The Los Angeles Times in Dying Color

The Los Angeles Times today unveiled their makeover and redesign. I'm sure that lots of time was devoted to this nose job, this elective cosmetic surgery, this colorful liposuction. I'm sure that the salaries saved by the firing and forcing out of actual news writers, editors, proofreaders and reporters more than covered the costs. I'm also sure that the addition of more color and color-coded sections and the eventual addition of caricatures of the few remaining by-lined columnists will neither increase circulation nor staunch the bleeding of circulation and advertising revenues.

More color with less content is the news equivalent of junk food. Strangely however as the junk increases the paper slims down. There is less news, fewer stories and little recognition of quality writing. But think of the money they are saving on news while spending it on design and color. The list of writing and analytical talent lost is shocking: from international news to local political writers, from business to sports, from entertainment to opinion, we are left with fewer reasons to buy or read the Times.

A once great paper, with a national and international reputation, is being vivisected before our eyes. The Tribune Empire is being taken apart and sold off for scrap and we are left watching our Los Angeles Times bleed out. But at least we can see the red. I know I'm seeing red--red-hot anger, red blood and the fatal flow of red ink. They can now put their USA Today style color graph/pie-chart on the front page to document their shrinking presence, increasing irrelevancy and immanent demise.