Finke on Kinsley *

LA Weekly columnist Nikki Finke takes a look back at Michael Kinsley's months in the top job at the L.A. Times editorial and opinion pages, and it's safe to say she isn't a fan. By the way, there was some chatter at last night's Zócalo event (which drew 1,300 people to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to hear ex-guvs Brown, Deukmejian, Wilson and Davis) that Kinsley's Parkinson's disease and the toll of traveling between Seattle and Los Angeles may have played a role in his stepping down.

Here's Finke's take (plus some other links to reaction at the bottom):

Years ago, there was a notorious movie based on a best-selling book called The Harrad Experiment, whose plot centers on a college that conducts an avant-garde policy of encouraging students to experience sexual freedom. Tension and confrontation ensue, yet this intentionally dramatic film just appears ludicrous. That’s how it is with The Kinsley Experiment, which officially ended this week at the Los Angeles Times not with a bang but with him whimpering to a rival newspaper. It also leaves behind a readership confused by Michael Kinsley’s yearlong fling with editorial freedom during which he flippantly recast the venerable editorial and opinion sections into a comedy of errors — describing readers as “assholes,” hyping wikitorials, inciting blog porn on the Web site, and snidely dubbing his domain “The Opinion Manufacturing Division.”

Good riddance, Mikey. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out to your new $6.2 mil Seattle mansion, purchased right before you took the LAT job....

At first it looked like nothing would be decided right away since [Publisher Jeff] Johnson was vacationing this week, and Kinsley was working from his principal residence in Seattle before taking the entire month of August out of the office. Yet the buzz among his staffers Monday was that Kinsley wouldn’t be returning from vacation, and there was also word that he was giving up his downtown L.A. pied-á-terre in Bunker Hill Towers. That’s the same place he’d recently boasted afforded him only a 10-minute commute from the paper’s headquarters if he walked, but inevitably drove. That small revelation only served to underscore how little actual contact he’s had with his unadopted city.

In typical Kinsley fashion, self-serving and self-righteous, he beat his own paper to the punch and on Monday gave the news of his stepping down to the LAT’s arch-rival, The New York Times.

Finke's just getting started. After the jump: Joel Stein, Harry Potter and Kinsley's first (spiked) editorial...