Your blog posts are insightful. I will take them into deep thought and consideration. Your point of view is very smart and intellectual. Charlie…

The Times has sold its objective soul and become a propagandist on so many occasions that it no longer realizes how corrupt and double minded it has become. Just because “everyone else is doing it” doesn’t make it alright. All the more reason to not follow the herd.

It still occasionally puts out some good work but in my opinion it is has become a non objective propagandist rag.

That’s the reason I won’t buy it anymore … and I know a lot of people who feel that way. Frankly I don’t care if the paper goes under … It is sad that their is barely any media anymore that have not become either entertainment or propagandists… Objective journalism has become a misnomer in our day and age.

As I said, Jon Carrol and Bad Reporter. Bad Reporter’s actually funnier than Hoppe was when he’d devolved into recycling the same bits (although he’s not far from reaching that point himself) and Jon Carroll is almost as literate as McCabe, especially given the generational differnce.. He, of course, hasn’t decided to hand himself over to the bottle, so he’s not quite as much fun to read. The “New” Herb – Leah Garchick – is a drag. What’s most depressing isn’t that the cream of the Chron’s crop are all dead, but that as a “major” daily in what it’s fair to call a major city with a pretty well-educated, politicized and cultured populace it’s always been read mostly for entertainment.

The LA metropolis is absolutely huge and the Tribune company should be ecstatic with a 20% profit margin in the very difficult newspaper industry.

There are very few good newspapers left in this country, and the LA Times was one of them … LA is a simply massive metropolis of maybe 30 million if you count SB, LA and Orange Counties.

If anything the paper needs to hire more reporters and get stronger.

Edmund Davis-Quinn
subscriber to LA Times for 2 years: 2000-2001

You’d think with our diaspora populations there’d be in depth coverage at least of Iran, Korea, China and Vietnam. All of these have undergone enormous changes, about which most of us really don’t have an inkling, and yet we need to evaluate questions of trade, culture, religion, war and peace.

Just take Iran. I have enough Iranian friends to know the stuff about the return of the 12th Imam and whether Ahmadinejad was at the Embassy is interesting but only a fraction of what changes are going on there. How did guys like Rafsanjani get so rich? What are there interests? How are women being educated there these days (it’s no Saudi Arabia in that respect)? What books are best sellers? How many scientists are there–do they want to leave or make nukes? If unemployment is really over 20%, tell us about the underground economy that must exist. Yadda yadda.

There are educated and increasingly wealthy communities who still have a great interest in those places (as should the rest of us).

You won’t learn about it in the Whale, foreign bureaux or not. Unfortunately not in many places, except the New Yorker, now and then.

I first read the LA Times at age 6 in 1969, and was PRIVILEGED to watch it undergo a flowering of journalism during the 1970s under Otis Chandler’s tutelage. As a literate, politicized kid (I lived in Chile in 1971-73 just like MC), I was amazed at how the Times allowed long, wordy, in-depth articles, and did not constantly parrot East Coast corporate right wing causes or even Israeli propaganda; Conrad’s cartoons alone stood for so much. The paper was fun: sports, led by the incomparable Jim Murray; The Food Section, with World-foodie Jonathan Gold before he left for the LA Weekly; whimsical Jack Smith; the hip comics page; the brilliant Howard Rosenberg on TV; the cool “Pop Eye”; and Robert Hilburn’s discussion-provoking ramblings in the Calendar section. As a teen my family moved to the “OC” and thank GOD we read the Times compared to the pathetic, shrill OC Register.

When I took a mass media course at UC Irvine I marveled at the Times’ attempts at Pacific Rim/ “Third World” perspective, which actually paid some attention to us Latinos compared to the East Coast blowhards. The late Frank Del Olmo ‘s columns were always good reads.

I agree with the earlier post about NYT and Wash Post insularity. These papers supported the genocidal attack on Iraq, which the LA Times did not. I’d like to think this has to do with the Times seeing LA as a 21st century world city –and reflecting that perspective–while the NYT and WP are bastions of dated Cold War US imperial primacy.

