How the “Ol’ Grey Lady of Spring Street” became a spinster. Now THAT would be a good book!

Someone should chronicle the careers of these two men vis a vis their ideology, the ebb and flow of the political climate, and the marginalization of the LAT’s Opinion page versus the erosion of revenues and the decline in readership.

Somewhere, someone was WAAAY out of step with the masses and should be brought to account for it.

While I suspect it was due to the failure of the Socialist propaganda model’s premise that independent-minded Americans can be led by the nose; and that they instead rejected the concept the masses NEED to be TOLD what their OPINION is, it would be presumptuous for me to say so. Now, if I had 20 years of emails and a horde of ex-ballot counters to provide the manual labor, I’m sure it could be demonstrated QED.

I can only speak for myself, but nobody told me to call and cancel. I did it on my own, before Scheer wrote a single word about it and my decision had less to do with Scheer’s politics than it did with how his writing ability compares with the keyboard smacking of Jonah Goldberg.

The Times has been getting worse for years and is completely out of touch with its own community. While trading an articulate veteran for a hack might have been enough for me to cancel on its own, it was really the last of many straws.

You may be right about the other 5,999 angry callers, Mr. Maxwell, but I won’t jump to conclusions about you, if you stop assuming things about me.

I know it’s old technology, but so is the wheel. I wish I could get a lot of the best stuff I read in blogs, news sites, etc. on a similar piece of paper for reading instead of the PC screen. At work, I often will print out long documents, like contracts, for reading and noting comments in the margins, before responding to them electronically.

The newspaper may be old technology, but are you confusing the media (paper) with the content? There’s something about holding a book or a newspaper in my hands that is much more natural.

Am I alone in this?

Nice of him to stand up and retort Mr. Wasserman’s observations, but I believe he (Maxwell) is in a very small, minority group with similar beliefs. Bottom line, in my opinion: the consistent changes and mutations the Times has undergone have not improved the newspaper.

With all this experienced newspaper talent roaming free around town (amid plunging sales of the LAT), I would think the time is ripe for another broadsheet to drop in. Of course, that would need a huge start-up investment. Are there any whispers around town that this might be happening?

I don’t know if there are any such whispers (given that I’m a couple of thousand miles away), but newspapers are dying, period. They are eighteenth century technology, modernized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but simply unable to compete as we enter the twenty-first.

It’s a lot easier, a lot cheaper, a lot cleaner, and a lot more up to date to get news from the internet.

Seriously, if the content is superb, even if it is right-of-center, it’ll find an audience across the region, including the Westside. But it’s not my money.

Isn’t it best anyway to jettison the b.s. and the pretense of objectivity and write the stories, but supply bios of the reporters so that their background and politics can be used as a refeence by the readers when making theri own decisions about the “objectivity” of a given story? That way, right or left is at least being worn on the sleeve and the writers can focus on writing good stuff, like it or not.