Goodbye Los Angeles Times

I canceled my subscription to the Los Angeles Times today. I'd been thinking about it for a while but today's edition (Sunday, April 5th) pushed me over the edge.

First of all, I have to admit I love newspapers. I grew up reading the New York Times, which was delivered in the morning and the liberal New York Post my father brought home from work at night. Moving to Los Angeles thirty years ago, one of the first things I did was buy a subscription to the LA Times. I loved the quiet time leafing through the pages, the opinion pieces, the local news and letters to the editor, Calendar (The Arts and Entertainment section), and especially pouring over the huge sports section.

We'd spend hours every Sunday morning, lounging around the living room, swapping the travel and magazine sections, the extra large Calendar and sports section and enjoying the calmness the ritual would bring.

Not anymore. On the front page today was a profile of a woman with a deformed face. Not that there is anything wrong with a profile like that, but it took up more than half the front page. No mention of Obama in Europe or the NATO talks. I'm sure they could have shrunk the typeface on "Ana's Story" and fit another two articles in, but they chose not to.

The front page of the Sunday Calendar section, which used to be a "must read" for people in the industry was taken up by a three-quarters page cartoon and lead for an article about extras in Hollywood. A piece which years ago might have made page fifteen, took over all but the right column. Another waste of space.

Finally the straw that broke the camel's back. The Sunday sports section. On the day after the Final Four games were played, a day before the baseball season opens, when the Lakers are gearing up for the playoffs and USC is trying to figure out who their quarterback will be, this was the front page of the sports section. Two leads about the Final Four games and a column about horse racing. That's it, folks. The rest of the page was taken up with a large ad and a huge color cartoon of a Dodger and an Angel crawling somewhere. Beats me where they're crawling to. Home plate? A finish line? Who cares? But it took up at least half the page. It trumpeted their "Baseball: 2009" coverage which consisted of some local coverage, barely any mention of the other teams in the league and lots and lots of very large pictures. It was pathetic. The Sunday Los Angeles Times, which used to take a minimum of two hours to read, took me nineteen minutes today.

This afternoon I went to the annual local arts fair held in the neighborhood. There was a booth for home delivery of the New York Times. I made a beeline and signed up. As I filled out the paper work at least a dozen people stopped by to inquire and complain about the LA Times. Nobody likes the LA Times. It's become an embarrassment, like someone who wears an obvious toupee. They think they're fooling people but they look even worse. If it weren't for the slim sports section and the movie schedules, the paper would be history. Oh and did I mention that since they switched to cheaper ink, I can't read the paper without sneezing?

This is nothing against the excellent writers who still toil for the LA Times. It's not their fault that gross mismanagement has destroyed their work. Did I feel guilty canceling the local paper? Sure. I'm cutting off a once vital link to my city. But did the Tribune Company feel guilty when they slashed the budgets and destroyed a grand and powerful cornerstone of the city? I doubt it. I simply cannot justify paying the money they charge for such an inferior product.

Well, I guess I'll start DVRing the local news to see what's happening in town. (It's still not worth it to miss Keith Olbermann at 5 or "The Daily Show" at 11.) If we want to go to a movie, I'll check the Internet. For sports I'll check online and ESPN. Problem solved.

This was a lifelong habit I never wanted to break, but Sam Zell and company forced my hand. It's just sad how corporate greed has destroyed even the little pleasures in life.

Stu Kreisman is the author of Dick Cheney's Diary available here, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.

Comments

[posnak]

Hi Stu.

Love your style and point of view. But then, I always did -- dating back to my days at the South Shore Record. You're funnier and more incisive than ever. Love to the folks. H.L.

[LKitsch]

You don't do journalism any favors by canceling your subscription out of spite. It's OK to cancel if you don't use the product, but please dispense with the "message sending." You can do what I do and subscribe to both a local paper, the Times, and the NY Times for the full breadth and depth of coverage I want.

I wish people would stop characterizing the changes in the news industry as some kind of insidious attack on our intellect and American democracy. The news industry is changing due to technological progress, so accept it and move on. I suppose there were those who bemoaned the loss of horses, blacksmiths and livery stables when the first Model T's started puttering down the streets of America 100 years ago, but most people adapted to the new technology and never looked back.

Journalism will never go away. How it is gathered and disseminated will change. The Greeks wrote plays and now we can see them on our computers. The core value remains as long as it can adapt to new forms of delivery. It's ironic to see the obituary of print newspapers featured in one of the major instruments of their demise, since the Huff Post is one of the most popular news aggregators in the US today.

