Little slice of Her Ex culture

Tom Plate has a singular L.A. media distinction. He was the editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times toward the end of the Chandler ownership era and, previously, at the late Hearstian Herald Examiner. He also was deputy editor of the Her Ex under the revered-by-many Jim Bellows. He teaches media and policy now at UCLA and has a new book, Confessions of an American Media Man: What They Don't Tell You at Journalism School, that is being excerpted this week on CNN.com. In today's second part, titled "American newspapers don't have to be boring," he tells a very Her-Exian story on the paper then and its relationship with the bigger, more somber Times.

As a deputy editor of late and sometimes lamented Los Angeles Herald Examiner paper, back then under the editorship of Jim Bellows, I occasionally was asked to look at gossip items before they went to press. This was a wise thing to do, particularly in the case of the newspaper's gossip columnist, because not only was he a wildly imaginative (!) fellow, but he had been trained in the British tradition, where almost anything goes (i.e., if a story item cannot be conclusively proven to be false, it may just be true -- and thus is inherently and imminently publishable).

And so one morning at the struggling Hearst paper, trailing as it was in the deep shadow of the mighty Los Angeles Times, I arrived bright and early at the office to the sound of the great Bellows bellowing out to me, "Tom! Good Lord! Look at PAGE TWO!" This was how we had labeled our gossip page.

I immediately figured that the commotion had something to do with some amazing item! I grabbed the paper on my desk. There, shouting out from page two, was one of the weirdest headlines one would ever get to see: "Hit a Pet!" Next to that was a picture of the cutest little dog ever, and then the caption: