LA Times Bemoans Death of California Journalism – Fails to Acknowledge It Helped Kill It

This past week, the Los Angeles Times ran an entire series of articles on the terrible state of print media in California.

It lamented the loss of local newspapers and was sad because of the dearth of Spanish-language print media. It reminded the world of the need for the bill making its way through the legislature that would force search engines like Google to pay for new links, worried about how AI will change the industry, and appalled that the declining news coverage in California is making room for misinformation.

Yep – the Los Angeles Times said all of this, permanently shattering the unintentional irony record for all time.

The review of the state of newspapers by the Times contained much of the usual info and stats. Digital advertising obliterated print ads, Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist destroyed classifieds, newspapers were slow to react to a changing environment, and legislature really needs to pass the bill to get us paid by Google, etc., like in Australia and Canada.

In Canada, news organizations get the equivalent of $1,000 (US) per month per-reporter. In Australia, the tech giants negotiated a deal that will give much of the industry about $166 million to split each year for the next five-ish years.

As California is larger than Australia, let’s say a deal like that here would generate about $250 million a year – nice, but only about 5% of current print ad dollars taken in.

What the Times missed entirely is how newspapers – at least in part – brought this situation upon themselves. When the internet really started going – say, about 15 years ago, the papers decided they needed to get on board and began offering their stories for free on the assumption that people would stick with their trusted news source and they could sell banner ads and the like.

Oops.

In reaction to declining revenue, the papers started slashing jobs, mostly local news jobs.  Papers then found out they had no one to cover local news – go to council meetings, sit through planning commissions and such – and that they had forfeited the one massive advantage they had over tech: typically trusted local news coverage that cannot be found anywhere else.

Oops, again.

And then things got very silly – papers that had literally sold for a billion dollars just a few years before were being bought for their real estate alone and billionaires  – like the Times’ own Patrick Soon-Shiong – started picking them up on the cheap for influence purposes, hoping that they would at least break even.

But the destruction of daily grind local news at the bottom and the plaything mentality at the top only amplified the problems, particularly in the case of the Times which became the domain of Soon-Shiong’s permanent grad student, horrifically woke nightmare daughter Nika.

Her politics, reportedly, drove and drives the news coverage of the Times and that was that.  And yet another mistake was made – and not just by the Times –  that by being so woke, so scolding, so ideologically driven, so pointless, so full of propaganda that the majority of the public that wanted to read a daily newspaper simply turned away because there was no point to it – no point, that is, if you wanted to get relatively unbiased hard news coverage of local issues.

The Times also notes how sad it is that so many “journalists” have been laid off recently. At least it mentioned its own layoffs, no matter how obliquely.

The meat of the series – how a lack of news coverage allows crooked pols to run rampant – is unquestionably true. Unwatched cities typically fall victim to being taking advantage of because they are not really worried about getting caught.

At least that idea in the series isn’t hypocritical of the Times to rally around and …  oh wait.  As the Times has failed its way down the ladder, its coverage of local issues has been abysmal, abysmal to the point that what the series complains about possibly happening elsewhere really did happen in Los Angeles.

Dozens of city officials – electeds and staffers – have been nabbed in corruption scheme after corruption scheme and to say that City Hall under Mayor Eric Garcetti was a cesspool of bribes and harassment is a wild understatement.

And the Times  – which heartily endorsed Eric Garcetti and the city’s weasel power structure – was nowhere to be found, until law enforcement “broke” the stories.

The Times dutifully re-packages press releases and prints them – but only if they like you.

Take for example, District Attorney George Gascon. Los Angeles has objectively become a more dangerous place to be since his 2020 election, and to say his office is riddled with incompetence and malfeasance is an insult to riddles.

But he follows the same political lines as the Times’ leadership so everything is fine. Since the re-election campaign began in earnest, the Times has published exactly one mildly critical piece about Gascon (after it endorsed him, of course).

And then they have the gall to print this gem in the series:

As conspiracies and misinformation spread and exacerbate polarization, local newsrooms meant to hold officials accountable and keep community members well-informed are becoming fewer and farther between.

The lack of self-awareness is so astounding that it cannot be accidental. The Times has to know what a large role they have played in spreading utter falsehoods and lies and the degradation of the city over the past few years but is still trying to convince the public – and maybe even themselves – that they are guiltless.

It is reminiscent of a skit from Netflix’s “I Think You Should Leave” comedy sketch show starring Tim Robinson:

The key to local news – a point the Times misses – is the importance of the personal, on-the-ground reporter making connections in the community. Emblematic of not understanding this basic fact was the Times’ move out of downtown – physically close to the action as it were – to El Segundo:

Covering news properly requires a human connection; it is an oddly intimate, especially as it is typically transitory,  process.  The woman quoted at the city council meeting, the tornado victim, the Eagle Scout, the murderer, the sleazy politician can all be impermanent subjects, crucial today, non-existent tomorrow and a reporter must be able to nearly-instantly understand each situation in as much totality as possible.

And an email from a PR flack simply doesn’t allow that to happen.

Reporters – not “journalists” – spent their time in the community, particularly at the local watering hole, always with an ear out for information and opinions and ideas.  That rarely happens anymore.

Instead of meeting for a drink  which allows for a discussion of history and nuance and also an assessment of body language and such, now a canned standard email suffices to pass as news.

In the article about how awful it is that Richmond doesn’t have local reporters on the ground anymore, the Times did note there are a few intrepid news websites up and running and that there is now a weekly newspaper. But, because the paper is funded by Chevron – -the owner of the Richmond refinery and target of the powerful far left faction in the city – it essentially cannot be trusted so it doesn’t count.

The Long Beach “news desert” is also touched upon and the Times tracked how the Press-Telegram is a mere shell of itself, how the Times itself had to pull its three reporters from the city, and how a promising news website has essentially just collapsed because it lost its funding from its wealthy backer.

It should occur to the Times that – instead of having a half-dozen staffers doing a series on the decline of the newsroom in California –  it could have sent those people to, you know, actually cover the news.

And finally, the series does include website traffic information for a number of news organizations throughout the state.  Of course, the Globe, which actually beats a few of the other sites, wasn’t mentioned.

I wonder why – maybe because we actually do news and we tell the truth.

Here’s the link to the entire series.