Parting Thoughts
Parting Thoughts: Bob Carey
‘My compact with the L.A. Times has been buried in an avalanche of debt’
By Bob Carey Thu 24 Jul 2008 12:08 PMI’m being laid off after twenty-four years at the L.A. Times and after thirty-eight years in the business. I spent most of my career as a staff photographer, but I’ve also been an editor now and then.
The decline of the L.A. Times is due mostly to the failure of the members of the Chandler family to exercise even a vestigial shred of stewardship. They should be guiding the Times through an orderly transition to the Internet. They just wanted their money, and now that Sam Zell has given it to them, the wheels are coming off the cart. Zell invented the financial quicksand we’re in at the moment, but our circulation loss is a self-inflicted wound: we stopped covering Southern California.
The old Times Mirror bosses were keenly aware that The New York Times drew half its circulation from outside New York City, but the Los Angeles Times got almost all of its circulation in Southern California. From about 1980 to 2000, the L.A. Times built bureaus in Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, Ventura County, and San Diego. I think we had about 500 reporters and photographers in those zones when Tribune took over.
Those of us who laid awake nights, worrying about whether Mark Willis would wreck the Times during the final Times Mirror years, welcomed the Tribune guys with guarded optimism. Right from the start, they said they didn’t care about circulation the way Times Mirror did. They had some other metric, whatever that meant. No one dared criticize them when they shut down the zones and redeployed those 500 people elsewhere. We simply abandoned the suburbs, and there are a lot of those in Southern California.
The new California section focused on the City of Los Angeles. We covered the L.A. city council and the mayor, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the LAPD, and acted like, by doing so, we were covering politics, schools, and crime in the region. We won fifteen Pulitzer Prizes while we lost a third of our circulation. To be fair, we won Pulitzers on the mess at King Drew Medical Center and massive fires in the region. But, in general, we stopped covering the zones. One day, I pointed out that Antonio Villaraigosa was not, in fact, the mayor of the city I live in and that I really didn’t care about him. It wasn’t appreciated.
No one seemed to care that we stopped covering city council meetings in Oxnard. No one listened when I told them that I was being barraged by complaints from friends that we weren’t covering their high-school sports any more. The steady loss of about 450,000 subscribers was blamed on “do not call” and the Internet. Hardly a soul said that we might be hemorrhaging readers because we stopped covering things they cared about. Our feature sections were urban hip. Nearly a half a million readers weren’t.
This may be just be spitting in the wind. The Internet is killing newspapers. I think the Los Angeles Times could be in a much stronger position to survive if it had been managed better during the last fifteen years, but it may not matter in the end.
I think the answer is something else. Something else will be invented. I suspect that that something else will be on the Internet, or maybe it will be a little community paper, like the one that has sprouted in my town. It’s called The Acorn (honest). I think that something else will involve people covering what the L.A. Times stopped covering: communities. Something else on the Internet will be better designed than the Web site we were saddled with, which isn’t saying much. Something else will cover community opposition to a new big box store.
It’s not my problem any more. I’m not going to lay awake at night worrying about Mark Willis or Sam Zell any more. I gave it my best. I’ve damn near been killed a half dozen times for the By God Los Angeles Times. Whatever compact I thought I’d made with this paper that I love—that I’d risk my life in exchange for the privilege of spending all of my working years here—has been buried in an avalanche of debt. It’s been a lot of fun. The late Times columnist Jack Smith once said that the purpose of life is to hang around and see what happens next. I just won’t be doing it here. I’ll be doing something else.
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The steady drip of layoffs and buyouts, slowly desiccating once-vibrant newsrooms around the country, has also produced a reservoir of anger, sadness, fear, uncertainty—even some cautious optimism here and there—among reporters and editors who invested years, decades in some cases, of their lives to print journalism. We’ve asked anyone so inclined to channel these emotions, not into rant—although there will be a bit of that—but rather into reflection on what went wrong, and where we might go from here. We will publish one per day, under the headline “Parting Thoughts.” All of the letters we publish will be collected here.
CJR
Diana
Thu 24 Jul 2008 05:31 PMSo true--the loss of local news/zoning really was the beginning of the end...interestingly, the web could be the place to create that content, cheaply, with different sites for westside, san gabriel, ventura, sfv, etc. If only it seemed the current ownership cared at all.
Kay
Thu 24 Jul 2008 06:06 PMBob: Thanks for speaking up for all of us. We had damn fun competing in Ventura County in the good old days, huh?
