I read the Times every day for nearly 20 years.  Firing Scheer was bad enough- he was more than enough to counterbalance the repulsive ‘editorials’ of Cal Thomas and the like-but when Jonah Goldberg was brought on board for ‘balance’, that was the last straw for me.

I wouldn’t even line the litter box with it.

RIP, LA Times.

“It breaks my heart”.

ditto.

I was a subscriber for over 20 yrs - now get the Sunday NYTimes, and am thinking of getting it daily…...what a fabulous edition today, is a paper you keep all week.

....LATimes came so close.

Guess we’re preaching to the chior here - let’s hope LA can grasp it away from the Trib-soon.

Here’s the sad story of the LA Times:

Each day a copy of the paper arrives outside the doors of my office building, sometimes wrapped in protective plastic, always just where people must step over or around it.  And that’s where it remains throughout the day—unclaimed, unwrapped and unread.  Day after day.  Forget about dwindling circulation, no one will even steal the paper now.

Do I believe that a good many top-notch journalists still struggle to make the Times a class paper?  Yes.  Do I believe the Times bleeds credibility and talent with every ill-conceived reorganization and editorial shuffle?  Undoubtedly.  And do I believe the blame goes to the big board room in the Tribune Tower?  Absolutely.

The paper remains, but the voice is gone.  And whether you were a Bob Scheer fan or a Michael Kinsley admirer, what’s left on the sidewalk now isn’t even worth bending over to pick up.

It breaks my heart.

As Louise says, who wants to wade thru pages of Advertising when there’s no content? This illustrates the new ratio of advertising vs editorial content that has re-created the print media today. 

I beg to differ tho, and say that previous advertising was also more interesting, seemed to be designed by creators with competition in mind….not the cheapest way possible.

True, younger generations make their own news-is what makes life interesting and more challanging-and how we grow as a population.  This said, a newspaper should reflect not only these changes in society, but how it effects the entire population. One thing missing with this paper is the support of conceptual thought, through editorial comment and investigative reporting. Gone are the ideas, FACTS, if you may - for the reader to decide for themselves where they stand, not only politically - but how these events effect us as a nation…..and, how one can get involved to make change.

The bubble is already bursting as far as the economy goes. Folks are getting hit everywhere with rising gas prices, taxes and consumer goods. Americans are on to the bogus faux economy being force fed to them - and acting accordingly, which is to hoard what money they have until the system either changes-or completely flops like a dead fish. Denying basic services in return to shipping cash to foreign countries without regard - and told to ‘go shopping’ has totally failed, imho.

The fact that to get ‘real news’, one has to invest top $$ every 3 years for a decent computer, and high-speed connections for $30/month adds up to a subscription to a really good daily newspaper that in turn, offers employment for alot of people at a decent living wage.

Seems to be a no-brainer to me….but t hen, I like to read - and hold the 4th Estate sacred.

Publish or Perish.

I met Bill Boyarsky many years ago when he made a presentaton to local civic group. At the time I thought him cold and cynical. This article shows him to be caring and I think right on in his analysis. We keep on gettingt the Times at our house but we have noticed the decline in quality. We keep hoping that it stops. I understand that it still nets (ROI) 20%. WOW! I wish I could find an investment Like that.

Intelligent people of conscience, whether journalists or not resist spoon feeding those who are perfectly capable of feeding themselves.

If the food is palatable, if the consumer is hungry, he will eat. If he chooses not to, he will go hungry. Or, if the food is not palatable he will push away from the table and go find something that is. Spoon feeding wont change that ... just wastes the time and effort of the feeder and the fed.

Long way of saying if there’s nothing appetizing in print today, why should anyone waste their time plowing through endless adds and hollow words if another choice is available?

What no-one wants to talk about is the obvious! Adds and meaningless diatribe where news and intelligent commentary use to be holds no appeal for people spoiled by what use to be. And, young people make their own news. They have no interest in pretending to be interested in that which is monumentally uninteresting!

The internet gives people who really do want to see all sides of a story the opportunity to do so. Why should anyone pay for a pile of paper that is missing what they want, when with the click of a mouse they can get what they’re looking for?

We all know the advertisers pay for the publishing. And we all know if they aren’t getting a return on their investment they wont advertise. And of course we all know there has to be a dividend for the investors at the end of the day. These may be important factors to the success of a newspaper, but doesn’t mean squat if nobody’s reading it! When it comes right down to it, the least important factor in the equation for the publisher seems to be the reader who buys the paper! Which brings me back to that intelligence and conscience thing.

All across our society we see people trained to the bottom line who think investor before quality of product. They are as incapable of perceiving the needs of the consumer as Rumsfeld was of seeing the needs of the military, or Bush is of seeing the will of the people. They are symptoms of a society in collapse. Protect the investor, (money) hang the consumer!

Intelligent people of conscience, whether journalists or not have a daily battle to face. Do I give the consumer what he has a right to expect? After all, he’s the guy buying the product! Or should I flip the consumer off in favor of pleasing the “think advertising, think investor” boss who is completely indifferent to consumer needs?

Capitalism may be a good thing, but it’s only as good as the consumer base that keeps it alive. All the investors in the world can’t make capitalism work if nobody buys the product. That is the bottom line that the “trained to the bottom line” folks don’t understand! And lest you think I am overstating the fact or generalizing, take a look around at our product base. Then take a look around at the shrinking consumer dollar.

