The Tribune Co.'s Chicago managers at the Los Angeles Times have decided to blame the Times' reporters and editors for six years of Tribune's complete neglect of latimes.com. It's about like the mortician blaming the corpse for getting murdered. No wonder the Newspaper Guild may be gaining ground in organizing the Los Angeles Times newsroom.
The Tribune hasn't moved to encourage the local buyers that the paper needs, so the Times is stuck with its Tribune-faithful but Los Angeles-ignorant top management, publisher David Hiller and executive editor James O'Shea. Their latest idea is to keep the Times' already cut-to-the-bone newsrooms working "24/7," writing breaking news for the Web and then rewriting the news as analysis and "think" pieces for the print version. This might have been a bright idea five years ago, before the Trib cut hundreds of jobs from the Times newsroom. Or if it hadn't been accompanied by a sneering dismissal from O'Shea of the Times' own reporters and editors. Here's a snippet from his Wednesday address to the newsroom:
We're woefully behind. I know that our natural inclination as journalists is to ask why. Who is responsible, whose fault is it, who is to blame? And the answer to that question is: It's everyone's fault. Every editor, reporter, photographer, artist, everyone who works here everyone who is in this room and everyone who is not here. Everyone who has ever come up with an excuse as to why we can't do something new and different, it is your fault just as much as anyone's.
That won't have the paper's best veteran reporters clambering aboard the Tribune's new bandwagon. It's more likely to intensify their job searches, which may be just what the Tribune wants. It's a lot easier to get newly hired 20-somethings to work the midnight shift in the online newsroom.
The new web coverage can only come at the expense of deep local reporting, the very thing that Hiller and O'Shea had vowed to focus on. Readers can look forward to more web video of car chases, less coverage of the political forces that drive L.A. and California.
So it's no wonder the Newspaper Guild/Communication Workers of America union is giving another look to the Times newsroom, issuing a long Q and A about the benefits of the Guild to a newsroom in complete turmoil. There's nothing like several hundred overworked, jerked-around journalists with a job-cut sword always over their heads to make a union look attractive, even at a paper whose animosity to organized labor is legend in the city. The Times press operators, despite a campaign of cheery promises and implied threats from Hiller, have already voted to join the Teamsters.
A sampling from the Newspaper Guild's message to Times reporters:
Q. Why a union and why at this time?
A. Because more upheaval is coming. Because few individuals have leverage to negotiate better circumstances for themselves with the Los Angeles Times; because all LA Times employees want to see their newspaper remain a top-of-the-line paper and there are no guarantees that a new owner will care.
It's enough to make readers wish they also had a union to bargain with management for the newspaper they deserve.