Thinking about the Los Angeles Times

The nation's second largest newspaper is in one hell of a mess, and as Jeff Jarvis says, it's become something of a parlor game to answer the question, "What would you do with ...?"

Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll quit last year in protest of budget cuts. Publisher Jeffrey Johnson defied corporate instructions to cut expenses this year, and was shown the door as his reward.

Market confidence in newspaper companies has evaporated, and with it, share prices; the Tribune Company's current $8.11 billion market capitalization is roughly what it paid to acquire Times Mirror about six years ago. Chandler family interests are revolting over the apparent decline of their inherited wealth, forcing parent Tribune Company to go through one of those hellish periods described as "exploration of alternatives for creating additional value for shareholders." These things tend to end in vivisection.

I've only been to the Los Angeles Times once. It felt like a big, dark, cavernous chunk of the past, stranded in a strange new world. My experience was very odd. I was there to speak at an IFRA Newsplex "convergence road show" sponsored in part by the Times. I had just done a similar gig at Florida Today to a fairly packed room. But in Los Angeles, no one showed up. No one. Had they already figured out the future, and decided not to talk about it any more? Martha Stone and I sat around and chatted awhile, ate some Los Angeles Times pastries, drank some Los Angeles Times coffee, then left. I looked over some museum pieces in the lobby on my way out.

Most of my impressions of the Times were formed in my decades as an editor, and especially from the LAT-WP wire. It's long been a reporter's newspaper, a place where there was plenty of space and freedom and resources to go out and do serious, long-term, long-form journalism.

Such institutions are good for society. But it seems the Los Angeles Times today is "caught between two worlds" in many dimensions. It's not a failure (it is, in fact, making tons of money) but is being flogged by the investment marketplace. It is too big to be a local newspaper, but rather seems to be a regionally distributed national newspaper, which makes no sense at all. It is an artifact of the 20th century protruding uncomfortably into the 21st.

Michael Kinsley has proposed that the Tribune Company reform its big papers into one big national edition, which at first blush strikes me as a really dumb idea (RC Cola, anyone?) but does illustrate the problem of the supermetro.

As it painfully turns the screws on the Los Angeles Times, the Tribune Company is investing in new media such as CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com, Apartments.com, HomeGain.com, ShopLocal.com, ForSaleByOwner.com and Topix.net. (Notice that none of these are news sites, unless you count Topix, which is a mere aggregator and not journalism.) And every one of its newspapers has aggressive, if conventional, Web operations, many of them growing as print-focused headcount is reduced. These seem to be sensible steps, but the market is not impressed.

The New York Times says the Los Angeles Times has assigned some of it is investigative reporters to figure out what to do. They're calling it a "Manhattan Project." I don't know exactly what instructions they were given, or what they'll actually do (often these are not the same things). In a general sense, I applaud any effort by a newsroom to critically examine the current media landscape and the relationship between reporting and audience; it certainly beats living by assumptions derived from a bygone era. But it seems likely that the effort will be all about preservation and not about creation.

So, having stated the obvious, where do I really land on this issue? What would I do with the Los Angeles Times? I sight, shake my head, and say I'm not sure. But I don't think it can sit forever between local and national. And I am reminded that the real Manhattan Project ended in blowing things up, and Oppenheimer quoting Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."