L.A. Times bloodletting reportedly gets a big one -- Mark Heisler

Yet Chris Erskine still has a column.

Go figure.

 

This is starting to make a little sense, at least in the case of Heisler. If he truly had only a year left to work, and they came to him and said, hey, would you leave a little early with a nine-month severance? I think I'd take that deal.

 

It's interesting that the Times is apparently going to go without an NBA writer (when they have two teams) but still has Sam Farmer covering the NFL (even though they don't have a team).

 

That's exactly what I was thinking and I have heard of that scenario happening time after time. The other part is, maybe he had advance notice of all this and is going to surface soon at one of the aforementioned outlets (NBA.com, ESPN, the cable station with a website etc.) in very short order. And if that happens, he would be double-dipping for the next nine months, which would be great.

 

Don't think too many outlets are going to be hiring NBA writers in the near future. Nine months might not even cover the length of the lockout.

 

Amen to that.

Listen, Erskine may very well be a nice guy and may do a good job with his column in the Home section or wherever it is (don't know, never read him there), but to give him ample space to essentially "moonlight" in the sports section is a slap in the face to the guys who just got let go, and to the sports staff as a whole, IMO.

 

The fact that Erskine "moonlights" in sports is probably exactly the reason he wasn't cut.

He is not, budget- and department-wise, actually a member of the sports staff. If the sports department had to cut two big names, he wasn't an option.

This is the same reason that, sometimes, de facto "staff stringers" are not eliminated at the same time that staff members may be. It involves two different piles of beans.

 

There are probably things that mitigate the departures of Heisler and Crowe -- I hope so for their sake -- but I can't help but think back to 1987 when I started at the LAT and thought I was at the coolest place in the world, then go through 1995 when things had started to go downhill and I (completely incidentally) left, and I'm still sad about what there was -- incredible talent all over the place, 1.2 million Sunday circulation, and an Orange County BUREAU that hit 300,000 Sunday -- and what's left.

Not a singular Times problem, obviously, but still sad.

 

One of the interesting things about the L.A. office was a gigantic, wall-covering assignment table that had every sport and every day and every writer and who was going where. It was up there for ages, but don't know if it still is. Anyway, I digress...

 

The LA Times sports page has hemorrhaged talent - as well as number of pages - in the past few years...

Yet they've *added* Chris Erskine?

Parisian teenagers take in a Dodgers game on their U.S. tour arranged by French-Jew’rney.

Selfless in ways even I don’t pretend to understand, I treat them to pretzels and red licorice and ask them how they like our little city.

“I prefer New York,” one of them says.

“Really?”

“I prefer Israel,” says another. “My second favorite place in zee world is California. The first is Jerusalem.”

So, maybe not so typical after all. They are all Parisians, sent over by French-Jew’rney, an organization that helps European teens experience American culture. Fairly well off, I assume from their pricey two-week vacation, though we never really discuss that.

What we discuss is baseball. Ever try to explain it to a foreigner?

“OK, that croissant down there, that’s first base,” I say.

“What’s ay dou-BELL?”

“That’s when they get two croissants.”

*facepalm*

 

wow --- that is lame.