Rachel Cohen
Thu 24 Jul 2008 08:47 PMWhile I'm sorry for Bob, I have to wonder at all these Times people who spent 27, 24, 18 years at one gig. Who has that luxury now, besides tenured professors? Most of us job hop, freelance, permalance, and/or indie contract and that's not just the future, that's the now.
The LAT lost touch with the readers--not just Oxnard, but Pasadena, Canyon Country and everywhere in between. Sure, national recognition is great, but the editors--both homegrown and imports--cared more about the opinions of their pals at the NYT and the WaPo than about those of the readership.
Gary
Thu 24 Jul 2008 11:04 PMRachel: Try reading Bob's piece again. I think he would agree with you. the Times lost its focus.
I'm glad you are proud of job hopping, permalancing and the such. Check back with me when crowdsourcing really catches on and nobody wants your lance, perma or otherwise. Check back with me when you try to start a family or face a medical crisis within your family with no insurance.
When you too are out of cash or just shilling at some pay-to-play publicaiton or website to make ends meet, check back in. I'll post something about how you were too focused on the opinions of your pals at your blog than the crowdsourcers and their corporate masters who think the proper amount to pay for words or photos is zero.
Then maybe you too will feel like this photo by Bob Carey
http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2007-11/33772157.jpg
All rights reserved, or course - by Sam Zell, not Bob Carey.
Tom
Thu 24 Jul 2008 11:14 PMBob hung in for 38 years, 24 of them at the By God LAT. I'm halfway through my 25th year now and just wondering how much longer I'll last. I was left out in the cold when the Oxnard Press-Courier closed it's doors in 1994 after 95 years of publishing. I got kicked to the curb when Tribune took over Times Mirror in 2000. I've lived through layoffs at my current newspaper and I'm watching as it continues to spiral downward. It's not that the LAT lost touch, it's more that journalism lost touch, everywhere.
What we used to call the "velvet coffin" wasn't.
The profession that I thought would take me to retirement didn't.
So what do I do now? Write CSS for TMZ?
Marty
Fri 25 Jul 2008 01:24 AMI worked across Western Canada for 15 years in print (magazines and newspapers) and pulled the plug in late 2006. Not because I was laid off, but because I saw the shrinking career opportunities of a copy breeder. Yes, the Internet is a factor (I have since moved into web development) but the relevance of mainstream print media is also of concern. In Canada - as in the US - newsrooms are filled by idealistic relics of the 60s and politically astute (read PC activist) reporters of the 90s. For the old moldies - like most of the contributors to this forum - they are the tired, small-S socialists of the sixties. The new crop is made up of PC-university, speech-code damaged individuals. Critical analysis is rendered through the glass of a lock-step political and social outlook. LA Times, NY Times, Miami Herald, Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun: old hippies out, new PC automatons in, in both the editorial and news holes. On almost any given subject or issue of the day, the same drone is heard. The diversity, colour and animated discourse is gone. You have to go on-line to find that.
The same, tired old voices and new, rigid minds do not make for an interesting read.
It is all about content, stupid.
No one cares if we are attend the Los Angeles Unified School District or Moose Jaw Ratepayers Association. The eyes and voices do not reflect the sensibilities or concerns of the "unenlightened" readers nor does the coverage make for interesting, provocative reading. It has become so much hubris and navel gazing.
walter brasch
Fri 25 Jul 2008 05:14 AMI was born in, grew up in, and worked in SoCalif. (I then "job-hopped" until I got to Pa.) I remember when LAT was mediocre. I remember when it was great. I also know it deteriorated--horribly. It seems that puboishers (and to some extent editors) believe that downsizing means profits--or more profits--or even survival. These idiots haven't figured out that quality builds circ., and circ. builds advertising. This is Journ. 101. But, cutting news columns, staff, and imposing a word limit (official or not) isn't the way to go. Reader attention span is NOT MTV-like. Doubt me? Check out the healthy TINE, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Atlantic, and the mags that give us a mixture of shorts and in-depth (5,000-10,000 w.) stories. If you have a solid toipic, written well (and with fewer copyeditors, the obvious happens), then the readers will follow. But, nsprs have forsakes the "news" in their flag. I do a column, write books--BUT, I also see that mags, overall, are healthy because they focus and have such archaic things as fact checkers! There's so much we can do to restore our profession--but newspapers are slowly being killed by thge greed of puboishers demanding 20%+ proofits. /walter brasch/
www.walterbrasch.com
walter brasch
Fri 25 Jul 2008 05:21 AMre: above post. Typos happen when it's 5 a.m. and there's no copyeditor around! /walt.