Sadly, as the 1990s passed the Times lost its lustre, and then came the buyout by the dinosaur (“Dewey defeats Truman”? Please!) Chicago Tribune. Many good reporters left the paper, like Robert Reich, Robert Scheer, Robin Wright, Brian Lowry, and the late Bella Stumbo, who interviewed me as a kid returning from Chile in 1973. And losing Manohla Dargis in LA was a crying shame!

Regarding “local coverage”; that is not the issue. I feel it is about world coverage with a local bent. Read the OC Register to see how insular, homogenized and xenophobic “ local” papers can be. Los Angeles needs a world-class paper to teach people about the world (I am an idealist, deal with it) and help prepare us for a new century, not the ignorant, historically amnesiac media spun by corporate USA under GW Bush.

Unlike many of you, my relationship with the LA Times has been ongoing for 37 years, longer than girlfriends, jobs, homes, and hairstyles. I read it less, its journalistic quality is faded; yet sometimes resources are spent on trenchant investigative stories and supporting people like Pulitzer Prize-winning Carolyn Cole: she’s a masterful, humanistic photojournalist, and took a stand against Israeli atrocities in Jerusalem with her pictures. Let’s see THAT in the NY Times. I wish the editor and publisher of the LA Times –always “The Times” for me– the best.

Thank you Marc for your post recent posts about torture and Iraq, y siempre por Chile.

Right on, what happens in Berlin and Jakarta has absolutely no relevance at all to the lives of Southern Californians. Nor what happens in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or any of those funny foreign lands, right? Thanks for a nice demonstration of the provincialism that makes people think we can invade and occupy a country without knowing anything about it or its people.

The real problem is how to get Americans more interested in staying informed. Forget about the LA Times washout, the election of W as president is the strongest evidence out there that a growing segment of Americans choose to stay in the dark about what’s actually happening in the world.

Newspaper journalism is under assault primarily from consumer culture. Market forces are merely acting as enforcers of the trend.

To be sure, Tribune management is somewhat irresponsible, but have faith, market forces are having their way with them too. As individuals, they may parachute out and move on to greener pastures, but the company won’t if it stays on its current path.

Market forces will not correct the bigger problems facing newspaper journalism. The LA Times has been “dying” and in the process of being “gutted” for as long as I can remember, and I danced to Oingo Boingo at Madame Wong’s West, if you need a reference to date me.

My third-baked theory is that everything’s going online and the newspaper as we know it cannot survive that. The benefit of “community” derived from broadly-based regional and local newspapers will be replaced with the benefit of communities of association, such as the one at marccooper.com.

(As an aside, my offer still stands to become a paying subscriber if and when Marc severs his pact with the execrable Pajama boys.)

And yes, the velvet coffin will have to find a new home outside the daily newspaper and that will be for the greater good of mankind.

Others have made great points, but I’d add that
Los Angeles requires a national paper with an international scope AND with great local coverage. It’s not an “either or” proposition. More than any US metropolis, LA is both a national and international city. Almost everyone has roots and family in others states, or in other countries and is a hub for commerce, finance, and immigration for the entire Pacific Rim and for nations to the south.

The NY Times has it merits (excellent writing for one) but also suffers from the gross myopia and arrogance typical to a narrow strata of a small geographic slice of Manhattan. It will be a sad day for journalism — and citizenship — when the LA Times surrenders world and national reporting to leave us entirely at the whim of the NYT and the inside-the-beltway Washington Post. Fact is, there is life and culture and politics west of the Mississippi – and we have a different national perspective from this western viewpoint.

The LAT has had a lot of difficulty providing adequate local coverage. They’ve done some awesome investigative reporting on local institutions. Stellar work. But LA is a complicated collection of cities and they do a poor job of covering local government and politics. But cutting non-local bureaus and other staff will not help one bit to improve local coverage. Their research has likely shown (again and again) that there is an ever-narrowing readership for detailed news that serves local citizenship. Until someone proves some fresh approach to local coverage will generate more subscribers or advertisers, that’s unlikely to change.

