Beat Down (Updated)

regarding the trajectory of the los angeles times

The Los Angeles Times laid off twenty percent of its newsroom this week, which is showing up as a local scandal on social media. It doesn’t matter. At all. I don’t say that as someone who hates the newspaper, but as someone who grew up with the thing on my family’s dining room table. As always, generalize beyond the current example. The story I’m about to tell is about the news media, all of it.

In the 90s, and then briefly into the next decade, I worked for small, locally owned newspapers in suburban Los Angeles. I’ve written about this, and how much I loved it and hated it. I was always committed to the local and alt press models, and freelanced for publications like the late Los Angeles Reader and New Times, and you could have caught Young Chris Bray at the bar bitching about the stupid corporate media. However, and this is a big but:

A little more than twenty years ago, I was sitting at my desk at a small suburban newspaper when we started to hear sirens everywhere, which was our cue to go to work. It turned out that some dude had tried to kill a sheriff’s deputy in a nearby town, then vanished for a while, then turned up in our quiet little community. He was in a panel van, stopped in the middle of the street, and he ran and hid in the back of the thing when the police tried to pull him over. There he sat, probably armed, out of sight of the police, who called for a SWAT team.

So I ran up the street, found the van, and threw myself down behind a brick wall to watch — next to a bunch of cops, who knew me and sighed heavily at my appearance. “Just keep your head down.”

I got good stuff, and our not-terribly-daring photographer got some okay pictures. But we soon discovered that the Los Angeles Times was so totally all over everything that their photographer got a stunning photograph — I actually let out a long, awed breath — from a spot just behind the SWAT team, looking down the barrel of a rifle at the dude’s face as he surrendered, with a police dog at the periphery and looking quite pleased by the prospect of putting in some work. There was a whole perfect story in one flawlessly composed image.

There was a long period in Southern California when this was the normal thing: The Los Angeles Times was an alert and constant presence. It was always, in my lifetime if not at its founding, a liberal newspaper. They had a point of view when they covered the news. But they covered the news. Working for the small local papers, I never went to a suburban city council meeting without seeing the reporter from the Los Angeles Times. They were everywhere. If you didn’t read the Times, you didn’t know what was happening in California. Their large and aggressive Sacramento bureau dominated coverage of state government; the Central Valley bureau dominated coverage of agriculture and water policy; the suburban bureaus dominated coverage of the county. And so on. If you lived in Bell Gardens or Signal Hill or La Verne, a beat reporter from the Times was assigned to cover your community, and did the job.

Today I live in a small town in the Los Angeles suburbs, and I would bet that the Los Angeles Times hasn’t had a reporter regularly sitting through our city council meetings for well over a decade. They don’t bother; the local news bureaus and sections are dead. I ignore the thing, because it’s safe to ignore. As a fun test, I’d like to see how many people in the Los Angeles Times newsroom could get in the car and find South Pasadena without putting it into their phones for directions.

The old newsroom directory listed the beat reporters for Long Beach and Pasadena and Santa Clarita; the current newsroom directory lists beats like this:

No one at the Los Angeles Times covers your part of Los Angeles, but I can connect you to the climate justice team. Fuck off.

But don’t worry, because they still cover blackness and Asianness:

And then there’s this, which makes me start grinding my teeth:

The newspaper of record in a 4,000 square-mile county of 10 million people has…a reporter assigned to the courts and prosecutors. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department covers a patrol area the equivalent size of several East Coast states with about 10,000 cops, which means that it’s substantially under its expected numbers and struggling with a recruiting crisis, but the newspaper with a climate change team and a racial identity team has one reporter assigned to cover the thing. And aside from the LAPD and LASD, who covers the police in Glendale and Burbank and Pasadena and Long Beach and Irwindale? Weirdly, I can’t find those beats listed in the Times newsroom directory.

Yes, the Los Angeles Times went woke and then went broke, and that’s part of what happened.

The bigger truth behind the implosion of the Los Angeles Times is that, and yes I’m shouting, IT STOPPED COVERING THE NEWS. It became a social justice newsletter to the exclusion of showing up and consistently covering budgeting and policy stories in California communities. It gave up on who, what, when, where, why, and how, in favor of endless prattle about Orange Man Bad and all the related pieties. The complaints about the layoffs precisely mirror the dynamics that caused the decline of the newspaper.

And please do note that the Times laid off this important opinion writer even though she’s the author of a book about how mean and racist Donald Trump is:

oh no where will they find another journalist who’s capable of bitching about donald trump

The Los Angeles Times used to be the largest newspaper, by circulation, in the country. Then it stopped being a newspaper.

ADDED LATER:

On Twitter, a magnificent collection of Los Angeles Times headlines that show exactly why the paper is dying: