Why all this handwringing over cuts at this mediocre newspaper?
If there are stories that are not getting covered by L.A. Times reporters, then that creates opportunities for others to do the job. I rely on The New York Times (as well as the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post) for my national and international reporting. The writing quality of The L.A. Times is decidedly inferior to the New York Times. L.A. Times national and international stories make few ripples. Almost nobody on the East Coast says, “Did you see what The L.A. Times wrote today about President Bush (or Iraq or the economy or Washington politics, etc)?”
I’m reading today’s Wall Street Journal article about the demise of the stand alone L.A. Times Sunday Book Review and I was shocked to see it described as “highly esteemed.”
Highly esteemed by who? I’ve been trying to get through it for many years and it is just plain dull (and decidedly inferior to the New York Times book coverage).
Does anyone think that people will read fewer books because the L.A. Times Sunday Book Review runs to fewer pages? There’s no shortage of book coverage elsewhere (try The Elegant Variation).
I don’t think it would be any loss if The L.A. Times closed tomorrow. Something at least as good would replace it.
I believe Charles Bobrinksy is spot on when he tells PBS’s Frontline:
People want to read about what’s going on in their own communities, and the Web usually can’t provide that. The Web can tell you what’s going on in Iraq; the Web can tell you what’s going on in Washington, D.C. It can’t tell you what’s going on in Des Moines if you live in Des Moines.
It’s difficult to cover your own community unless you are backed up by an organization (be it the Jewish Journal or The Los Angeles Times). That’s why you’ll find hundreds of bloggers in Los Angeles writing about Iraq but very few of them do any hard-hitting reporting on Los Angeles. There are dozens of Jewish bloggers in Los Angeles but almost none of them advance any stories about Jewish Los Angeles.
Charles Bobrinksy says:
The L.A. Times unfortunately hasn’t figured that out. They’ve decided that they have to be a national newspaper with international coverage. They’ve got over 20 foreign bureaus, including bureaus in Istanbul and Cairo. Nobody is reading the L.A. Times wanting to find out what’s happening in Istanbul, so it’s critical that the L.A. Times figure out what it is, which is a provider of local news about what’s going on in Southern California….Readers care about the local entertainment industry, which they don’t do a very good job of covering in the L.A. Times. They care about things like fashion, which The New York Times does a very good job of covering; the L.A. Times doesn’t. They should care about issues like immigration. All of the Mexican-American immigration issues should be front and center in the L.A. Times. They should own that story, and they don’t in the way they should.
…What we would argue is that The Washington Post does a better job of covering its local market with fewer reporters than the L.A. Times does, maybe 15 to 20 percent fewer. How does it do that? It does it through focus. If you focus on your target market — again, Washington D.C., politics; in the case of The Washington Post, the Washington Redskins, who they do a great job of covering at The Washington Post — then you can get by with less reporters than the L.A. Times has, because it’s trying to cover the world. It’s trying to report on why Bush went to war in Iraq instead of what’s going on in Southern California.
…We’re saying there’s a role for probably three national newspapers — The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today. Each has its own niche; all three are national newspapers. We don’t think there’s any demand for a fourth. The L.A. Times is trying to be that fourth.
The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles has the same problem as The Los Angeles Times. While it should be focusing on Los Angeles, the Jewish Journal has delusions that it has expertise in national and international coverage.
This leaves enormous swathes of local coverage to bloggers such as myself. I have yet to do much with this opportunity because I’ve found it hard to monetize such reporting and because I lack the courage to do it day in and day out. It’s much easier to get people to talk about difficult issues when you say you are from an established publication rather than from your own blog. A blogger investigating a tough story is going to be looked upon by many/most of his subjects as someone seeking trouble.
Chaim Amalek writes: “Yes – it is much easier to intimidate a lone blogger than say, someone with a New York Times ID badge dangling from his neck. (The latter has backup that the former has not.) Perhaps the way to monetize your work is to follow the lead suggested by Page Six, and accept payments from people who don’t want to be written about. I’m sure that this happens all the time (why so little gossip about Howard Stern? I suspect that either he buys their silence either with free publicity or with information), so it isn’t as though you would be the only one doing this. So that’s what I suggest: use the internet to become known as an especially vexatious pest, and then monetize your work by selling silence to people with money.”
