'De-coloring' of the Los Angeles Times

Daniel Hernandez is a former L.A. Times staff writer now working on a book in Mexico City. He's watching the continued outflow of talent from the paper and wonders, as others have this week, how a staff with fewer and fewer journalists who look like the city can possibly begin to grasp Los Angeles.

One of the most remarkable stories I read in the Los Angeles Times this year was a look at a small community of immigrants from Mexico's Costa Chica centered in Pasadena. The story, published in April, gave us a fascinating dose of nuance for a region long accustomed to overwrought tales of 'brown vs. black' violence and tension. Veteran metro reporter and editor John L. Mitchell wrote the piece. This week he was named among 75 editorial staffers at the LAT who were bought out or fired.

Mitchell will no longer be bringing L.A. and world readers stories such as these at a time when we need smart community journalism the most. Neither will Francisco Vara-Orta, a young staffer just starting out his career. Or Lynelle George. Or Agustin Gurza. And these are just a few names from this recent round of cuts at the LAT, the third so far this year. Add to them Connie Kang, Lorenza Muñoz, Cheryl Brownstein-Santiago, Sergio Muñoz, Solomon Moore, Sam Enriquez, Caitlin Liu, Gayle Pollard-Terry, Frank Sotomayor, Camilo Smith, Barbara Serrano, Daniel Yi, Martha Flores, Evelyn Iritani, Mike Terry, Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Mai Tran, Joe Hutchinson, Janet Clayton, and many others, all journalists of color who have left around or since the departures of former editors John Carroll and Dean Baquet.

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Without these journalists, the situation has gone beyond tragic or sad. It is an extension of the failures I detailed in this LA Weekly feature, "Shades of Brown," using the Frank del Olmo papers at CSUN. The piece shows how the morass of late-20th Century identity politics combined with blunders at the corporate and newsroom-leadership level over how exactly the paper should cover L.A.'s changing demographic make-up continue to haunt the L.A. Times to this day. In the end it's not so much the color of people's faces or their surnames that count, but their ability as journalists to connect dots for the daily news report across cultures, languages, borders, and disparate neighborhoods -- which, really, is what life in L.A. is all about....

The chief news source for the most colorful place in America just got incredibly duller....these cuts amount to an abdication of the LAT's duty to its readers and the community.

Mitchell put in for a buyout, I was told before this week.

Sad statement: Author David Rensin has subscribed to the Times since 1982, but yesterday he left it on the driveway — not in protest. "I just didn't get it this morning because it's become so increasingly irrelevant to the city and my life that I just forgot it was there -- until I drove over it on the way out." Native Intelligence

LACMA blog: "Isn’t thoughtful third-party reporting integral to our history as well?...seems to me we need our paper more than ever." Unframed

Previously:
List of LA Times departures
Another bad day at 1st and Spring
LAT publisher spins
Roundup of LA Times reactions
Times story does the numbers