Tough Times at the Times

The eagle, symbol of the Los Angeles Times.

Some years ago when your blogger was a poor but pure graduate student he was an intern (after four tries!) on the View section of the mighty Los Angeles Times. It was a smartly-written feature section under the direction of Art Berman, who 20 years before had been part of a Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watts Riots. Under Mr. Berman were two associate editors and a dozen or so full-time feature writers.

What struck me about the Times in those days was how they threw money into the editorial product. Those well-paid feature writers, for example, were responsible for only one article per week, which in the newspaper world was a very leisurely pace. They paid their freelancers (I was one of them for awhile) pretty good, too.

I remember having the freedom to really focus on doing my best A+ work. Quality, not quantity was prized (a revolutionary concept in the newspaper world).

It looks like that Times is gone. Mr. Berman died some years back and the Times was sold to the Tribune Company in 2000. One million daily circulation--which had been a source of considerable pride to the old Times-Mirror Company--is now a distant memory. And a lot of reporters and other employees had their contracts bought out, took retirement, or got laid off.

The editor and publisher of the Times have recently decided that the cuts have gone far enough, and have defied orders from the parent company to cut an additional $10 million from the paper's operating budget. The emerging fight has been covered by National Public Radio, which ran a story on Sept. 19 and a followup on Sept. 22.