Talk of the 'Times'
Despite the advice, will Tribune Co. devise a workable plan to save L.A.'s daily?
By Mick Farren
This column has never overly concerned itself with the interior machinations of local media. The profits and losses, the internal intrigues, the hiring and firing in Los Angeles print, TV, and radio are well documented elsewhere, especially by the excellent Kevin Roderick on his website LA Observed. My interest has always been media's impact on the consumer, and the cultural and political environment.
Thus I might have ignored the October 5 press release from Tribune Publishing, announcing that it had "named David D. Hiller president, publisher and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Times, effective immediately. He succeeds Jeff Johnson, who resigned today." I would have merely smiled when L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke called LAT editor Dean Baquet "a gutless wonder" for not quitting in support of the ousted Johnson. Indeed, I might have dismissed the whole deal as not on my waterfront, except all the upheavals, changes of course, editorial bloodletting, and the constantly falling circulation beg a crucial question. Why can't a city with a population in excess of four million support a quality broadsheet?
The blame falls most heavily on the Chicago-based Tribune Company, which, since its purchase of the Times in 2000, has relentlessly cut costs and conducted serial purges of editorial staff. Rumor claims Tribune will not be happy until it sees the paper yield something approaching an 18 percent return on its investment, which - in this era of dizzy communications flux - is nothing short of absurd. Equally absurd is Tribune's notion of a miracle formula that will entice under-30s to read hard-copy newspapers, and raise the Times' circulation back above the million mark.
The two words that spring to mind are "get real." The young demographic won't suddenly start reading newspapers, especially in a city with minimal mass transit, where the habit of buying a paper to read on the bus or subway isn't imprinted on youthful commuters. Also, some of the Times' supposed appeals to the youth market have been nothing short of bizarre. Music reviews of Paris Hilton and treating Britney Spears as relevant are as ungainly as an elderly aunt posing as hip, and give the impression of a schizophrenic publication attempting to be all things to all readers. Even more distasteful is the feeling that the Los Angeles Times is soullessly searching for a marketable political philosophy - alienating both left and right by trying to please a center that either doesn't care or doesn't even exist.
Confusing design makeovers and the renaming of sections, coupled with fiascos like Michael Kinsley's 2005 "wikitorial" experiment or the arbitrary firing of op-ed columnist Robert Scheer and editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez (sacrifice one from the left and one from the right), further tagged the Times as the paper ducked any controversy - other than its own.
Amid tales of angry T-shirts and mutiny in the Times newsrooms, plenty of advice has been forthcoming. Rumors of a consortium of billionaires - with David Geffen as the celeb name - plotting to buy the Times were greeted by Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, with the advice that they should forget the Times - in fact, forget about print - and put their money into creating a new web-based news venture with superior local coverage to goose Tribune into serving L.A. instead of its corporate bottom line. Recently in the Times' own "Current" Sunday opinion section, Kinsley also argued for an improved online edition, but then suggested that salvation was national rather than local. Make LAT the core of a composite of the best Tribune papers that could compete with The New York Times and Washington Post, scoring with what Kinsley dubbed L.A.'s "dominant infotainment-media-celebrity complex." Unfortunately, this hybrid sounds like a horrid precompromised variation on USA Today, which - if Tribune listens to Kingsley one more time - would basically make Los Angeles the city with no newspaper.
Published: 10/19/2006
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