The LA Times editor who got the ax the other day became an editor gone wild about it:
“The current system relies too heavily on voodoo economics and not enough on the creativity and resourcefulness of journalists,” O’Shea said in a farewell note to his staff that said flatly he had been fired. Too often, he said, “we’ve been dismissed as budgetary adolescents who can’t be trusted to conserve our resources.”
When quite the opposite is true? Or are they guilty of wanting to make money without consideration of the market?
It is “simply stupid,” [Jim] O’Shea [the editor] wrote, to consider closing foreign bureaus so the Times can afford to cover the presidential campaign and the Beijing Olympics. As for Tribune Co.’s new owner, real estate financier Sam Zell, O’Shea said, “When Sam Zell understands how asinine the current budgetary system is, he will change it for the better, because he is a smart businessman.”
Zell will take business advice from O’Shea? Please. Instead, elementary economics from the publisher who fired him:
In an interview yesterday, [David] Hiller said the rupture came over O’Shea’s demand for a modest increase in newsroom spending, but that this was just one among many disagreements.
“It was a regrettable and unnecessary line drawn in the sand,” Hiller said. “In the environment all newspapers are facing, it is wildly unrealistic to consider a budget increase at a time when revenue is falling.”
What? You don’t spend more when taking in less? What sort of mentality is that?
Blithe Spirit 