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If it’s Tuesday there must be a new Los Angeles Times top editor. Not 
that it’ll matter to Hollywood since the newspaper’s entertainment business coverage remains smug, lazy, and uninformed. Editor Russ Stanton will step down as the Editor/EVP on December 23 after four years and Managing Editor Davan Maharaj will take over the top newsroom job. He’ll become the paper’s 15th editor and is a 22-year LAT veteran. The official statement from LAT President/COO Officer Kathy Thomson in the paper only says Stanton “moves on to the next phase of his career”. During Stanton’s tenure, the LAT newsroom staff shrank from more than 900 people to about 550. As much as Stanton tried to make the LAT a bigger online presence, his leadership emphasized celebrity over substance in entertainment coverage. The result is that the newsosaur is now irrelevant in the Hollywood community and the proof is in the LAT‘s dwindling movie and TV advertising revenues.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Wow. That’s really mean. And absolutely true. You’d think that, if the L.A. Times could, or would, do anything well, it should be covering the entertainment business. Yet, it’s an afterthought, and they still let Patrick “three weeks late” Goldstein write for them. Has he made an outgoing call in the past decade?
This is my way of voting up your comment!
When I worked there and asked why the paper wasn’t breaking entertainment news, a top editor said to me, “There’s a fear of being first.”
“The Times” is being killed by Chicago. What’s going on in The Tower should be stopped by a Judge but instead the World’s Longest and Most Expensive Bankruptcy rolls on. The culprits are all hiding in plain sight. “The Times” will be lucky to survive in any form whatsoever. The scoundrels are having their way. American journalism exists in history lessons now.
Yeah, they bummed me out when they swapped out David Ulin, who edited the Book Review, for the guy who’d been editing the Obituaries. This happened a while back–no warning–but the review up and died, IMHO.
I mean, Hollywood’s Book Review section, right? You’d think the paper would capitalize on that, But no, they laid off one of their best editors (Orli Low), demoted Ulin, who’d come out from NYC for the job, and put the undertaker in charge.
It’s not just showbiz news they suck at (please can somebody over there fire Geoff Boucher, who makes Jiminy Glick look like Edward R. Murrow and has turned brown nosing Chris Nolan and JJ Abrams into a cottage industry), the LAT is also getting beaten handily on the local/metro coverage. They were WAY behind on the breaking coverage of the Hollywood shooting last week, and the first video and pics from the scene came from local TV and radio. This paper blows and there was a clear opportunity 15 years ago for it to become the Wall Street Journal of entertainment/medua news but as implied by Ms. Busch’s post above, they were worried about losing revenue by breaking unflattering stories about the studios and networks. Meanwhile, look who’s advertising non-stop on Deadline these days!
I haven’t seen anybody reading this paper in public for months if not years.
Russ Stanton was a useful idiot. It’s cold on the street. I hope he has a tin cup and a coat.
So you all have not heard about the Internet??????????
When I worked there, I called an editor at the L.A. Times and said, “Let’s put this up right away on the Internet before the news breaks nationally in a couple of hours.” The response? “We can’t move that fast.”
They still got the LA Times? Imagine that! A fella learns something new everyday.
I know it doesn’t count for much these days, but the LA Times still has one of the best — if not THE BEST — columnists in the nation, Steve Lopez. I still chuckle at his column involving Sharon Stone’s ex-husband — editor for the San Francisco paper — who got bit by a kimono dragon at the zoo. You just can’t make this stuff up!
Lopez is probably better known in Hollywood circles for his stories that inspired the Robert Downey Jr/ Jamie Fox flick, ‘The Soloist’. He is a super talented writer and while I have a healthy respect for bloggers very few can write a short narrative the way that he can. His words have poetry and snark, not just snark.