Kinsley: LA Times publisher 'wants me gone'

[quaoar]

So he's gone -- off to WaPo

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2005/09/kinsley_leaving_on_bitter_1.html

Hi. In case you haven't heard already, the Publisher is announcing this morning that I'm leaving the Los Angeles Times. The news stories a few weeks ago saying that I would be giving up managerial duties but staying with the paper were not wrong. That is what I wanted and what John Carroll wanted too. But Jeff wants a "clean break." He did offer to discuss at some future date the possibility of my continuing to write a column as a non-employee. And he raised the possibility of some consulting on web matters down the road.

This did not seem overly welcoming, and further inquiries by me and others have made clear that it wasn't intended to. For whatever reason, Jeff isn't merely uninterested in any future contribution I might make, but actively wants me gone. So I'm off, with some regret and some excitement, to the Washington Post, duties TBD but including the column. I hope it will continue to appear in the LA Times as well, but that is beyond my control.

[swag]

1. Golly. So did many readers.

[Pithy Cherub]

2. Can Kinsley set a speed record for leaving, please! Be gone!

:woohoo:

[Totally Committed]

4. I thought I was the only one who couldn't abide him!

He is a self-important, major piece of work. Man, I hope he's gone so fast he leaves skid marks!

Be gone, Kinsley! :nuke: I say, be gone!

TC

[papau]

3. report to the commercial, and not the editorial - and this is good?

Nikki Finke : Kinsley would be leaving now that he has to report to the commercial, and not the editorial, side of the newspaper


LTTR from Kinsley:

I knew that Nikki Finke is an idiot, of course, but I had no idea that she was such a fuddy-duddy. Among the malevolent non-sequiturs and damned-if-you-do-or-don't accusations in Nikki Finke’s appreciation of my tenure at the LA Times <“The Michael Kinsley Experiment Ends,” July 29 - August 4>, my favorite passage is this one, scolding me for moving too fast. “Normally, any change at a newspaper happens slowly amid much careful thought and laborious planning so as not to upset subscribers.” It’s a pity that Finke finds the torrid pace of change at the LA Times so upsetting, since she is the only person to have noticed it.
Finke is hard to please. John Carroll stands accused of alienating “conservative subscribers” by hiring a “legendary lefty” (ie, me) to run the LA Times opinion pages, and also of “overlooking” Los Angeles’s “progressive movement” by hiring an “old school liberal” who makes no “serious argument” (also me). I came to work in Los Angeles in 2004 in order to “draw attention” to myself “on the East Coast” (which I demonstrated my excessive attachment to by leaving it in 1995). A light-hearted cartoon about the mayor’s race shows that I hold LA in “contempt” as a “third-rate city.” A solemn editorial series about malaria in Africa “left unanswered the question of whether there weren’t issues closer to home that deserved equally extraordinary prominence.” Because I always go for cheap thrills over substance, my pages are “packed with pablum.” If I’m not publishing “lefty cronies” I’m publishing “wacko neocons.”
In all of this, Finke peremptorily attaches her own odd views to the entire city of Los Angeles. If the Times or I were to portrayed the citizens of Los Angeles as Finke does in her article -- humorless, easily upset, provincial, intolerant (not to mention demagogic and deranged) -- Nikki Finke would be the first to throw a fit.
Michael Kinsley
Editorial and Opinion Editor
The Los Angeles Times

To read Nikki Finke's article, “The Michael Kinsley Experiment Ends,” click here http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/36/deadline-finke.php

[Cassandra]

5. I slightly remember Nikki Finke from college

I'm glad Kinsley is going. He's been a pain in the ass.

[papau]

6. That seems to be a universal opinion as to his skill at management

but the editorial report to commercial codifies the control the advertisers have on paper content.

Wish it were not so.

Indeed AAR is running into advertiser disinterest not because of economic payoff problems but because the fellows running/placing advertising into AAR ARE RW and are using their power to screw the viability of a voice on the left.

I wish the right did make decisions based solely on profit - but our media situation proves otherwise.

:-(

[lateo]

7. Fuck Kensley

What a jerk. He is the symbol of mealy-mouth, appeasing Democrats.

[txaslftist]

11. Shit. He can't write any better than that?

Good riddance.

[spooky3]

8. Oh good, now WaPo will have another white male sexist

on its editorial pages. Heaven knows they haven't found it in their budget to add Molly Ivins, which they really don't need because they already have one "gal."

:sarcasm:

[FrenchieCat]

9. So glad......

Poof, he's gone! :nuke:

The man just thought he had all of the answers.....maybe so/maybe not....personally I don't know, because it was so hard to understand his points the majority of the time!

[applegrove]

10. He did some really great writing on economics. I saw one piece that

had me laughing so hard...