A good sign of the Times
The LA Times’ Tim Rutten lauds the decision to kill the questionable edition of Opinion to have been guest-edited by Brian Grazer, which we talked about here. The gist of Rutten’s piece:
- Because the editorial section is a statement from the paper to its community, it should not be guest-edited. I agree.
- That over the past decade, various checks and balances have disappeared and firewalls come down. It would seem so.
- That he’s made it onto the resigned opinion editor’s enemies list and while he can’t figure out why, he doesn’t mind.
- Whereas I said the personal lives of newspaper editors are not the usual domain of high drama, Rutten does me better with this graf:
- Like most of my colleagues at The Times, I’m fundamentally uninterested in other people’s personal lives, but I’ve always subscribed to the late Abe Rosenthal’s standard for journalists: I don’t care whether my colleagues sleep with elephants, so long as they don’t cover the circus.
While I’ve been distressed by the paper’s various lapses, you can’t say they aren’t at least covering their own mistakes — and Rutten, the media critic, does a fine job. I know a number of people who work at the Times and everybody seems aware of the enormous problems within the paper. But what I haven’t heard — aside from wild outside schemes for making newspapers either non-profit or entirely digital partnerships — is a plan to fix them.