The doom and gloom here seems over-the-top, no?
When historians get around to 2008, it’s likely they will say it was the year the Los Angeles Times died. No, I don’t think the paper will fold between now and December. But I do fear the paper will be so diminished, so crippled, that the chance of saving it will have slipped away.
I agree that indiscriminately slashing the LATimes’s staff and budget will, inevitably, degrade its quality. (Though given its traditional bureaucratic loginess, cutting and reorganization are not automatically bad things.)
But like most papers, the LAT is more than a bunch of journalists and a building, it’s an institution and a brand. Those will endure in some form or another. Once Sam Zell has wrung all he can out of them, his successors will want to do something with what’s left. Los Angeles is a large metro area. It has a big industry and a vibrant cultural life for a news organization to tap into. The LAT won’t die - and it will be back in a new form, perhaps a better one. It just won’t be the 1990s-era Times. That is, indeed, dying.