Rachel
Fri 25 Jul 2008 10:36 AMGary-- I'm around Bob's age and have been a freelancer for all my working career--I pay my own health insurance and have a family. I wasn't bragging, I was pointing out that the LAT staffers who've spent decades at one job were cushioned from the real working world. (No wonder their WGA strke coverage was so poor--they simply couldn't understand why the writers didn't get real jobs, like they did.)
Gary
Fri 25 Jul 2008 05:50 PMRachel: I immediately regretted posting my item at a very late hour. I was criticizing you for not walking in Bob's shoes, but I haven't walked in yours. I truly wish you luck and fortune in your writing. Anyone who has committed their life to writing (or like Bob, photography)is a fellow traveler. I don't like the anger all this brings out.
best wishes,
Gary
Marty
Fri 25 Jul 2008 07:46 PMBravo, Rachel.
>freelancer for all my working career--I pay my own >health insurance and have a family.
I have freelanced. I have also worked in sclerotic unionized newsrooms filled with 30+ year lifers. Most of whom are concerned with buttressing their dusty world view with garbage columns and ensuring, during contract negotiations, freelance material does not appear on "their" pages.
For a staffer to talk down to a freelancer is about as arrogant as it gets.
Boo hoo Gary and Bob.
As a managing editor, give me 25 hungry freelancers and 5 deskers. Allocate the same budget being paid the staffers to the freelancers and I can guarantee a vibrant, interesting read.
In fact, give me one Rachel, you can keep all the Bobs and Garys of the world. Both will be dying from starvation, unable to overcome their sense of entitlement to stoop so low as to pitch a freelance story. Maybe Rachel can put a good word in for you, Gary, get you a delivery gig at one of the papers she freelances for.
Michael M.
Fri 25 Jul 2008 10:11 PMMarty: You sound like the one who's arrogant. Maybe you were a freelancer because you couldn't get hired full time by a newspaper, eh?
don
Fri 25 Jul 2008 10:40 PMBob - Thanks for an intelligent analysis. I suspect other factors played roles, too: The general dumbing down of America, the egotism of some of the Times supertar elites, greed by the Classified Department and a well-deserved customer vengance through Craiglist, and the demolition of America's department stores and old-line, traditional retailers. But the Chandler family's devotion to ever-increasing wealth - along with its disdain for the community that kept them in riches for decades - is the knife that fatally wounded the Times. Bob, I applaud your career of integrity, sacrifice and public service - as with so many old-school pro journalists, you've done noble work and gotten little thanks from readers, a kick in the head from Corporate America, and undeserved disrespect from the oh-so-trendy yet intellectually vapid blogosphere.
Rachel & Marty - Thanks for nothing. Your comments are truly those of "citizen journalists" at their most ignorant. May you both retire in poverty.
Marty
Sat 26 Jul 2008 12:31 PM dumbing down of America, the egotism of some of the Times supertar elites, greed by the Classified Department
Everyone else is to blame.
Or maybe Bob et al are now irrelevant.
Ever considered that?
The editorials, political stumping, cheerleading of pet causes hold no relevance for most readers. The blogosphere may be “vapid” and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report insulting but they wear their kitsch proudly. The authoritative posture many mainstream print reporters and editors emulate is largely fabricated. They owe their prestige primarily to the newspaper or magazine. If it was otherwise, all these “old-school pro journalists” would be able to launch their own blog/news service and capture a significant audience or they would be snapped up by other content providers. That is not going to happen. Readers consumed these individual’s news stories because they were bundled with the rest of the info. – sports agate, tv listings, stock market, flyers - in the newspaper that arrived daily.
“News” stories thinly veiled as banging the drum for Democrats/Obama/Gore/Global Warming/ gender, sexual proclivity victim du jour gets real tired. Now readers have a choice, delivered online, anytime.
Hey Don, Bob et. al.: look beyond the tip of your nose. Readers are not besotted with you. You did a job, you got paid, you got complacent and developed a sense of entitlement and a acute sense of victimization. No one owes you anything more than they owe the GM workers in Eastern US and Ontario and, in Western Canada, the thousands of forestry workers now out of work.