Dean Singleton’s Los Angeles News Group (which publishes the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, the Whittier Daily News, San Bernardino Sun, among others) has followed the lead of the Los Angeles Times by cutting staff and thus reducing the chance of actual news getting in the way of the ads. Gary Scott (of reporter-g blog) carries a list of the dead, including Elise Kleeman. A Caltech grad, Kleeman’s beat included science, her alma mater, JPL, and Altadena. Most recently, she filed great stories on the rise and fall of the Pederast Hilton. No word on who will cover Altadena now, or if it will even by covered by our Denver-owned hometown paper.
Foothill Cities blog waxes eloquently:
Perhaps the greatest loss will be this area’s ever-weakening grasp of history. A couple of weeks ago, one of the founders of the Valley, Bill Temple, passed away just short of his 104th birthday. He had run packing companies in Covina and La Verne, and sat on the valley water board for a half-century. Yes, 50 years.
The Singleton media jalopy made barely a mention of what should have been front-page news. And that was before these most recent cuts.
So, what will be left? High school football and basketball stories, wrapped by the occasional shooting spree, all of which will be hard to find in the jumble of ads.
Of course, the ads will soon thin, as nobody will have any motivation to buy the remaining excuse for content.
Picture shows Singleton (in black) explaining the watchdog role of a free press to a threatening government official.
Patrick the Sales Guy said…
Herbert Asbury wrote a wonderful book called ‘The Gangs of New York’ which went on to become the basis for a truly awful movie. In his preface Asbury said he relied on the memories of the reporters in NYC still living who covered the events in his book. It was Asbury’s contention that the reporter is a community’s first and best historian. The local reporter lays down the groundwork for the official historians who will come later.
What the modern press baron fails to understand is that these people also have an institutional memory that defies capitalization and easy accounting.
Sunday, March 09, 2008 at 09:23 AM
Steve Lamb said…
It seems that every single time a reporter at the Star-News actually gets any kind of grip on Altadena’s history, culture and the various factions fissures and fractions that make up the town, she is gone.
Eventually they assign a new reporter and after two years of instruction and telling them where to go in their own dead files and who and what to look up, poof gone!!!
The only value a paper like the Star-News can have in the modern era is to be a community repository of memory and explainer, conservator and expander of the local culture.
When I first ran for the Altadena Town Council some 18+ years ago, the PSN did stories every day for a week about the issues and candidates. Nowadays its difficult to get the results in the paper after the election.
Important events, happenings and issues in Altadena are often not covered or if covered covered with a peculiar Pasadena bent.
In order to survive the PSN needs to be a BETTER local paper with better reporting not less and less. It is now on a long spiral downward to death, particularly with the Mt. Wilson-Observer, Pasadena Now, and the Pasadena Weekly on the scene as potential and at times effective, competition.
I’ve known lots of PSN reporters over the last twenty eight years. The ones who worked hard and tried to get it right were Andre Coleman, Courtenay Edlehardt, Pat Karlak, and Elise Kleeman.
Rats!
Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 03:55 PM
Dre said…
Thanks for compliment Steve and I was sorry to see those good and hard working reporters laid off. It is sad.
Fat cats have ruined this industry. Corporations running around buying up any and all indy media outlets and then cutting staff and using non-local stories is inexcusable.
What I do now is nothing like what I did when I first got in this business.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008 at 02:01 PM