Nicole's Editorials

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?

I recently blogged about my distress with the Los Angeles Times and their "money hungry" corporate owners. After discussing my blog in class, I realized that the owners weren't necessarily the "bad guys" but were just trying to do what was best for their stockholders. As the story has unfolded, I've learned much more about the situation and how it may affect the future of many print newspapers.

The article, titled, "More than jobs are at stake," by Tim Rutten, explains that the expansive cutting of journalists positions isn't the only negative in the Los Angeles Times situation. After Jeffrey M. Johnson, publisher of the paper, was forced to resign this past Thursday, things are in a bit of an uproar. The editor, Dean Baquet, has agreed to stick around, but the cuts, it sounds, will still be happening.

"Tribune has cut the number of reporters, editors, photographers and designers
from about 1,200 to 940. The paper's editors say that Chicago believes that
about 800 would be a more appropriate number."

To me, this seems and ungodly amount of people to be cut from an operation. I know that profits are down, but can the quality of a newspaper survive with a loss of nearly 35 percent of its staff?

The bigger question that Rutten brings to the forefront of his article is that idea that newspapers may be suffering from more than just staff cutbacks.

"Whether newspapers belong to individual proprietors or corporate stockholders,
the future — and its profits — will belong to those who are both socially responsible enough and financially hard-headed enough to carry what is indispensable about the present into the era now struggling to be born. Los Angeles will be one of the places where we'll eventually find out whether newspaper journalism's current distress is a birth pang or a death rattle."

As Walter Lippman once wrote, "The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct." Will the newspaper industry be able to survive the "big bad wolf"?

posted by clevergirl @ 7:36 PM