For historians, a Google cache has pickled the first post.
Like any big metro daily, the Los Angeles Times has its share of internecine politics, ideological warfare and grumbling malcontents.
The noise never really threatens to overwhelm the paper's sometimes stellar work nor its struggles with the Web, nor the sort of grousing about its local coverage that you hear from Neighborhood Council reps. And like other metro dailies, the Times has snipers taking potshots (and headshots) at it from the blogosphere - just not usually from inside its own building.
UPDATED SUNDAY: Now comes View from the 3rd Floor which has launched a few days before his(her?) 12/13 target. The first post hints at future revelations on the horrors of the Times cafeteria, a Times parking garage lottery, New York Times envy and the effect of Trib cost-trimming on free aspirin, journalistic principles and the shrinkage of Sports.
The second post, uploaded Sunday evening, paints the picture of Times editors nervously switching on the NY Times cable channel to see if they've been scooped.
Of course, it never occurs to them that if they want to find out what is going to be on the NY Times Page 1 the next day, they could find out about two hours earlier than they do now just by doing a simple Internet search.
Then again, they could have some self-confidence and resolve. Sure check out what the NY Times has, but have confidence the decisions we have made are correct. Don’t run around like a flock of chickens if they have something different. The panic and lack of real confidence in our own product spreads throughout the newsroom in small but significant ways. We look like we consider ourselves inferior every time we do this. But in our haste to copy New York, that fact gets overlooked.
The lone author, identified on the otherwise anonymous Blogger account as "The Insider," hints at handling weekend duties, and may or may not have little to lose. promises gravely that the truth-telling begins Monday: It'll be interesting to watch his/her identity unravel in the coming months, as doubtless it could, given enough interest from the glassed-in offices or the desk in the next pod over.
The blog could be a calculated buzz-builder to launch a disgruntled employee's planned escape into greater post-Velvet Coffin fame, or simply the cry of a desperate and frustrated scribe who truly cannot bear to see what's become of the place and just doesn't give a damn about the risk.
FWIW, the news product has improved somewhat since the days when I was there and bad editorial decisions were made on a regular basis by "cereal killer" Mark Willes. But with the gutting of the suburban editions and a couple of rounds of layoffs (and word from friends inside that Trib's bean counters are understandably obsessed with protecting the bottom line in the face of dwindling ad sales and readership) it's no surprise that the esprit de corps has erupted into anonymous screeds in an alternative medium.
The Insider's intro declares: (as posted here earlier:)
Once upon a time, the LA Times was a great newspaper, until the evil Tribune "Shareholder value is our first priority" Company bought it. Now, the once great LA Times is like a circus, only there's no escape. This blog will start Monday, Dec. 13, and offer a daily glimpse into the innerworkings of a world gone mad.
The blog (if it actually takes off) will join "Take Back the Times," the consistently relentless blog-critique by 39-year Times vet Ken Reich, the hard-working, curmudgeonly earthquake expert who was pushed into retirement last spring after yelling at a newsroom aide.
But I'm beginning to think we need a revival of something with some bite, along the lines of Cathy Seipp's trenchant "Our Times" column that ran in the late, lamented Buzz Magazine some time last millennium.