Finally, that guy from OK was right---compared to a lot of metropolitan dailies, the LA Times, even though it ain't what it used to be, is still a great paper.

[Roopez123]

Besides subscribing to the LA and NY Times, maybe we should all subscribe to the Sporting News for sports, the Wall St. Journal for business news, TV Guide for the tv listings and People magazine for the gossip.

You're wrong that the change is due to technical progress. It's due to cost-cutting short cuts. Apples and oranges. The fact that you have to subscribe to two papers to be well informed proves exactly what the author is saying.

[LKitsch]

Quite the contrary---I have always subscribed to a number of newspapers and magazines in order to get a multitude of different viewpoints and perspectives. News is not a commodity to be consumed as quickly and cheaply as possible, but a well informed public has the responsibility to seek out different sources of news in the marketplace of ideas. Even the venerable NY Times is bested from time to time by other journalism sources.

The change is due to the fact that newspaper management did not do a good job of adapting to changing technologies. The smart blacksmiths and livery stables learned how to fix and garage cars when they saw all those Fords running about. Smart newspaper publishers should learn how to adapt to the changing nature of the information slipstream---to some extent the NY Times, with its robust website and national edition, has done a better job than many in doing so. So yes, it is both apples and oranges, and nothing wrong with smart cost cutting.

[AnnfromCA]

The paper has done nothing, really, but restructure for over a decade.

That's just a waste of time and energy. Meanwhile, they remained hopelessly out-of-date.

[SoCalSoCool]

"The Times is now comprised of a bunch of wire stories, and is put together like a high school newspaper. It breaks my heart."

So true.

I canceled my subscription last week as well. Not only is the product getting worse with each week, but I had to badger the circulation department to get them to deliver it to me. Finally I gave up.

Note to Sam Zell: Satisfying your reader doesn't mean produce a lousy newspaper and then expect your readers to fight to get it.

[shelbygrad]

Hi. Some people reading this blog post might get the (wrong) impression that The Times didn't cover the NATO/Obama Europe story in the Sunday paper. We did. In fact, The Times had three stories on the subject Sunday paper:
--Foreign Correspondent Laura King wrote: Turks eager to meet Obama
--Foreign Correspondent Henry Chu wrote: NATO's Afghan Pledge not modest
--Washington reporter Christi Parsons wrote: First lady conquers Europe.

Those stories ran inside the A section --not A1. But A1 did contain two major enterprise stories, the Ana feature the blogger mentioned and also a piece on how the FBI has linked truckers to hundreds of serial slayings.

--Shelby Grad, City Editor, Los Angeles Times

[Stu Kreisman - Huffpost Blogger]

Shelby, what was behind the decision to run a three part series (Ana's Story) on page one? A few years ago the series would have run under the "Column One" heading. Now it takes up half the front page for three days in a row, bumping much more important stories. Yes, there were NATO stories inside, but obviously "Ana's Story" was deemed much more important. A few months ago the Times did the same thing, running a series about mobsters in LA during the forties. It was a major feature on the front page for about six or seven days in the presidential the presidential election.Y­es, I believe there is room for all kinds of stories in the Times. However, the choice of priorities has been abysmal.

[SoCalSoCool]

Shelby: You're kinda missing the point. Your customers are telling you they're not happy with the product. You're telling them they're wrong and they should be happy with it. (Which is one of the major reasons the Los Angeles Times is the mess that it is).

[RobinSeattle]

It's just too bad, Shelby, that the L.A. Weekly and the Orange County Weekly are doing the lion's share of investigative journalism for southern California these days while you guys sit on the sidelines and give us more celebrity fluff and then headlines such as this, hot off of today's Times website front page:

Italy quake shatters historic buildings along with lives

Now think about that. You are lamenting the damage to BUILDINGS while people are dying in that quake? Kinda insensitive, no?

Wouldn't it have been better to do a story about how earthquakes have changed the Italian landscape over time completely separate from describing the death toll while also waiting a few days to run this part of the story?

I mean, I'm sorry those pesky people got in the way of all those crumbling marvelous churches, etc. Please forgive them.

[jackson1015]

I live in Los Angeles and grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. Both my parents subscibed to it for years, and I followed suit when I became an adult. But it has become an AWFUL newspaper in recent years and it's been at least seven years since I bought a copy. And I don't miss it one bit. I would try a lot of different sources -- HuffReport, MSNBC, Air America, L.A. Weekly, etc. -- before I'd EVER go back to the L.A. Times.

[veracity]

We all knew that the LA Times was on a handbasket to hell, when they Fired real, journalist­/reprorter ROBERT SCHEER for "being too anti-Bush", meaning reporting the facts too strigently, "being too liberal."

