LA Times (update) will cut 150 from newsroom, 250 overall

Agreed. Enormous problem for LA Times.

There are 17 million people in the metro area, 13 million of which do not live in the city of LA. And many folks inside (and outside) city limits are far more interested in the presidential election, terrorism, Latin America and the Pacific Rim than they are in the City Council.

If the Times cuts national and foreign reporters to emphasize LOCAL news, the battle will be lost.

 

Apparently not.

Boy, you talk about people likely running scared, and employees being held hostage and terrorized within their own companies...

This is, perhaps, an attempt to make assessments based on what's considered most important and held in high regard at the L.A. Times. Even though cutting by seniority, status/pay levels, or some other cut-and-dried system, is also horrible in some respects, I think I might actually prefer that sort of somewhat objective decision-making, to this.

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2008/07/todays_talk_about_the_latimes.php

Seems just a bit too subjective and varying, depending on the people/jobs involved, and no matter whether you're one of the ones doing the judging, or being judged.

Your future is, literally, in somebody else's hands, and doing it this way seems to me that it might leave too much room for favoritism, or even potential dishonesty when it comes to evaluating the talents/productivity/potential of the people involved.

And, of course, it's all predicated on having editors who are actually good at making such evaluations and being perceptive enough to recognize people's skills and talents in the first place. Unfortunately, that's not always the case, even at the biggest/best newspapers.

This whole situation, going on throughout the industry, is so awful. It's like, which one of our kids should we kill?

Just horrible.

 

I went through this nearly two decades ago. It was the first written performance reviews that paper had ever done, and after that one I stuck around another three years and we didn't have another written review in that time. Deal was, three people had to review you. It was supposed to eliminate the settling of old scores. You'd think they'd all be in cahoots and write the same things about you, but it wasn't that way. One who did mine was a kind of ditsy editor who probably meant to call me a newspaper junkie (for reading lots of papers) and instead referred to me as a "newspaper groupie" (I am such a slut!). Thing was, two of the three people who wrote mine were toast. God knows who wrote theirs. Some people got screwed, in my opinion.

 

Right you are, Write. Way too subjective and way too much power in the hands of imperfect managers.

Hate the idea that people might get valued according to the role they happen to have or fill at the moment, too. There probably are a dozen or two people in that newsroom who are "playing out of position" because of some need situation in the past, yet might get dumped because their current positions aren't deemed invaluable enough. Punishes the whole concept of team player-ism at that point.

If a joint is going to thin the herd that way, it might as well go the Lean Dean route and have people re-apply for their own, and other folks', jobs. At least you might get a playground pickup game-style of team selection then.

 

Plus, many of the most important talents of reporters/writers are somewhat intrinsic and esoteric, and not always easily seen or measured: news sense and recognition, creative thinking and approaches to problem-solving, general outside-the-boxy-ness and sophistication of story ideas, trustiness in the eyes of sources, empathy, toughness and the guts to ask questions that maybe others wouldn't, historical contacts/context, forward-thinking and foresight...

The perceptiveness needed to see such things, and to understand and value them in others, is considerable. Not all editors/managers have it.

 

Damn.

I think the best thing to say is good luck to those looking for new work. I hope everyone lands on their feet.

 

Everything in this thread is germane, of course, but note: I was asked to rank my staff from top to bottom to single out who'd be at the bottom for possible layoffs/buyouts at a current Tribune Company paper -- in 1995.

The concept, while containing all the flaws mentioned here, is nothing new.

 

For clutchcargo and others who would claim the chickens are coming home to roost because of the L.A. Times' "liberalism" (and before you bother, I know that it's a source with a vested interest in all this):

(Editor Russ) Stanton also said on KCRW that on the list of reasons that ex-readers give for dropping the Times, "too liberal" ranks 4th — and "too conservative" ranks 5th.

From L.A. Observed.