“There were mergers left and right,” said Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella. “It was just dizzying.”
And now, decades after the last major merger between The Times-Picayune and States-Item, history is repeating itself. The flag of The Picayune now flies above that of The New Orleans Advocate.
The journey to today began on Jan. 25, 1837.
Francis Lumsden and George Wilkins Kendall published a four-page newspaper they called The Picayune, named after a Spanish coin worth about 6 cents.
Most of the newspaper activity at the time would center itself along the first blocks of Camp Street, an area known as Newspaper Row.
“If you walked along here, you would hear the clattering away of these Line-O-Type machines, you would see journalists and reporters scurrying in and out, shouting in the streets,” Campanella said.
The Picayune build a new home in the 300 block of Camp in 1850.
“Right around this time, they cover the Mexican War and start developing a national reputation and a huge readership,” Campanella said. “They also start to develop a lot of competition, so other newspaper firms set up adjacently. There’s the City Item, there’s The States, there’s The Times.
By 1914, The Picayune merged with The Times-Democrat -- itself the result of another merger -- to become The Times-Picayune.
But the competition was far from over. The States moved 900 Camp St., now the Contemporary Arts Center, and printed there until The Times-Picayune bought it in 1933.
The Item moved a few blocks away on Perdido Street, just off of St. Charles Avenue. It was there that The Item battled not only The States in the afternoon but The Picayune in the morning with its short-lived Morning Tribune.
Walter Cowan, who eventually was named editor of The States-Item, got his start at The Item.
“It was hour-to-hour competition with The States at that time,” Cowan said in a 2003 interview with WYES-TV. “And when I say hour-to-hour, each newspaper put out about four editions a day.”
“Competition was fierce. You won’t believe it, but it was,” States-Item police reporter Jack Dempsey said during a 2008 interview.
He began his career as a reporter for The States and remembers the day in 1958 when things changed for both afternoon papers.
“We became The States-Item,” he said. “The Picayune bought The Item. But we were in fierce competition prior to that.”
By 1968, The Times-Picayune and The States-Item moved from their home on Lafayette Square into a sleek new plant along the Pontchartrain Expressway
“Why? Because you wanted access to the new interstates and highways that would get you out to the suburbs,” Campanella said. “That’s where the readers were moving.”
And while business was great, The Picayune’s reputation wasn’t always so good.
The Picayune continued to refer to black people in derogatory terms for decades and was lukewarm, at best, when it came to integration. The States-Item mirrored its sister paper’s views until publisher Ashton Phelps granted independence in the late 1960s.
In 1974, MORE, a journalism review, ranked The Times-Picayune as one of the 10 worst papers in the country. “Ads that look like news stories. News stories that read like ads. Pitiful Washington coverage. No investigative reporting at all,” were just some of the critiques.
Meanwhile, the staffs of both papers were slow to become diversified.
The first black reporters were not hired until the early 1970s, and it wasn’t until 1990 when the society page featured its first black debutante next to a white debutante.
The Times-Picayune’s reputation and quality began to improve under editor Jim Amoss, who was at the helm when the paper won its first Pulitzer Prizes in 1997.
And when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005, the newspaper was a lifeline for those marooned in the city -- and for those displaced, who got their news instantly on NOLA.com.
“We were getting 30 million hit a day on the website,” former Times-Picayune reporter John Pope said.
There was no denying that a change was headed to New Orleans.
But that change happened too soon.
The city was outraged when the Newhouse family, owners of The Times-Picayune since 1962, announced the paper would cut daily publication and lay off 200 staffers as the focus shifted to digital publishing.
Enter The Advocate.
The Manship family of Baton Rouge opened a small New Orleans office that ballooned when local businessman John Georges and his wife, Dathel, bought the paper in 2013.
An old-fashioned newspaper war was on as the digital age dawned.
And seven years after they banked big on digital, the Newhouses sold the Times-Picayune and NOLA.com to the Georges.
Now, the flags of The New Orleans Advocate and The Times-Picayune fly on Page One, the latest chapter in the story of New Orleans journalism.