Sad thing is, if the LA Times really was A BUSINESS, instead of just one“asset” in some out of town media corporation, good managers would not be trying to squeeze out more profit. They’d take a big chunk of that hugely-successful 20% yearly operating surplus and plow it into new initiatives and experiments that might insure the future viability of the whole business.

Instead, these corporate weasels see no real future in newspapers, despite any rhetoric to the contrary, so their primary plan for this “asset” is to squeeze out as much juice as possible before it runs completely dry.

And yes, New Times is about to do the same to LA Weekly, only twenty or thirty times faster, and with far fewer people paying any attention.

Banquet & Johnson are heroes for taking so public a stand.

But, my dear…um… Mr. Getty, you certainly have a point about the Atlanta bureau—both literally and metaphorically.

By the Times’ own account, it has 11 national bureaus, 22 foreign bureaus and four California bureaus. It has more reporters in Atlanta than Altadena. These outlying bureaus don’t fulfill the Times’ local news mission and they are expensive to operate.

The Times could preserve and even enhance local news coverage, while satisfying Tribune profit demands, by eliminating these bureaus. It might bruise the egos of some Times reporters and editors who view the newspaper as a world-class institution, but its readers live in Southern California, not Berlin, Jakarta or even Chico.

It’s time to be realistic about what the Times can and can’t do.

I first read the LA Times at age 6 in 1969, and was PRIVILEGED to watch it undergo a flowering of journalism during the 1970s under Otis Chandler’s tutelage. As a literate, politicized kid (I lived in Chile in 1971-73 just like MC), I was amazed at how the Times allowed long, wordy, in-depth articles, and did not constantly parrot East Coast corporate right wing causes or even Israeli propaganda; Conrad’s cartoons alone stood for so much. The paper was fun: sports, led by the incomparable Jim Murray; The Food Section, with World-foodie Jonathan Gold before he left for the LA Weekly; whimsical Jack Smith; the hip comics page; the brilliant Howard Rosenberg on TV; the cool “Pop Eye”; and Robert Hilburn’s discussion-provoking ramblings in the Calendar section. As a teen my family moved to the “OC” and thank GOD we read the Times compared to the pathetic, shrill OC Register.

When I took a mass media course at UC Irvine I marveled at the Times’ attempts at Pacific Rim/ “Third World” perspective, which actually paid some attention to us Latinos compared to the East Coast blowhards. The late Frank Del Olmo ‘s columns were always good reads.

I agree with the earlier post about NYT and Wash Post insularity. These papers supported the genocidal attack on Iraq, which the LA Times did not. I’d like to think this has to do with the Times seeing LA as a 21st century world city –and reflecting that perspective–while the NYT and WP are bastions of dated Cold War US imperial primacy.

Sadly, as the 1990s passed the Times lost its lustre, and then came the buyout by the dinosaur (“Dewey defeats Truman”? Please!) Chicago Tribune. Many good reporters left the paper, like Robert Reich, Robert Scheer, Robin Wright, Brian Lowry, and the late Bella Stumbo, who interviewed me as a kid returning from Chile in 1973. And losing Manohla Dargis in LA was a crying shame!

Regarding “local coverage”; that is not the issue. I feel it is about world coverage with a local bent. Read the OC Register to see how insular, homogenized and xenophobic “ local” papers can be. Los Angeles needs a world-class paper to teach people about the world (I am an idealist, deal with it) and help prepare us for a new century, not the ignorant, historically amnesiac media spun by corporate USA under GW Bush.

Unlike many of you, my relationship with the LA Times has been ongoing for 37 years, longer than girlfriends, jobs, homes, and hairstyles. I read it less, its journalistic quality is faded; yet sometimes resources are spent on trenchant investigative stories and supporting people like Pulitzer Prize-winning Carolyn Cole: she’s a masterful, humanistic photojournalist, and took a stand against Israeli atrocities in Jerusalem with her pictures. Let’s see THAT in the NY Times. I wish the editor and publisher of the LA Times –always “The Times” for me– the best.

Thank you Marc for your post recent posts about torture and Iraq, y siempre por Chile.