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

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

Clutch, I'll refrain from the name-calling, but as Michael Gee beat me to the punch about this earlier, Otis Chandler turned the LA Times from a right-wing mouthpiece of Richard Nixon and the SoCal Power Elite into a moderate, left-of-center paper.

It's held this editorial stance long enough to top out at nearly 1.3 million in circulation before the reasons posted by Fishwrapper and others neatly defined why it's around 800,000 today. And as a lifelong reader (and one-time employee), it's not the paper it once was -- but is still better than 99.98% of the papers out there today.

Read David Halberstam's masterpiece "The Powers That Be" if you want to get the full, unvarnished story in living color. But I assure you the drop had nothing to do with the paper's editorial stance, just as I assure you that if it stayed a right-wing rag, it never would have seen 1.3 million in circulation.

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

Like I said on another thread, being an objective member of the media can inheriently make you a liberal. Just by reporting a story in an objective way can be seen as liberal, because conservatives, by definition, want things to stay the same.

Look at Upton Sinclair. He wrote about rats in sausage factories. He wasn't the one who put the rats in the factories, he merely wrote what he saw. Many conservatives considered him a radical, because his reporting interfered with big business' lassiez-faire attitude about doing business. Nevermind that the same conservatives who were howling about how clean food regulations was socialism were the same ones eating the sausage in restaurants.

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

At risk of really going off topic here, I think better definitions of American conservatism and liberalism is over the size and power of government, especially the federal government, rather than wanting change.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he wanted things to change, not stay the same. I also believe in 1988, when campaigning for George Herbert Walker Bush he said, "We are the change," to respond to Democrats' call for change by electing Michael S. Dukakis president.

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

The well off/not well off divide in Los Angeles has made it even tougher to appeal to the masses as a general-circulation product. The upper middle class (and those that think they are, such as those in entertainment) read online, for free. The lower middle class have dramatically different lives, which don't include much time for leisure reading of any sort, whether it's English or not. The middle class has left much of the area.

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

The problem is that the truth has a well known liberal bias.
Back to the LA Times.
I remember being out west a few years back fro vacation and per my newspaper nerdiness, I picked up a copy of the LA Times every day and I was just astonished how good it was.
I just wonder what Otis Chandler would say about all of this, if he was still alive.

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

Something like: "Help! Let me out of here! You buried me alive! Help!"






Too soon?

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

You realize the government grew immensely under Reagan? George W Bush has greatly increased the power of the executive branch?

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

It's not simply the reporting of a story, as a presumption of seeking "change."

It's the approach that a lot of folks in our business brought to it, a creed that some papers even have hanging on their newsroom walls somewhere: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

That has a liberal tilt to it, right? And the folks drawn to this business to "do some good" typically are driven by something other than profit motives.

All those newsrooms through all those years that have painstakingly tried to maintain their editorial independence from the business side of media haven't traditionally been trying to dig a moat between themselves and all the lefties in the publishers' suite.

I'm more troubled by some who deny that there might be a liberal tilt than by the tilt itself. But, I must add, I'm not talking abou the L.A. Times specifically -- my earlier post had to do with a couple of markets where the dominant papers are quite clearly left-leaning.

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

Don't forget that government is a little more accountable than big bidness. Try getting big bidness to respond to an FOIA request.

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

For a segment of the conservative population, growth in government is sweet stuff, as long as you're a direct business beneficiary.

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

So this has nothing to do with the LA Times, but the opinion of some of assumed journalists who post on SportsJournalists.com is that a paper should reflect the collective opinion of the community?
And that would apply the editorial page?
So the paper's edit page should not take an unpopular stance?
What I'm leading to is all those Southern papers that stood up for civil rights, they shouldn't have done that? I just kind of wonder what happened to doing the right thing because it was right.

 

Re: LA Times layoffs rumor

Them were the days.