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Parsing the Times Rebellion: Trib Cuts Bone
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 Few things get your average copy editor's cliche-juices flowing faster than a story about his own paper:
When L.A. Times editor Dean Baquet and publisher Jeff Johnson announced they would defy parent Tribune Company's demands for staff cuts, the chain's own headline writers and columnists did not disappoint:
"All's Not Quiet on Tribune's Western Front" blurts the hed on today's column from the Trib's Phil Rosenthal, who then goes thoroughly batshit with metaphors - battlefield and otherwise ...
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Just as Tribune Co. bosses close in on peace with one California faction, yet another skirmish has broken out on the Western Front.
So much for that idiotic stereotype about all those people being so laid back and mellow. Earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, smog, gridlock, the Schwarzenegger administration--it makes them tough, maybe even a little ticked off.
If anybody's going to get stoned, it's going to be in the biblical sense. Let he who is without a diversified portfolio cast the first rock. Well, as with most stylistic bombast, there's some true weight behind it: This is big news and it really does matter.
Rarely do editors and publishers criticize their paper's corporate parents so publicly, nor do they have to do so with so much at stake: As Times media columnist Tim Rutten points out, Trib has already slashed the paper's 1,200-member staff by about 20% since taking over in 2000.
On a fiscal as well as ideological basis, the Trib's forces in charge of watching L.A. have basically treated the Times like a stray dog, leaving it chained in the back yard, beating it occasionally to keep it from whining, and feeding it just enough to keep it alive and keep the ASPCA off their backs.
Well, the ASPCA just came calling, in the person of former Sec. of State Warren Christopher, USC Annenberg School Dean Geoffrey Cowan, L.A. County Federation of Labor chief Maria Elena Durazo and 17 other L.A. power brokers, all of whom wrote to Tribune CEO Dennis FitzSimons urging him to reconsider cutting the paper's staff any farther. "All newspapers serve an important civic role," the letter, sent Wednesday, added. "But as a community voice in the metropolitan region, the Los Angeles Times is irreplaceable." Now, just to play devil's advocate, Trib is trying to bring its dead-tree divisions into line with the profit margins enjoyed by its TV stations and other properties, and it's a losing game.
FoMoCo's cutting thousands of engine-assemblers, body painters and gearshift-knob-attachers to fix its crumbling financial picture, why shouldn't Trib?
But rather than give the Times the resources and guidance it needs to make the transition from old-world newspaper to new-media-era information broker, the bean-counters at Trib keep hacking away joylessly at the bottom line.
Perhaps they hope make the Times more desirable to potential buyers. Definitely they are threatening more layoffs and buyouts with no more simple an aim than pleasing stockholders, with no better tactics than crayon-scrawled goals like nudging up the profit margin by gashing staff rosters.
God knows that's easier than tackling the more complex business of actually building the Times' professional, journalistic capital and tuning its role in the swiftly mutating mediasphere so it can have a fighting chance of actually competing against CNN, YouTube, MySpace and a dozen more brands that are eating its lunch in the mindshare war.
Too bad that good journalists - and journalism - have to suffer for Trib's lack of vision.
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Sunday, September 17, 2006 - 11:48 PM
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