Last Throes

"Even the dimmest hooker knows to get paid upfront."

Ouch!

"If there were no stodgy newspapers to set the agenda with boring stuff like government, world news, politics and finance, TV news would be free to give viewers what they want - more weather, cute animal videos, traffic accidents, house fires and 'special reports' on the dangers (or promise) of cosmetic surgery.

"The dilemma: While people get their news from the Internet, the Internet gets its news from newspapers. Without newspapers, who provides the content?"

The former editor of the LAT book review, Steve Wasserman , paints a pessimistic picture and takes a few whacks at his old paper:

"Why continue to read newspapers? After all, newspapers are losing circulation at precipitous rates, giving rise to fears that they may not survive long enough to write their own obituaries. Cutbacks, buyouts and layoffs are widespread, affecting many of America's most prestigious newspapers, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, where it was recently announced that the paper faced an 8% reduction in its editorial staff. Morale plummets, anxiety mounts...

"There is a strong feeling within the newsroom at the Los Angeles Times that its Chicago masters regard Los Angeles as an alien planet whose denizens are made of different DNA. Chicago's faint and unenthusiastic recognition of the 13 Pulitzers the paper was awarded during the five years that John Carroll was its editor is a wound that refuses to heal. It's almost as if Mars had conquered Jupiter but somehow, much to the Martians' bafflement, Jupiter still exercises a larger gravitational pull and looms still brighter in the heavens above. More than one high official of the paper has remarked on the odd but palpable admixture of resentment and envy the paper's Midwestern owners evince when they are in the presence of their West Coast underlings.

"Despite the vast reams of internal marketing surveys the paper has routinely commissioned over the years, the Times today seems no longer to know who its readers are, much less how to talk to them. Today the paper is ironically an almost perfect reflection of the city it purports to cover: Neither really knows what it wants to be when it grows up...

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the paper, in a frenetic effort to reinvent itself under the suffocating pressure of its Chicago overseers, is jettisoning a patrimony of journalistic excellence painstakingly built up over the years at great cost."

This morning, meanwhile, the L.A. Times follows up on the Pentagon media-manipulation story that it broke:

"The White House demanded Thursday that the Pentagon hand over information about a secret U.S. military operation to plant news stories in the Iraqi news media, and senators plan to meet behind closed doors with military commanders to learn about the information offensive underway in Iraq.

"Press Secretary Scott McClellan said the White House was 'very concerned' about reports that a defense contractor in Iraq, working with U.S. forces, was paying newspapers in Baghdad to run stories written by American troops." Actually, he spent most of his time refusing to criticize the effort by saying the White House didn't know the facts.