RIP: Agate in LAT sports pages

Oh, certainly... I realize with the new owners came all those positive changes. It just amazes me to see LAT continue retrenching like that.

I do believe LAT would benefit from new ownership. If someone could come in and breathe new life into the paper that would be great, because it's sure a far cry from what it was.

 

It's kind of sad seeing what the LA Times has become. Did a paper on the LAT for a college journalism class and an English class. Fascinating history with the Chandlers, Gen. Otis etc. Always thought a newspaper publishing family in the 40s and 50s would make for an interesting TV drama, between the political and business dealings, the family scandals and tragedies...

 

Katherine Graham and family maybe could be a decent subject.

 

It did make for a great documentary.

http://www.peterjonesproductions.com/documentaries/Inventing_LA.html

 

The "they can find that anywhere" reasoning is now the "they're finding it somewhere else because we're not giving it to them and, gee, I don't understand why we're losing circulation" line of reasoning that so many editors have adopted.

 

Also, doing agate is the way just about every sportswriter ever got into the business as a high school- or college-age person, no?

 

My paper is schizophrenic when it comes to agate. Basically whatever we don't run is wrong, even if the editor told us not to run it. Agate space keeps decreasing yet they keep increasing the content that one reader with a complaint wants in there (we don't run bowling agate, one reader wants to know why there wasn't bowling agate in the paper, we now run bowling agate).

The editor is also big on getting two-day old agate into the paper if it was late the day before, so that's even more space wasted. Somehow the line of thought is that people who complain that they don't have a game story in the paper today are completely alleviated by having the game agate in tomorrow's paper, two days later.

 

No.