Even before owners of The New Orleans Advocate bought the assets of its competitor, The Times-Picayune and NOLA.com, earlier this month, it charted a remarkable course of expansion in an industry that is relentlessly shrinking.

With papers in Baton Rouge and the Acadiana/Lafayette region, The Advocate has built a combined circulation of 100,000 and a news staff of 110. Both will grow as The Advocate absorbs The Times-Picayune’s paid print circulation (at 43,400, slightly bigger than its own circulation of 35,500).



The combined digital site will pick up the NOLA.com name and use its faster technology, probably by early July, though a date has not yet been set. And the New Orleans Advocate will grow its news staff hiring some of those who lost their jobs as NOLA.com and the Picayune dissolve.

That thunderbolt overshadows what The Advocate had already accomplished a month earlier: winning its first Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and being chosen as a finalist in editorial writing, both honors for a painstaking investigation of jury practices that discriminated against black defendants.

The contours of the Advocate’s success by now are familiar to many — a generous owner, John Georges; a deeply experienced and hard-charging editor, Peter Kovacs; and a host of strong news and business staffers as well.

However, I suspected there was a good deal more to this counter-cyclical tale and went to New Orleans earlier this month to see what I could find. I identified at least 10 reasons the Advocate became ascendant.

One: Community loyalty

You first need to understand that The New Orleans Advocate has been a Times-Picayune newsroom in exile since the day it launched in 2013. I asked Kovacs and publisher Dan Shea (both former managing editors there), in a joint interview: How many of the current news staff of 50 came from The Times-Picayune?

Well over half, Kovacs ventured.

More like 85 percent, Shea replied.

Two: Hire away

The two confess to “shock and awe” hiring raids both to peel away top talent and signal staying power. It is a strategy now being duplicated at The Acadiana Advocate property, which recently hired six editors and reporters from its competitor there, Gannett’s Daily Advertiser.

Three: Hire away, part two

The newsroom was buzzing the Monday I visited, counting up how many desks were being moved in for the upcoming staff expansion (the consensus was 21). In upstairs meeting rooms, laid-off Times-Picayune reporters and editors were already being interviewed.

Kovacs and Shea said that they will talk to anyone who applies but are still unsure how many of the 65 displaced NOLA.com staffers will be hired. Shea said he hoped over time to build the three newsrooms to 140 (The Acadiana Advocate will be expanding, too).

Shea also told me the organization will hire some from the Times-Picayune on three-month contracts — a window to see just how fast and how big the benefits of absorbing Times-Picayune circulation and advertising lists proves to be. If money to convert those to full-time positions doesn’t materialize, Advance has agreed to still pay the severance to laid-off Times-Picayune employees.

The hires will draw on the strength of the Times-Picayune’s environmental reporting and the bells and whistles of its digital operation, which is more sophisticated and enjoys much higher traffic than the Advocate’s.

Realistically, the total hired will probably be only a fraction of the 65 news staffers who lost their jobs — despite expressions of respect and regret I heard on my visit to The Advocate for the good journalists displaced. (When Poynter’s Tampa Bay Times bought and closed the Tampa Tribune three years ago, only about 10 reporters and editors were hired across the bay.)

Kovacs and Shea said they will not lay off any of their current staff to trade up for a NOLA.com star.

“Absolutely not,” Shea said. “They bet their careers on a very uncertain venture and that should equate to job security.”

The mechanics of merging operations of two papers are huge and can stretch as long as a year. But this one appears to have been very well planned. Shea and Kovacs said they hope to have much of the work done by fall. That is prime season for news in Louisiana, they explained, as the New Orleans Saints and Louisiana State University football seasons crank up.

Four: Keep it coming

Momentum will continue. The Pulitzer-winning special projects team is training it sights on lavish state subsidies to New Orleans’ thriving tourist industry. A pay meter for The New Orleans Advocate went up April 15, the day the Pulitzers were announced. (The number of free articles will vary and adjust over time, and offers will be pegged to data on who is most likely to subscribe. Right now the rate is $9.99 a month, with no discount for introductory subscriptions.)

The merger of two sites may makes selling digital subscriptions more than a little tricky. How do you hold onto NOLA.com’s most regular digital readers who have long been accustomed to getting it for free? But moving to paid digital is rightly an emphasis throughout the industry. As print advertising revenue goes down, audience financial contribution must go up.

So The Advocate, perhaps belatedly, is taking that step to a more secure future.