Enough Is Apparently Enough at the L.A. Times

Interesting developments there:

Today, in Editor and Publisher Carroll denied his own newspaper’s website report that he was retiring — saying he’s taking an "open-ended vacation" and will then "find something else" in journalism — and dissed the paper’s parent company for all the slashes in resources and budgets mandated in recent years that eliminated more than 60 editorial positions last year alone. While clearly this is the job Baquet coveted (even going so far as to rebuff a personal overture from The New York Times’ scion "Pinch" Sulzberger to return to his former employer as managing editor after the Howell Raines purging), Baquet has his work cut out for him. He inherits a once stalwart institution now beset with problems: nose-diving circulation, spotty penetration, weak advertising, unwanted budget cutbacks ordered by parent Tribune Co., increasing portents that the newspaper could be sold sooner rather than later because its business plan is hopelessly doomed.

Even the LAT’s own Web site announcement of Baquet’s takeover led with bad news: how Carroll had "struggled with circulation" throughout his five-year tenure at the top. Pointedly, no mention was made of the multimillion-dollar fiasco that took place also under Carroll’s watch: General Motors’ April decision to pull all advertising because of a cranky article by Pulitzer Prize-winning car columnist Dan Neil. Add that Baquet’s promotion followed a recent meeting with the Chicago bosses — one which Carroll did not attend, according to LAT sources — as well as a recent change of publishers, and you don’t need a calculator to determine it was a zero-sum game for Carroll. So he had no choice but to cut his losses despite all those shiny new 13 Pulitzers he won for the paper.

First word of the transition came from Kevin Roderick’s widely read LAObserved.com Web site, which is the town crier for local media. Shocked and baffled LAT staffers spent the next hour messaging and phoning and huddling in bathrooms and corners. Finally, at 11:45 a.m., the worker bees were told at a gathering in the newsroom.

(The news will not be covered by LAT media critic David Shaw, who is said to have inoperable brain cancer. According to friends, the columnist tragically suffered a brain seizure on July 5 and has been hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai in a coma since then.)

The announcement left more questions than it answered among LAT newspeople, especially about the degree to which Carroll jumped or was pushed by Chicago. To explain the timing, the buzz at first was that he may have been unhappy over deeper budget cuts supposedly in the offing by the Tribune Co., or disappointed over whether reporters’ sources would be protected, or just fed up with the uninterrupted nagging about finances and circulation. How demoralizing for Carroll when, after winning five Pulitzers in 2004, the second-most ever for a single paper in one year, he saw the LAT bear the brunt of Tribune Co.-mandated layoffs just two months later. On the other hand, the Chicago bosses had reason to keep riding Carroll after circulation posted big drops for the past two reporting periods — down 5.5 percent for daily and 6.3 percent for Sunday in September 2004, and then down 6.4 percent for daily and 7.9 percent for Sunday in March 2005.

One insider summed it up: "John Carroll doesn’t want to kiss anyone’s ass anymore. He’s too old and too proud. Baquet is more pragmatic. And whatever’s happening with Tribune, he’s not feeling the need to take action or take a stand." While Carroll spilled, Baquet is notorious for being close-mouthed and brilliantly playing corporate politics.

A few weeks earlier, LAT insiders heard bits and pieces about how the paper’s top men, with their Chicago bosses, were performing a "look to the future" during which there was going to be big decisions made — both good and bad — for the LAT.

But Carroll’s descent and Baquet’s ascent was helped along by the new publisher, according to insiders. "He has a very heavy hand on the tiller," one source told LA Weekly. "It’s widely known that he lit a fire under editorial recently by saying, ‘You guys have to think about your role in circulation. We are selling a product, and the two are connected. We've got to make this a product that people want to buy.’" LA Weekly has learned that mandate triggered a recent retreat of senior editors to ponder just that topic.

Media is nothing but vanity press without an audience.

Blogs have grown influential as their audience has grown, not as the quality of their writing has grown. The written word unread is no more influential than the unwritten word.