J.A. Adande seeks LAT buyout

You have to figure that the chances of Adande going to ESPN are about 100 percent. If the LAT wanted to be cute, it would refuse the buyout, knowing he would leave anyway.

 

Didn't Adande come from an East Coast paper anyway (Baltimore?)

 

Yeah. Little papers called the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun Times.

 

Adande aside, since he appears to have a different deal with ESPN, but where do these people go after they accept the buyout... It's not like a lot of jobs are being created...

 

What on earth is happening to the beloved times. Now the only thing the city of LA needs is a tabloid like the NY Post.

I thought that the Times was going to finally go into the direction it needed to go to become a quality local newspaper. Instead they are wasting money to be a national newspaper.

 

My guess is they would accept the buyout from Adande now that this has become public knowledge. It would get rid of a big salary and get rid of somebody who wanted to leave. Not that I would blame Adande, because there are going to be new owners and that usually doesn't bode well for somebody who was promoted under a different regime - and make no mistake about it, this going to be a lot bigger change that when the Times was sold to the Tribune.

Maybe it's my blatant East Coast bias, but I never looked at the LA Times as all that. You are always going to have really good writers at any paper that size simply because somebody could get exposure and maybe move to bigger and better things at magazines or on television. When the Times was purchased by the Tribune, on the first day the LA Times tried to portray it as a merger, which it clearly wasn't and anybody who understood the first thing about any business could see that it wasn't a merger. Then there were the eight-page sports sections during the week. There was the fact that the LA Times never seemed to have tough coverage of the motion picture and entertainment business in LA. I have always said if you put the LA Times sports section in New York, it comes out no better than third.

 

And you've always been wrong about that, but I admire your consistency.

I don't think regime change would affect Adande very much. No regime is going to be in a hurry to get rid of one of the few African-American sports columnists in the country.

Also, the L.A. Observed item doesn't put him in one of the questionable categories. It calls him a confirmed buyout.

I read right over Moehringer. I just got done reading The Tender Bar. Great book if you have any interest in bar culture and this business, or if you're from the New York/Long Island area (I'm in the first category).

That is indeed quite a list of talent heading out the door.

 

Adande probably wants the buyout because he'll be at ESPN before the check clears...

 

Yes, it is a little silly to believe that the L.A. Times sports department, magically transported to New York, would be unable to adapt to a different market, alter its tone a little and thrive.

Conversely, would L.A. readers accept NYC-style tabloid journalism? I don't think so. The L.A. Herald Examiner was tabloid in every way but the size of the page and couldn't survive. So if you magically transported an NYC tabloid to L.A., it would have to adjust as well.

It's a crazy comparison. We publish newspapers for our specific markets, not to measure ourselves against staffs 3,000 miles away.

 

I understand it is a "what if" comparison that can't be made perfectly. I also understand that you can't even go to the library and make comparison because you won't read the final edition of each paper.

But you can read the papers and, to a lesser extent, read stories on the website, you can get an idea of what you like and the way things are covered. Somebody gave me a Canadian newspaper three or four years ago from Calgary once and I saw how deep the coverage was on a regular-season NHL game. I thought it was great. Now maybe somebody would say that hockey isn't that big a deal in their area or they don't have the space, but I liked how hockey was covered in Calgary. I like buffets with more choices and good food instead of warmed over medicore eats.

On the other hand, I remember in 1993 when a Kings game went into a second overtime and the LA Times had the story where the game was tied at 3-3. I was amazed, and thought a New York newspaper would never do that and there would have been a pregame story there. I was also amazed because you couldn't get a west coast score in a west coast paper - I mean, I thought moving from New Jersey to California would mean you would have west coast scores in the paper.

Dwyre put out the memo about space being reduced pretty dramatically. Has any New York daily newspaper done that? I don't think so, and that is my point. Frank and SF, maybe you can say, "Oh, newspapers can't do that in the current environment" but that's what I like.

 

The NYT used to do that in the 1970s and into the early 1980s.

It depends on the edition. If you look at other Western big cities like San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, you'll find the same thing. It is simply impossible to print that many papers and deliver them to the vast circulation areas (a lot more spread out than the NYC area) and start the presses late enough to get every score in every edition.

Oh of course the New York papers have to an extent, but you have to put it in the context that the LAT has really no competition in the city, as the Daily News focuses on the Valley. The NYC tabs have maintained sports news hole over the past 10 years for the most part because they are in a death struggle with each other and can't afford to cut back on sports, but there have been lots of cuts in other departments just to maintain that focus on sports -- coverage of the suburbs and even some of the boroughs has pretty much died. Both also had significant cutbacks in sports space and staff in the late 1980s and early 1990s at a time when West Coast sports sections were adding staff and space, so in a sense they already had scaled back as much as they felt they could. There is also no doubt that space has declined considerably over the past 10 years in all the other NYC area papers.

 

That's what I love about the New York sports pages. There is so much competition and I think it makes everybody better. Out here, everybody seems satisfied to just follow the LA Times - I'm not saying some individual reporters at other papers wouldn't try to do better, but everybody seems satisfied and content.