Lost in the wailing and complaining and rending of garments over the ouster of Dean Baquet and the "Tribunization" of the Los Angeles Times is an important point:
The Tribune Co. is right.
It's pretty obvious that major changes have to be made at the L.A. Times. Its circulation is sinking like a stone—which means that readers are desserting because it obviously doesn't serve their needs anymore. As with any other product, when the customers start to go away (especially in droves), changes need to be made. Big changes.
Yes, cuts in staffing are part of that. There has to be deadwood, and probably lots of it, in a newsroom as large as the Times' (940 people—the largest in the industry for a non-national paper). Smart editors will go through and weed that out and make the remaining staff more productive. That's just good management.
Coverage also priorities need to be addressed. Are European bureaus, national correspondents and a large Washington staff more important than local reporting about L.A. and its many environs? Guess what: The departed readers obviously didn't think so. When you lose 25 percent of your circulation over 10 years—one third of that in the past year—something is really wrong with your newspaper. And it's not corporate bean counters.
Journalists like to be romantic about the profession and think that what they do is some sort of religious calling—even that they are the "stewards" of their newspapers. Nonsense. The newspaper belongs to its owners—in this case, Tribune Co. stockholders—and those owners have an absolute right to expect the paper to be run as profitable business. Doing that, as in any business, requires a judicious combination of correctly focusing the news coverage so that it meets readers' (customers!) needs, prioritizing resources accordingly, and yes, making cuts where necessary. That's what Tribune Co. is doing.
Those bemoaning what's happening to the L.A. Times need to take a cold hard look at the paper and its mission and understand that while there may be glory and ego gratification in covering national and international news, that's clearly not what readers want. The paper's focus needs to be on its local market. It needs to find ways to recapture readers who have left it because it became irrelevant to their daily lives. It needs to reach out and find ways to serve readers who are young, who prefer pixels to print and who want some excitement and entertainent in their news. That's true of all newspapers right now. But those nostalgic for the good old days of the Times (hint: they weren't that good) need to focus on finding ways to use the paper's resources—even if they're diminished—to make the paper better. Whining isn't going to bring the readers back. Making the paper more compelling and relevant will.
Ironically, the best statement on this subject comes from the man who Tribune Co. has parachuted into Los Angeles to makeover the paper, one of those scary Chicago "suits," new Times Editor Jim O'Shea. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week, before his appointment was announced. O'Shea had these wise (and typically crusty) words: "The whole damn industry is focused on the wrong thing," he told the Journal. "We're all worried about how many people we have, and what we should really be worried about is declining readership."
Exactly. The Tribune Co. is right. And its new man in L.A. knows it.
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