If it keeps on raining, levee’s going to break — “When the Levee Breaks,” Led Zeppelin


Newsprint sentimentalists are part of a shrinking club. Plenty of people care about news, but the fetishists who want it to be imprisoned on paper? We are like Shriners, once a proud, powerful bunch who now meet in little rooms and exchange secret handshakes.


Nothing gets print romanticists more dewy-eyed than The Times-Picayune, which we learned last week will no longer be a daily presence on newsprint in New Orleans.


I was in the city right after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the role the newspaper and its Web site played cannot be overestimated. Many of the women and men who work at the paper stayed and filed articles even as their families dispersed and their homes went underwater. It was the kind of journalism that won Pulitzers, but more important, reunited families, gave people critical guidance and brought order out of incredible chaos.


Since then, the newspaper has prosecuted coverage that has kicked up federal investigations and helped bring rogue cops to justice. In a city where not much of anything works, the newspaper does.


I return to New Orleans often — to fish, eat and dance. But it is a particular pleasure to sit in one of the city’s many coffee shops and watch plain old folks jaw over The Times-Picayune, brandishing it like a weapon when they want to make a point.


After the news broke that The Times-Picayune would no longer publish daily, far-flung fans of the city and its newspaper gathered on Twitter — just consider that irony for a moment — and had a collective sniffle. The Times-Picayune will be subsumed into a new company called NOLA Media Group and will come out three days a week (Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays), with most of the resources — fewer after the layoffs — devoted to the Web.


Many newspapers have gone away, including The Rocky Mountain News in Denver and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Others have been diminished to the point where it wouldn’t matter if they did go away. So why the freak-out over the Times-Pic?


Because it is a story about a town that loved its newspaper — its market penetration is among the highest in the land — but just not enough to keep it. It’s the kind of doomed romance that inspires tear-jerker movies and elegiac columns in, yes, newspapers, so bear with me. It is Memorial Day, after all.


There is nothing particularly remarkable about The Times-Picayune’s circumstance. Advertisers have consolidated, their choices have multiplied, and their potential clients have many more options for getting their information. Other than a few fat days like Fridays and Sundays aimed at food shoppers or moviegoers, many newspapers arrive at the doorstep looking more like skinny brochures than their stuffed ancestors.


But New Orleans is not a very wired city and The Times-Picayune has always been an excellent daily with a balky, dated Web site. Orders from headquarters aren’t going to reverse those competencies on a dime.


I talked to Steven Newhouse, the chief of Advance.net, part of Advance Publications, which owns the paper. Mr. Newhouse is as sweet on newspapers as the next guy; after all, he and his family own 35 of them. But advertising has dropped steadily year over year at The Times-Picayune, just as it has almost everywhere else. In terms of total revenue, the industry is half as big as it was in 2005.


Mr. Newhouse knew that New Orleans, notoriously averse to change, would not be happy about the reduced presence of The Times-Picayune. This city has already lost a lot, after all. But he and his colleagues did it anyway because they felt they had no choice.


On days like Monday, Tuesday and Saturday, the newspaper is all but ad-free, so all of the industriousness and skill that go into putting together those issues is noneconomic. The Newhouses are plenty rich, but they are not in the business of underwriting, so they are re-engineering their newspaper division for the long haul.


Experiments in Ann Arbor, Mich., and with the Booth newspapers in Michigan demonstrated that smaller staffs and a reduced print schedule could be sustainable, so Katrina and sentiment be damned, The Times-Picayune will become the largest guinea pig so far in an experiment that will end in either death or transformation.