A report from the Wasthington Post:
On Oct. 1, 1910, a bomb set by James McNamara, an operative of the Iron Workers union, then embroiled in a ferocious dispute with the Los Angeles Times, blew up the Times building, killing 21 pressmen. McNamara was arrested the following April, convicted and later sentenced to life in prison. He died in San Quentin in 1941.
The question for today is: Would a similar sentence be appropriate for Sam Zell?
Zell, for those of you fortunate enough not to follow news of the newspaper business, is the Chicago real estate magnate who last year purchased the Tribune Co., which owns the Tim
es, the Chicago Tribune and a number of smaller papers. At the rate he's going, he's well on his way to accomplishing a feat that McNamara didn't even contemplate: destroying the L.A. Times.In his brief tenure atop the Trib empire, Zell has concluded that the proper response to the very real troubles in which the newspaper industry finds itself is to cut back on what newspapers offer. When Zell took over, the Times had already been through successive rounds of buyouts and layoffs administered by Tribune executives, but Zell has taken bean counting to a whole new level.
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During his first year in journalism, Zell has visited the city rooms and Washington bureaus of a number of Trib publications to deliver obscenity-laced warnings and threats to employees that whatever it was they were doing, it wasn't working. There was too much coverage of world and national affairs, he told Times writers and editors; readers don't want that stuff. Last week, the company decreed that its 12 papers would have to cut by 500 the number of pages they devoted every week to news, features and editorials, until the ratio of pages devoted to copy and pages devoted to advertising was a nice, even 1 to 1. At the Times, that would mean eliminating 82 pages a week.
Click on the headline to read the rest of this story by Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post.
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