Then forget everything you keep hearing about this great economy. If you are part of the minority percentage who actually can afford to invest in stock, it’s looking pretty good. And, if you are and you’re not paying attention to the shrinking buying power of the majority consumers, you might want to figure out what you’re going to do when the bubble bursts.

I was a Times subscriber for more than 20 years but dropped it when they dropped Robert Scheer.  I’m amazed at how little I miss it.  The LA Times has been declining for years and seems to be content with the situation.  I miss the Times I used to read daily but not the pale imitation of a newspaper it has become.

The destruction of the Times proceeds apace. The latest announcement is that the Sunday Current section will be renamed Opinion and merged with the Book Review (?!!). The Sunday magazine section has been gutted and no longer appears to contain serious content. On the other hand, the paper has launched a new fashion section called Image and has expanded coverage of Hollywood in its Calendar section. Clearly, the “vision” that Charles Bobrinskoy arrogantly described in the recent Frontline documentary is proceeding at breakneck pace.

I have subscribed to the Times for almost 30 years. I will be canceling my Sunday subscription, and am seriously considering canceling my daily service.  I guess getting long-time subscribers to cancel is one way to skew the demographics toward a younger audience.

The demise of the Times has been a tragic loss to the citizens of Los Angeles, Southern Cal - in all.

The loss of a once vibrant reflection of international interest, reader participation, editorial and investigative reporting and illustrative graphic quality-from this region that won so many awards has seperated, disconnected our society in SoCal. This is reflective in the entire country with corporate take-overs for cash-only profits. 

The fact that the leading newspapers in this country are ‘liberal biased’  is a total farce.  With corporate takeover, they have been replaced as a commodity, much like soybeans and pork bellies.

Sadly, gone are the days of investigative reporting - to get to the truth and print ‘All The News That’s Fit To Print’. Scabs like Andrés Martinez, leaving the sinking ship because of a conflict in his love nest exposes him and the others to their shallow belief of what a newspaper really is - as if these MidWestern Chicago economists even cared if the the paper survived, or not.

The Tribune crew who came in and dismantled OUR newspaper never got the ‘clue’ that advertisers would leave in droves once they realized that nobody was reading this watered-down lily-livered feel-good rag. Armed with desktop publishing software and oatmeal for brains, they’ve managed to destroy a once terrific institution, much like the clowns in the Casa Blanca.

We readers will come back, but not until all the rats leave the ship and fly back in their Leer jets to the lap of Milton Friedman, where they belong.

The Opinion section has been a disaster since Kinsley took it over, and the daily columnists are mostly not much better. I used to boast about these sections when Scheer, Huffington, and others wrote for them regularly. I think it is unfortunate for the Times to focus on the “girlfriend” and scandal aspect of this; things were not much better pre-Frasier. What once vied with the NY Times section is now pitiful compared to NYT section. As the LATimes letters show, those who read the section dislike their right-wing or smarmy columnists.

As I see it the problem is the loss of ambition at the TIMES that started when Otis Chandler retired. He had a vision - to make the TIMES the voice of the Pacific Coast and of the largest state with the most diverse economy. More importantly, he wanted to break the monopoly of the East Coast papers (NYT, WaPo, WSJ) and New York as the determiner of all trends, political, social, and cultural, in this country. By the sixties that was - simply - no longer a viable strategy.

Alas, the Chandler family is not the Sulzberger family. All the cousin (reckoned by the dozens) cared about were their dividend checks and their disdain for the paper’s “Leftist” writers - meaning anyone to the left of the John Birch Society. So they sold out to midwestern yokels content to be regional monopolists.

It is a tragedy to watch the steady lobotomization of the paper and, combined with the takeover of the local “alternative” weeklies by a crew from Phoenix, is another sign that LA is just not going to matter that much. We may be the largest county but there are no local corporate HQs - the banks are in Carolina. And Sacramento is another world. When Arnold leaves no one will give a damn!

These developments at the Los Angeles Times remind me of the award that the Society of Professional Journalists gave to New York Times writer Judith Miller.

Her reporting, apparently based on false and misleading information from the Bush-Cheney administration, helped promote the invasion of Iraq.

The field of journalism is a mixed bag with honest and ethical reporters and writers alongside of propaganda agents.

I am thankful that I received my journalism training at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio—which has some of the top journalism, communications, media and broadcasting programs in the country.

People need to be very careful about accepting what they hear on radio, watch on TV and read in newspapers, including prestigious major papers—and what major professional journalism associations do. For more on this, see:

“Society of Professional Journalists’ Award to Judith Miller Helps Cover-Up?”

Steve Hammons
American Chronicle
October 27, 2005

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=3287

I am not at all certain what journalism is. For large corporately-owned media, it is income. But, what it is, otherwise, escapes me, for it appears to present two heads, even when not money-motivated:
It informs that we conform, that appears to be its primary role, as it is for all members of a society. In totalitarian societies, that role is forcibly imposed, in more democratic ones more subtly so.
In informs that we reform. That is its nobler ethic. It rises to that level on occasion.
I would like to observe some classes on journalism to see what ethic is instilled there, as I have observed classes on mental health and seen the societal biases imposed there. How does one approach the idea of reporting without bias, when society itself biases reporting? That is of course the highest ethic of a free press, but first it has to free itself.
Harold A. Maio
Board Member
Partners in Crisis
Former Consulting Editor
Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal
Boston University
Language Consultant
UPENN Collaborative on Community Integration
of Individuals with Psychiatric Disabilities
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