LA Daily News is getting smaller

Pardon if this is a db. but LA Oberserved says the Daily News will get smaller. Viewpoint, Sunday's opinion section, and biz sections, which have become the Know section in recent months, are getting slashed. Plus it looks like the editor needs an editor. She can't spell changes and doesn't know what month it is. LA Oberserved published the memo with the errors.

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2008/06/daily_news_shrinks_some_m.php#more

 

I know how to lure readers back! OFFER THEM LESS!!!!

 

The Daily News was a far inferior product to even the P-T and the OCR when I was regularly in LaLa land in the early aughts. This is not surprising at all.

 

Anybody see the hand of Butler (``quick read'' memo) in this?



http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=13384

 

Yeesh, you've never made a typo in your life (chagnes ..changes) ? Give the woman a break rpm.

That was a company memo, not something sent directly to LAObserved. It reads as such.

I read through it. While it seems at first the cuts are major, it looks as if there is a shift to more local stories and less wire. So in essence, that's more homegrown product and less wire, which I actually found encouraging. It's when a paper starts running 90 percent wire stories that you need to start penning eulogies.

 

Two weeks ago Butler puts out memo in San Jose saying they're going to quickreads 2 days a week. Then Carolina drops this bombshell? Butler is a Singleton tool, and Carolina a Butler tool. Given Singleton's skyrocketting debt, beefed-up local content doesn't fit.

 

I am more concerned with the plan to make more cuts than the grammatical and spelling errors in the memo. This does not bode well for those of us in the editorial side of the building. Sports was spared in this cut, but it's evident that the loss of pages and the trimming of sections will lead to even fewer people in the newsroom. And even though sprots on the surface remained in tact, no one is safe.

 

Singleton axe nails a popular columnist (via laobserved). Longtime Sunday Viewpoint columnist Steve Young first casualty of Carolina downsizing. Several others have left since Butler shipped the despised Monterey Executive Editor to Woodland Hills to do his dirty work...

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2008/06/daily_news_columnist_sign.php

 

FWIW, Steve was not on staff and pretty much all he did for the Daily News was write a column a week for Viewpoint. Now that Viewpoint has been slashed, there isn't room for him.
And there has been a bit of an exodus in recent weeks, AME, page designer and copy editor/Viewpoint columnist among them. All good people and all positions that will not be readily filled. Although I have seen postings for a page designer, so maybe the powers that be have decided the newsroom is a little thin. However, I am not holding my breath that the position will be filled any time soon.

 

I know I'm pissing into the Pacific here, but can someone, ANYONE, explain to me why in an era where business news affects everyone's life -- and I do mean everyone, papers are cutting the bejesus out of that section?

If there's one section you could take national news/trends and localize them for your reader's benefit, business would be that section: consumer, workplace, trend stories, the list is endless.

Then again, I'm asking this about an industry that is committing hara kiri on a daily basis, so what does this former brokedick sportswriter know?

 

Ever since I have been able to save a little money and invest in bonds, gold and annuities (looking back, probably the worst investment I've made in the past 10 years), I check stock pages and markets like I used to check box scores. How anyone with any kind of investments ignores this information is beyond me. But with the Internet, again, I can get more up to date and better information on AOL and Yahoo than I can in a newspaper. I'd imagine people in the 20s and 30s don't even consider looking in a newspaper for this information.

 

Plenty, Birdscribe ... plenty.

But in this day and age, why actually offer something that might be, you know, newsworthy? It's all about cutting and slashing, then having some stuffed shirt walk into the middle of the newsroom and wail about "doing more with less."

Please don't enter logic and good thought into this abyss.