The Shrinking Heart of the Times

Is Sam Zell trying to destroy capitalism or does he just not understand? I mean when I studied economics I learned about supply and demand and "the market." Okay, I did study all this in the 60s and my memories may be clouded by time or second hand dope smoke, but I'm pretty sure you're supposed to lower the price to raise the demand. Sam and his minions, having squandered millions of dollars buying an empire they don't either love or understand, have presented Los Angeles with The Amazing Shrinking L.A. Times. He now combines this model of failure with raising the newsstand price by 50%!

Once upon a time you could hurt yourself picking up even the daily paper but today in both form and substance the LATs has become lightweight. Sections come, go, get reformatted and then put out of existence. Some days the Business section is one page. Even sports can shrink to a single broad sheet. Award winning writers with distinguished careers, are bought out, forced out or cut back till they fade away. Promising young talent is attracted and then let go. Editors and publishers have the life expectancy of Second Lieutenants on amphibious landings.

Now add to this abundant absence of judgment a complete absence of decency. Today, Monday January 12, we read in LA Observed that Al Martinez, Pulitzer Prize winning writer, long-times columnist and mainstay for the demographic that still reads the paper is losing his column. We do not read a complaint in Al's column today about the Times. We read instead about his daughter's fight with cancer. We are treated to his humanity, his thought provoking and tear producing handling life, death, fear, hope and beauty. In other words, we get a real Al Martinez column.

Does anyone in the shrinking Zell Empire have either a heart or a brain? Does anyone have any understanding of either newspapers or humanity? These are, I'm afraid, rhetorical questions. We know the answers.
www.Dobrer.org