It’s a move certain to confound LA Times cartographers. Some 50 blocks of Los Angeles are set to transfer from Van Nuys to Sherman Oaks—the result of a homeowner campaign backed by the local chamber of commerce and Councilmember Wendy Greuel. It won’t be the last time Van Nuys surrenders valuable real estate.
Everyone agrees the LA Times is marching toward irrelevance, but opinions differ as to why. James Rainey’s Friday finger wag at the Weekly sets a good stage for my two cents:
New Media obviously factors big, and while the death of newspaper as a medium was inevitable, the growing irrelevance of the Times as a content provider was not. The internet offers unlimited potential, unlimited capacity, and yet the paper ensures its irrelevance by refusing to acknowledge changing consumer expectations.
Seasoned consumers of news have long understood the impracticability of unbiased reporting and used it to our advantage. … Now in the age of the RSS reader, a growing audience is seeking subjective reporting, because the aggregate does, in fact, produce a better informed reader. The Times is too vain to acknowledge this; to step down and accept its place as one opinion in the arena of opinions.
For Rainey to give Jill Stewart a hard time while his paper is being replaced in my RSS reader by LAist, Curbed, and LA Observed for headline news (each of whose biases are clear and understood), speaks for itself. In short: I would love the Times a lot more if it would stop pretending.
Ron Kaye: “It’s great the Lakers won and they deserve to be honored. I just don’t want to see the mayor and City Council out there today posing for the cameras as if they were the champions instead of the bums they are.” More
Snow Days. Growing up “Back East” we lived for these. … Mornings met with enough snowfall to ground the buses and shutter the schools. … We’d dress for class within earshot of the radio as the robot voice read from an endless list of school systems and schools in neighboring cities and counties, waiting for the words:
CLOSED: DENVER PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
Growing up, snow days were days to get outdoors, to be free and creative. … Today, some 250,000 LA-area residents get theirs.
You know where. Scientology, parking meters, Paul Krekorian, and more.
Councilmember Eric Garcetti tells Rick Orlov, “I think I’ve seen more rumors this year than ever before. … And, it’s hard some days to find out which are true and which are just made up.”
The big rumor last week had Jack Weiss landing a Homeland Security job.
Tom Hollihan of the Annenberg School of Communication at USC says, “Sometimes, if you protest a rumor, you just give it more credibility. The more you take it seriously and respond to it, makes people think you are hiding something.”
This makes sense in the broader context, but not in a city of bad-faith politics like Los Angeles, where the mayor and council president on down operate with consistent duplicity. Here, it should surprise no one when imaginations run wild.
It’s a shame Matt Welch isn’t here to kick LAT editors in the heads every day.
California Assembly Districts
When Meg Whitman says the ballot initiative process has, in many ways, “worn out its usefulness,” does she suggest her star power alone can accomplish what Arnold Schwarzenegger’s could not?