Unfortunately, the NEW YORK TIMES is NO better. OK, maybe they (NYT) still have competent travel, sports, & entertainment coverage, but aside from FRANK RICH and PAUL KRUGMAN (both on the editorial page) THE TIMES gives up NOTHING to RUPERT MURDOCH, Sun Yung Moon, and other blatantly Right-Wing shills FOR WAR, for police-state powers (torture, surveillance, snatching ANYONE off the street, forever, without answering to ANYONE), and above all for BUDGET-GUTTING Tax Cuts for rich.

NO MATTER that the Times will ocassionaly print a "we must balance the budget" unsigned editorial as 'cover" - they will NOT _RELENTLESSLY REPORT on the US Deficits, budget expenditures, and about how BIG FINANCE _OWNS_ the US Congress, because the Times is in league with Goldman-Sachs, Citi, Chase and the other Big NY banksters (the Times is, or was until recently, a multi-billion dollar NY corporation in its own right) whose agenda is TO RIP OFF American consumers & taxpayers for BILLIONS.

PS: I too have noticed how DEVOID of real "news' the front pages can bee. The Sun-Sentinel, too, has taken to putting bogus, 10th-page stories on the front page, with practically ZERO information content. The HUCKSTERS selling newspapers have RUN OUT OF half-convincing LIES to sell America anymore.

[sheila]

They have gone from fear-mongering to fluff mongering, all to benefit Big Corpa. It is incredibly distressing.

Even their Environmental reporters steadfastly refuse to write anything about the feed - in - tariff revolutions taking place in 50 more progressive places so that PEOPLE can own the renewable energy production and be paid for it, instead of Big Energy killing off millions more acres of our wilderness. They refused to let anyone know that AB 811 had passed and we could ALL get loans for solar panels, efficiency upgrades, etc. with no money down. this is HUGE and relevant.

Instead they gush about Ausra (who lied about their pricing then went under right afterwards), about Sempra (who lied about the amount of power a home uses, to falsify claims of "grid parity") and about the "success" of the failed "million solar roofs" program that has resulted in 5% (yes, that's just a 5, not a typo) of the rooftop solar capacity being installed in CA, on a per-capita basis, as compared to Germany. Because, of course, Germans get paid for producing more clean power than they use and we are forced to give it to the utility for free.

I have sent at least 10 reporters in 3 departments dozens of variations on point of use renewables stories over 12 months that relate DIRECTLY to the stories they are writing, and have been politely but firmly ignored while they diligently transcribe another speculative Big Energy propaganda statement.

[Russycle]

I used to love the Sunday Times when I lived in LA 20 years ago. Too bad about it's demise. There's a great book written by a reporter who was at the Chicago Sun Times when Murdoch bought it. Basically they set a goal to increase profits (at a paper that was already quite profitable) by 10 percent every year. They achieved this by cutting costs, which in turn lowered the quality of the paper. And now here we are, papers dying across the country and they wonder why.

[SeenItBefore]

Yes, sad but necessary. Way too many illiterates posing as writers and copy editors for my taste. Having worked for 4 major dailies prior to working with said newspapers as an ad agency creative director, I find current papers hard pressed to aspire to lining the bottom of a bird cage.

Given the level of instruction here in central Texas that has allowed school districts to stop teaching cursive, grammar and spelling; what would one expect?

A local teacher has informed me some schools allow English themes to be written in text speak. So, lol, bfd b4 u bmol. And to think, a few years back we all snickered at the thought of ebonics. It appears the folk in Oakland are having the last laugh.

And, like so many previous commentators, I miss the morning smell of hot coffee and newsprint.

[kaykatz]

I only take it for the coupons.

[noamjunior]

Newspapers have been reducing content and raising costs- not exactly a good way to attract or keep customers

[noamjunior]

what is happening to the newspaper bizz is the same thing that happened to the music bizz. Both did extremely well in the 90's, both tried to hold on to out of date business models too long. Both blamed the internet. Both held on to out-of date delivery systems,for example owning their own trucks.Bot­h businesses tried to blame the internet instead of adapting to it. Both were bought out by large conglomerates who in an effort to reduce costs, stopped investment in human resources. Both currently produce content that is a sorry comparison to what they were doing 10 or 15 years ago

[FDRbyGodDemocrat]

Cheer up. I'm stuck with the Daily Oklahoman.

[RobinSeattle]

Even worse, you're stuck in Oklahoma.

[Prattvictory2]

Today was even worse. I used to get both the San Diego Union-Tribune and the LA Times. I dropped the Onion two years ago. I think the Times has dropped me.