Scary warning to L.A. Times staffers: "Treason"?

[DeepModem Mom]

LA Observed: Note to sources at the Los Angeles Times
Kevin Roderick

I've never felt the need to do this before, but it seems prudent to alert the Los Angeles Times staffers who help me stay informed about the inner workings of the paper. According to multiple sources at the Times, new publisher Eddy Hartenstein has been calling it "treason" for employees to share information with LA Observed. Now, it's easy to dismiss his rhetoric as beginner jitters — history has seen plenty of media publishers who naively try to muzzle the journalists who work for them, only to learn that it can't be done. (Never mind that it's antithetical to why the paper exists.) Before Hartenstein arrived in August, the Times gave up fretting about the newsroom memos we post here and started publishing them too, sometimes first. LA Observed is no longer blocked on employee computers at the LAT's Olympic printing plant (or at KTLA Channel 5) and the link to LA Observed was restored to the blogroll at the Times' local news blog after pointedly being dropped. (After all, Zell did decree no more censoring.)

And yet, solid sources have let me know that current Times leadership is unhappy enough (or paranoid enough) about stuff getting out to consider action against staffers. I don't know if Hartenstein is thin-skinned enough to retaliate — especially given Sam Zell's famously relaxed rule book — but he is throwing around the t-word. So take precautions — use your personal email, our PO box, or pick up the phone — and don't presume they aren't watching. And be assured that I will continue to report accurately on the Times with your help and, as always, will never divulge my sources.

I emailed Hartenstein and Times spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan about the treason comments a couple of days ago and have not heard back.

Unrelated, let's hope: Tell Zell, the blog that claims it is written anonymously by a Times staffer, has only updated twice in the past month and has yet to mention this week's new wave of buyouts and threatened layoffs that socked the battered LAT newsroom in the gut. Sources tell me Times bosses have been mightily interested in discovering who writes Tell Zell and have a watch list of suspects -- but really, does the most troubled newspaper in the U.S. over the past couple of years have time to worry about stuff like that?

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2008/10/note_to_sources_at_the_lo_1.php

[no_hypocrisy]

1. A free press was deemed "sedition" by John Adams.

Journalism unfettered is a fine American tradition.

[JDPriestly]

2. As a former reader of the LA Times,

I have to say LA is a liberal city. Conservatives are a minority here, thank God.

The recent owners of the LA Times have not been realistic enough to understand that if they want to appeal to LA readers, they have to print a liberal, and I mean liberal, newspaper.

LA is a city that prides itself on diversity, that enjoys diversity. You can't print the op-eds of conservative, narrow-minded pundits and expect people that revel in diversity to buy your product. It just is not going to happen. The competition in the information market is too great.

When the LA Times stopped printing Robert Scheer's columns, readers who had been loyal for years in spite of the failure of the Times to print the truth about Iraq became very tired of the lies. The loss of Robert Scheer's column was an insult to many of us.

I was a loyal LA Times reader for years and years. I gave up not only because of the firing of Robert Scheer but because the paper failed to prompt good reports on the Downing Street Memos. I felt the paper had just walked away from me.

I resubscribed for a short time when they virtually offered to give me a few days a week subscription for a year for a few dollars, a coupon for a local department store and promised they were making editorial changes. But their failure to report the truth combined with a boring editorial policy that features fluff pieces on behalf of liberal columnists and nasty ones on behalf of conservative ones just turned me off.

And then there is that Brownstein who writes what they sell as political analysis. If they must fire people, he should be the first to go. His items are tiresome. Who cares what he thinks? I certainly don't.

[DeepModem Mom]

3. Thanks for your post, JDP.

I know a little about this disturbing situation at the L.A. Times more from an employee/labor viewpoint than from the larger issue of the paper as a whole. On a human level, the situation is about as bad as it gets in this economic environment, as staffers -- and this includes employees at every level, very few of whom are highly-paid -- have no idea from one day to the next if/when the axe will fall on them or on a valued co-worker at the next desk or down the hall.