This Week's 'L.A. Times' Outrage

Is management trying to spark a mutiny at the Los Angeles Times?

Richard Pérez-Peña details a plan to shift control of the paper's monthly magazine from the editorial side to the business side, a shake-up that will involve firing everyone who currently works on the title and bringing in a new editor who hails from the Home Shopping Network.

This sort of church/state wall-breaching would raise an outcry at any paper worth its cover price, but it's particularly explosive at the Times, which endured a major embarrassment in 1999 when the paper (then owned by Times-Mirror Co.) published a special magazine section dedicated to the new Staples Center and shared the profits of the section with the arena.

It's a remarkably clueless and out-of-touch decision...until you consider the source: Recall that Times publisher David Hiller was described in an earlier Pérez-Peña piece as a dishonest, "star-struck outsider, a meddler in the newsroom who does not understand journalism or Los Angeles," at least in the eyes of his underlings.

Then again, I can think of at least one person who's not going to object to Hiller's plans on good-journalism grounds.