Sound and fury, signifying...?

There's a lot off hand wringing going on today about the departure of James O'Shea from the LA Times, but we may all be missing something here. The new management of the Times wanted to cut the newsroom budget, specifically foreign bureaus, and focus resources on the Olympics and the Presidential campaign. I'm not sure that's a bad idea right now. It might be an even better idea for the Times to focus on being a local paper and maybe start attracting readers beyond the politically and culturally elite of the LA basin.



I was in the LA area for a couple of weeks for vacation this summer (vacation in LA?) and got to see something of the real LA culture and people. They are concerned about their jobs, their health and, surprisingly enough, their community. And they are reading publications that focus on those things. They are not reading the Times.



So, like I said, maybe the new Times management has an idea about how to get readership, and as a result advertising, up. It's something to consider.

Comments

  1. John KellerFebruary 4, 2008 at 10:09 PM

    Lou, I grew up in L.A., and read the Times every day. Reading the Times is like eating your vegetables -- you do it because it's good for you, not because it's all that enjoyable. It's a publication that tries to be an East Coast paper in a West Coast town, and doesn't do a very good job of it. What you get is a paper with a sense of self-importance that can be a very dull read. I didn't realize how dull the Times was, however, until later in life when I lived and worked in Washington and read the Post. L.A. can be a very funny and weird place, but unfortunately there's very little funny and weird about the Times. You make a good point that perhaps the Times should be more of a local paper. The paper seems so detached that it's not even part of Southern California.

    John Keller

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