You hate to see anyone fired, especially an editor, especially a good one, especially an old friend and former colleague.
But Jim O'Shea's ouster from the top job at the Los Angeles Times seems to reflect a lot of what's wrong with the newspaper business and the way that old-school editors and publishers—even the smart ones—look at the world and the ways the industry is changing.
I don't know what really happened in L.A.—I haven't talked to Jim in ages, and the voluminous coverage today (do the firings of mid-level managers at other, non-news companies get the same level of coverage and dissection? Just asking.) is murky. But it seems to be boiling down to Who Shot John (or Jim) levels of disagreement: O'Shea complains about "voodoo economics" at the parent Tribune Co.; Publisher David Hiller says O'Shea was fired for resisting a 1 percent budget cut and for not backing off a request for a $3 million budget increase. Ugly.
I was concerned when O'Shea got the job 14 months ago that he was too traditional for the gig; he later made the right noises about putting the Web first, and apparently did other positive things at the paper. But in the end, maybe he was just too old-school. Reality bites, and the reality is that in a declining advertising and circulation market, you just can't practice journalism the old way.
The coverage of his firing says O'Shea wanted more money because he was concerned about tight resources in a Presidential/Olympics year, but it's not too hard to challenge that assumption. Does the Los Angeles Times need a full cadre of reporters covering the Presidential primaries? Does it need to send a boatload of people to the two conventions? Does it need to send its own Olympic team to the Beijing Olympics? No, no, and no. (That may save $3 million right there.) What the Times does need to do is provide better coverage of its local area for its readers, who can damn well read about the primaries, the conventions and the Olympics in thousands of other places.
I have no idea if these were the choices O'Shea was unwilling to make, but I'll bet I'm not far off the mark. (And, I'd add, editors at smaller papers would KILL to be able to make these sorts of decisions!) Sorry, that kind of redundant coverage of national and international news is old-think, and it's very expensive old-think. You've simply got to be smarter and more creative about where you're spending resources these days, and concentrate your resources where it will make the most difference: on coverage that your readers simply can't get anywhere else.
Rumor has it that O'Shea's replacement will be Innovation Editor Russ Stanton. Right title, I guess—you can't have too much innovation these days—but is Stanton the right guy? He's still a newspaper guy (formerly the business editor); how innovative can he truly be? I'll readily admit to blind blogger innocence about Stanton's credentials—maybe he truly is a breakthrough innovator—but has he ever run a business (as opposed to a Business section)? Worked in a startup? Spent time truly immersed in new media? If he hasn't, his experience just isn't broad enough to really bring new thinking to the L.A. Times.
I'll go back to what I said when O'Shea was appointed: Publishers need to look outside the traditional lists of editor candidates to find true innovators who can lead the industry out of its precipitous slide. The ranks of newspaper editors (and sub-editors) these days is too full of people who came up through the old system, played by the old rules, and succeeded, frankly, because they didn't take chances. Those days are over. Forget the Innovation Editor—if the L.A. Times really wants to revolutionize itself and break loose of the pack, Hiller should be looking inside dot.coms and other non-traditional sources for editor candidates who aren't encumbered by history and have fresh thinking about how to present information and interact with the audience. That's the only way things are truly going to change—and the only way newspapers will have a chance to survive.
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