"...the year the Los Angeles Times died."

[DeepModem Mom]

Los Angeles Magazine: Paper Rout
'From the Editor,' August 2008
Kit Rachlis, Editor-in-Chief

When historians get around to 2008, it’s likely they will say it was the year the Los Angeles Times died. No, I don’t think the paper will fold between now and December. But I do fear the paper will be so diminished, so crippled, that the chance of saving it will have slipped away. I’m aware that there are residents in L.A. who are cheering this prospect. The Times engenders more hostility than any daily paper I know of; in the view of its critics, the Times is an arrogant, liberal behemoth that deserves whatever fate befalls it. But for most people, the collapse of the Times is a tragedy. Over the course of 30 years it was one of the three or four best papers in the country. Its rise didn’t just mirror the transformation of L.A.; it went hand in hand.

Journalists have a terrible tendency to be sentimental, so I want to be careful not to romanticize the Times. As good as the paper has been, it’s always had galling limitations (I say this as someone who worked there for six and a half years): an opinion section that rarely generated heat; a record of ignoring wide swaths of the region; a disinterest in local politics. Still, for all its flaws (and my list, I’m sure, is different from yours), few newspapers have matched the Times’s ambition and reach. Now that ambition has vanished. According to sources, (Sam "Grave Dancer") Zell’s ultimate plan is to reduce the paper’s daily circulation to 500,000 (at its height, in 2001, it was 1.2 million) and its staff to 600 (half of what it was in 2004). To make the ratio of editorial to advertising pages equal, the paper will cut 82 pages of news each week—or to put it in starker terms, the Times will lose 4,000 editorial pages in one year.

Nobody disagrees that newspapers face a frightening set of challenges: a generation of 20- to 35-year-olds who get their news for free from the Web; the migration of advertising to the Web but not to newspaper sites; advertising rates on the Web that are 1/10th to 1/20th what newspapers charge; and now an economy that is in near recession. Any one of those factors would be daunting, but together they represent the most radical disruption the industry has ever faced. Even papers with committed ownerships, like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, are struggling. What’s required is something not usually found in American corporations: the strength to weather at least four or five more years of uncertainty; a willingness to experiment like crazy; and a belief that what’s being provided is more than just a business. The Times, on the other hand, has chosen to slash the paper and invest too little too late in the Web. It is hard to imagine a worse course. I will miss the Times, but the truth is that when I pick up the paper every morning, I miss it already.

http://www.lamag.com/article.aspx?id=8632

[JI7]

1. they use to be very good better than NYT and Washington Post

and other overrated papers.

but around the time the Tribune bought them they turned right and whorish.they are a big reason that whore ARnold was able to become Governor.

[villager]

2. Thanks for posting. I haven't subscribed in years, because they are utterly dispensible...

I even briefly wrote for one of their online ventures -- which actually had a leg up on much of the competition, in retrospect. Of course, the Times had one of its makeovers, and promptly shut it down...

[JDPriestly]

3. I canceled the LA Times when they canceled Robert Scheer

It's not that I agreed with him all the time. I did not. But I found his perspective to be different. Prior to that time, I believed the LA Times propaganda that it was trying to be a liberal paper. When Scheer was fired, it was obvious that it wasn't even trying to appeal to its liberal reader base.

It was pretty soon after that, the LA Times Sunday OpEd page announced BLUNTLY AND OPENLY that it was going to, as a matter of policy, publish more right-wing letters to the editor. That was the very last straw. My first attempt to cancel had been disregarded. This time, I made it very clear to the powers that be at the LA Times that I could no longer subscribe.

My disillusionment with the LA Times began long before it fired Scheer, however.

For many years I read the LA Times almost from cover to cover (at least the articles that interested me) before going to work each morning. In the months preceding the Iraq War, along with the rest of the conservative media, the LA Times pretty much beat the war drum.

So, when I heard excerpts from Powell's UN speech on my way to work one morning, I was conditioned to believe his lies about WMDS in moving trucks and aluminum tubes. It was a pretty ridiculous story as I look back on it. But one lie leads to the next, and the LA Times' lies had done a job on me. I was gullible.

It was not until I read the accounts and saw the pictures of the soldiers moving through the desert, almost single file, getting stuck in the sand and trickling north toward Baghdad that I realized that the Bush administration and the news media had lied to me.

What woke me up? Well, you see, I have studied and read a lot of French literature and commentaries about the horrors of WWI when waves of men were killed by gas warfare. Also, I had read accounts of the use of chemical weapons in the Iraq/Iran WAr. In each case, casualties were devastatingly numerous.

I knew and I knew that the Bush administration had to know that if there had been any real chance that chemical weapons might be used against our troops in Iraq, gas masks would not have been enough. They would have needed a huge army, sheets of soldiers, row after row. If our military had anticipated or feared chemical (or biological) warfare, they would never have sent our soldiers across the desert as they did because the casualties would have been enormous.

The LA Times lied. Not only did many of our best and bravest die, but the very people who lied to us and sent our soldiers to die have enriched themselves at the expense of the heroes, their families and ordinary American taxpayers. Who needs the lies of the LA Times? The more pages of ads they publish, the less people will be willing to pay for their paper. Who wants to fill the recycle bin with worthless newsprint full of ads.

As I explained to the salesman from the LA Times who called me to persuade me to resubscribe: I can read French and German. Nowadays, I check the foreign newspapers to get a more balanced view on events. The LA Times will be replaced by something with more integrity, something that fits the times, something less authoritarian. The invention of the printing press changed communication. The invention of the internet and other forms of electronic communication will give rise to new vehicles for communication. DU is one.