Uppity reporter is a good reporter *

Dear Mr. Hiller:

Thanks for your message this morning. Forgive my temerity in responding. As one Metro staffer, I appreciate your attempts to inject optimism into our situation.

I assure you I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of this newspaper.

When Mr. Fitzsimons visited us in July, he spoke about GM and how it had to change its ways. True. In fact, I think the auto industry offers pointed examples of what to do and what not to do. Look at Toyota and Honda. Their dominance in that industry today, from my reading, is due to relentless investing in their product over many years, without much concern for quarterly numbers.

Great companies strive to be excellent first, because with excellence comes profit, particularly over the long term. Excellence breeds customer loyalty and that allows companies to weather ups and downs. We have to think first about what our customers, not Wall Street investors, need and want. Wall Street investors will sell our stock tomorrow and not give a damn about what they left behind.

Yet I've been here two+ years and there have been three budget cuts in that time, due, I believe, to dictates from Wall Street investors. Or is there a long-term strategy behind these cuts that I'm missing?

So thinking of the future is hard to do that with optimism under these circumstances.

I, for one, absolutely agree that we need to be far more local, and become so very soon. The web offers us a way to do that - to be intensely zoned, inexpensively. To that end, a while back I made a proposal to the Spring Street Project that I've included in this email to you.

To do that, though, we need more money. Not less. Finding new ways of doing things, sir, requires investing in projects and ideas that may not work. (And it requires a whole lot more self-promotion, which I'm happy to learn has grown to $4 million annually, after shamefully falling to $89,000.)

Also, we need to get more local while maintaining, indeed increasing, our national and international coverage.

I think that's because customers demand that of a newspaper today: their world -- local, national, international, arts, sports, business. That's just a newspaper's job description these days.

But also, LA is what the rest of the United States, what the rest of the world, is becoming. A polyglot concentrate, made up of people with interests and connections far beyond our region.

Why don't we take a drive around Koreatown some day. In a section of a few dozen square blocks, you'll see Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexicans (among whom is a sizable chunk of Zapotec Indians from Oaxaca), Koreans, and Bangladeshis.

Just to the north, Hollywood remains Los Angeles' most enduring symbol, but for reasons that have little to do with movies. In Hollywood, there are enclaves of Oaxacans, Central Americans, Chinese, Armenians (both Lebanese Armenians and Russian Armenians), Russians and Thais.

We can take a sauna at the Bally's Total Fitness Gym in Hollywood - where you will hear, in a wooden box the size of a managing editor's office, four and five languages going at once. It's quite an experience.

Or we could walk around the regional park in Cerritos while dozens of Korean, Chinese, Indian and Iranian upper-class engineers and entrepreneurs crowd the paths take their morning constitutionals.

This is the region the Tribune Co. bought into. It is a region of the future. Covering it ain't easy. I believe we can, here in LA, find the future of newspapers in America. But not if we're constantly having our budget cut.

Thanks for listening.

Sam Quinones

Hiller's email reply: "Ok, we start in Koreatown and play it by ear on the sauna."

Brett Levy left the Times' systems staff earlier this year. He is also know to some in Los Angeles as the Dad Talk blogger. He melds his two identities in a post there:

The damage the Tribune Company is doing to the Los Angeles Times – and all of its other newspapers for that matter – is real and dangerous to our society.

Despite all those smug bloggers out there who think newspapers are no longer needed, let’s remember a few things. Few of us can ferret out governmental corruption, complex societal issues and environmental problems as well as the print media. And few of us can compete with the millions of hits big-boy media gets every day.

Many bloggers would be well-served to work in a newsroom like the Los Angeles Times’ to understand the difference betweens hacks like me using other people’s content and those who originate it.