The LA Times: Dulling the Edge of our Fright – UPDATED X 2

The past ten days has produced a dank flurry of ever more disheartening LA Times/Sam Zell news. First it was announced last week that 150 people would be cut from editorial.

Then on Wednesday Kevin Roderick at LA Observed reported that two whole sections had been slashed—the Highway 1 section (Its Pulitzer winning auto critic, Dan Neil, will migrate to business. Nice that they decided to keep him.) and the weekly listings section The Guide, will quit printing on July 24.

The Los Angeles Times Magazine was axed this month— but after the past year’s slo-mo rape of the once award-winning mag, followed by the decision to yank it away from editorial altogether, the better to pimp-mobile it for the ad dept—hell… it was a mercy killing.

“Still to come,” Roderick said, “the details on the future of Books, Sunday Opinion, Food, Real Estate and Home.”

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UPDATE: I’d been away from the computer only to return and find it had gotten WAY worse than I believed it could according to Friday mornings LAObserved (as commenter Adam pointed out):

Apparently the last standalone Sunday Book Review-slash-Opinion section will run in the Times on July 27. After that, books coverage will be in Calendar and Sunday’s opinion pieces will run in the A section — and on the web.

(What is wrong with these awful, awful people? I’ve held on to my subscription until now. But what possible reason is there to keep subscribing to the physical paper after these cuts and changes? Seriously?)

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This is not good, not good at all. But as I worried about the ever gloomier fate of our hometown paper, and also about the talented (and extremely hard working, trust me on this) friends still employed at the Times, as a coping mechanism I decided what I really needed was some nice black humor about the disheartening matter. (As Don Juan once told Carlos Castaneda who once told me: Laughter dulls the edge of our fright.)

I knew just the place to go: the blog of my brilliant pal Tod Goldberg, who is one of the funniest people I know, and someone whom I noticed had posted about Zell and the Times on Thursday. But Tod’s post, while, smart and morbidly clever, started out funny but quickly slid into a witty (if entirely understandable) depression that is not like Tod at all.

Here, just read it yourself:

LA Observed reported what those of us in Southern California have been aware of for a while now: That by the time the final cuts are done on the LA Times, it will more closely resemble a tablet of MadLibs than the newspaper we knew even last week, particularly since if you’re a fan of the Highway 1 section, the Thursday Guide, the Magazine and, I fear, the Book Review (where, in full disclosure, I frequently review), you’ll probably have to write those sections yourself.

[snip]

The newspaper industry is bleeding and what that means, simply, is that people will lose their jobs, your newspaper will become increasingly depersonalized — I live in La Quinta, which is just outside Palm Springs, which has a perfect example of this very thing in the Desert Sun, a paper about as news-rich as a tattoo, and as in depth, too. On a professional level, I of course hope divine intervention will keep the Book Review a solid concern, but if history is any clue, I expect to get word any time now that the Book Review will be folded into Parade.

[SNIP]

Cutting the Magazine was an obvious thing, of course — people barely knew it was being published anymore. But losing Highway 1 says quite a bit — there was essential feature writing going on in that section and for an area as car obsessed as Southern California to lose its car section tells me that bad news, really bad news, is coming soon.

Okay, well, after I popped the Xanax, I moved on to the anonymously written and also smart blog Tell Zell, which has run some very funny stuff. But, of late, even the funny posts are turning..tragic.

In desperation, I tried some of the other anti-Zell blogs run by various folks who work (or used to work) for some of the other papers in the Zell/Tribune empire, but they ranged in tone from grief stricken to quietly vengeful.

Then I realized the hard truth, which is that the most honest to god, slap-happy-rompish funny stuff on the Times’ troubles is being written by Sam Zell’s spiritual second in command, the Tribune’s CIO—Chief Innovation Officer—AKA the most influential person when it comes to the fate of the LA Times, short of Zell himself: Lee Abrams.

Abrams humor is marred only by the teensy, weensy problem of being….um….unintended. And often scary.

Disconsolate, last night I noticed that Tod had posted a new “status update” on Facebook. (In the past two weeks at least much of literary LA—and would-be literary LA, like me—has suddenly discovered Facebook, possibly to the point of needing an intervention.)

“Tod,” he wrote, “is worried that tomorrow’s LA Times might be delivered on a post card.”

Yeah. Me too. And it isn’t very funny.

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UPDATE 2: Smart blogfather and pal Marc Cooper has been doing an excellent five part online debate with also smart conservative blogger Patterico (Patrick Frey) over at one of the LA Times website. (You can find the various parts here, here, here, here and here.) Then Friday afternoon he did a philosophical wrap up at his own blog. It all makes for stimulating reading about a very, very sad subject.