A friend who is a longtime employee of the Los Angeles Times leaked the paper’s most recent internal cost-cutting announcement:

From: Hartenstein, Eddy
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 12:02 PM
To: zzTrbAllHandsLAT; zzMediaGroups
Subject: Important Message

Colleagues:

As you know from reading our front page and our homepage, not a day goes by that we don’t give our readers the latest news and analysis on the deepening troubles of the US economy. The same challenges that face the companies we report about also are affecting us.  We need to implement changes to our flagship print product, and throughout our organization, that will ensure our future as the #1 source of news and information in Southern California.

In the coming weeks, we will introduce a number of changes to the way we do business, including a new sectional line-up for the paper.  These are necessary to facilitate greater efficiencies in how we approach our operations, production and distribution and, as a result, we expect to eliminate approximately 300 positions.

Beginning March 2nd the paper will be presented in four main news sections:

A/Main News will be repositioned to present local, national and international coverage and opinion together – as each informs, impacts and shapes the others in our everyday lives. The California section report will lead A, followed by The Nation, The World and then Opinion.  The result will combine the stories and reporting of our two most widely-read print sections into one cohesive section.

Business will be the second section in the paper, and the report will be enhanced by bringing back the “Company Town” feature, which will serve as the anchor for our “business of entertainment” coverage.  The obituaries and weather pages will remain at the back of this new B section.

Sports will be the third section, and we’ll be moving the classified advertising pages to the back of this new C section.

Calendar will be the fourth section, and this move allows its deadlines to be pushed deep into the evening (aka “second-daily”), allowing us to make our primary space for entertainment coverage more news-driven. This will enrich this current “must read” section even further, enabling us to add features such as overnight reviews.

The feature-section lineup will remain unchanged, with Health on Monday, Food on Wednesday, Home on Saturday and Image, Travel and Arts & Books on Sunday.  The Sunday lineup also will be unchanged, except for the California report appearing in the A section.

These moves are designed to help us deal with the economic realities of the day, while continuing to allow us to deliver a high-quality product to our readers and advertisers.  We remain unwavering in our commitment to serve our community and to our mission.

We’ll be providing more details in the days ahead.

eddy

No matter how it is presented, this further shrinking of the paper is indeed sad news to me. I have been a loyal subscriber to and reader the Los Angeles Times for 20 years.

At the same time, I can’t help noting that while it’s not unusual in history for new technologies to displace pre-existing technologies — where are the telegraph lines now? — the Times’ particular predicament is largely a result of mismanagement.

In the 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, and indeed until probably 2003, The Los Angeles Times was very profitable. The paper had double-digit profits — an enormous result compared against other companies its size, which make do on 3-6%.

Was any of this invested in the future? Was any of this set aside for a rainy day? While the editorial writers bemoaned Sacramento’s profligate spending, did they ask hard questions of the Chandler family or any of a number of Times Mirror management teams? In a different world, wiser heads would have realized that the Times was in the news business (rather than the newspaper business) and would have monetized the internet more quickly. What’s the difference between Craigslist and LATimes.com? The former makes a substantial global profit. And it was started by one guy named Craig in his house.

Instead of making appropriate investments, the paper has made one cut after another so that a string of owners — Sam Zell being only the latest — can fund their empires and maintain their stock prices. Which only makes me feel all the more foolish for maintaining a paid subscription to a newspaper that has no Book Review, no Opinion section, no Metro section, no Outdoors section, no Lifestyle section — and which maintains all its content utterly free online, where others can see what I’m seeing without paying for it. There are only two reasons I keep my subscription:  1) I’d rather read the comics in a newspaper than online, 2) pure sentimentality from someone who has loved newspapers all his life and who got his first job, with a newspaper, at age 14. And the sentimentality is wearing thin.

So yes, I bemoan what has befallen the Los Angeles Times. What especially saddens me is that its community of readers, as well as everyone else who relies upon the paper, is paying for the gross negligence of management.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 6:02 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.