by Paul Teetor
It’s been a brutal couple of weeks for the dwindling band of Los Angeles sports fans who still get the bulk of their news from the LA Times.
First came the shocking news last week that the paper’s top editor, Executive Editor Kevin Merida, was resigning less than two years after taking the job.
Why was his sudden departure such a bad omen for local sports fans? Because he had come over from ESPN, the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports news. Although he also had stints at the Washington Post and other prestige media outlets, he was seen as an ESPN sports-first guy who was doing all he could to protect and preserve the remnants of the Times’ once great sports department, headed by legendary columnist Jim Murray.
When Merida was hired after a long search process there was all kinds of happy talk about growing the paper, renewing their commitment to news above profits, and becoming the top news source on the West Coast.
Those kinds of sentiments were easy to express because the paper’s owner, bio-tech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, was willing to subsidize the paper’s annual deficit of somewhere between $50 million to 70 million, annually. He bought the Times and San Diego Union Tribune in 2018 for $500 million and was hailed as the paper’s savior after years of decline and turmoil under Tribune mis-management.
The Tribune era was marked by wave after wave of budget cutbacks and staff layoffs. The twin problems of declining circulation and advertising losses to the internet were killing print media, large and small, across the country. The Times, even with its 142-year history as the leading news organization in the country’s second largest media market, was no exception.
Throw in a series of absentee owners and incompetent executives and it was a toxic brew on Spring Street. When the paper moved to El Segundo at the same time that Soon-Shiong bought it in 2018 a new era had seemingly dawned.
Now journalists would be hired, not fired. Now budgets would be bulked up, not cut down. Now news, not the desperate search for advertising dollars, would be the ultimate prize.
And for a year and a half, before the pandemic hit in March of 2020, there was a honeymoon as new management set out to rebuild the paper’s product and reputation.
But when Soon-Shiong decided last summer he no longer wanted to absorb those kinds of staggering losses year after year, the paper announced it was cutting 74 editorial jobs, which translated to 13% of the journalists in and out of the building. Many of them, naturally, had to come from the sports department, which in turn forced a major re-organization of the sports section.
No more box scores. No more breaking news stories. No more stat leader boards. You want to know how your team did last night – you’ll have to look elsewhere. You want to know Shohei Ohtani’s batting average or his Earned Run average, you’ll have to look elsewhere. You want to know LeBron’s or AD’s scoring average, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Soon the deterioration was so drastic that the most interesting, most reliable, part of the sports section was a new feature called “On This Date.” Roaming over the last century, it served as a kind of Cliff’s Notes for sports fans who needed to brush up on their historical knowledge.
Last Wednesday, January 17, for example, it noted that on this date in 1961 the Cincinnati Royals star rookie, Oscar Robertson became the youngest player ever named to the NBA All Star Game.
Also on this date in 1995, the LA Rams announced they were moving to St. Louis. And on this date in 2012, LeBron James became the youngest player in NBA history to score 20,000 career points.
Interesting factoids all, but you can bet they were being spit out by a computer program rather than a real, live human being.
Then this week, the reason for Merida’s sudden departure became clear: the Times announced that it was going to do another round of across-the-board staff cuts. This time it was to be up to 100 editorial positions – which would chop the newsroom down to fewer than 400 employees – compared to 1,200 when the paper was at its peak in the late 1990s.
“This is the big one,” Media Guild of the West president Matt Pearce told his fellow journalists in a mass email Thursday.
The result: an emergency meeting Thursday and a one-day strike Friday — the first walkout in the newspaper’s 142-year history.
For its part, the paper issued a statement that was basically mush.
“The hardest decisions to make are those that impact our employees, and we do not come to any such decisions lightly,” the statement said. “We are continuing to review the revenue projections for this year and taking a very careful look at expenses and what our organization can support.”
Translation: it’s bad and it’s going to get worse, and we don’t know when or if we’re going to stop making staff and budget cuts. Oh yeah, and blah, blah, blah.
The bad news: the sports section will, if possible, get even thinner and less informative than ever.
The good news: they’ll probably keep On This Date.
Oh, and just to make sure that the week was utterly depressing for sports fans, Sports Illustrated announced that it was firing its entire staff of writers and photographers.
Once the premier sports publication in the nation, and a cash-cow for the Time-Life media empire, it had been sold several times in recent years and ended up with some outfit called Authentic Media.
We had a hint of what was coming a month ago when the SI editors were caught using fake bylines with stories written by Chat-GPT, the AI service that is taking over the news business.
Now we know why they called themselves Authentic Media. It’ll be nothing but fake bylines from now on.
Redondo ballers dominating Mira Costa
The two Bay League hoops powerhouses, Redondo and Mira Costa, met for the first time this season Tuesday night. It was a close, hard-fought game, and when it was over Redondo had the win, 56 to 40, and a 17-4 overall record and 5-0 in the league for first place.
Costa, meanwhile, dropped to 19-3 overall and 4-1 in the Bay League. But the Mustangs get one more shot at the Sea Hawks in the regular season finale February 1. If they win that game they could still have a share of the league title.
We’re talking, of course, about the Mira Costa girls basketball team, which is having one of the best seasons in the school’s history. They are 20-3 after Friday night’s rout of Culver City. Now if they can only get past Redondo – the Sea Hawks have won the last 13 times they played and 19 out of the last 20.
With the Mira Costa boys team falling to 3 to 3 in the Bay League following two losses to Culver City and a 60-45 loss Tuesday night to Redondo, attention has shifted to the girls teams.
Costa Coach Jeff Herdman admitted it was a tough 56-40 loss for a team used to winning, but said he was proud of the way his girls fought and never gave up.
“It was a close game until we had to start fouling late in the game, and they made their foul shots,” he said. “And we missed a lot of shots we normally make.”
Redondo’s senior star, 6-foot-4 Ella Zimmerman, dominated the game with 27 points, 17 rebounds, 4 blocks, one assist and one steal.
“She’s a great player,” Herdman said of Ella Zimmerman. “And her sister’s pretty good too.”
Sophomore Abby Zimmerman also starts for Redondo and gives them a 1-2 sister act.
Herdman said his team is looking forward to a re-match in the regular season finale at Costa on February 1.
“If we can shoot the ball a little better than we did, I think we’ll have a real good chance to win,” he said. “We’ll be ready.”
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. Follow: @paulteetor. ER
