For years Tim Rutten was one of the archbishops at the LA Times. Cerebral, magisterial, confident of his consortium with angels, Rutten's voice was heard on the Times editorial page, more recently from a pulpit on the front-page of Calendar. Who hasn't read Rutten and felt his large personality looming over their breakfast table...and wanting, at times, to yell back at him?
But Rutten has been defenestrated - fired; in the good old days, defenestration was a nasty way for a mob to dismiss its unwanted princes by literally throwing them out a window, to an uncertain fate on a cobbled street below. Rutten, we're happy to report, survived his fall, and his new job - if you could call it that - as of last Wednesday was to talk to two-dozen retired and out-of-work newsfolks. These aging, squinting, tottering greybeards belong to the quaintly-named Old Farts Society (is it refreshing to know that such entities really exist?). At this - one of the OFS's semi-regular luncheons, in Pasadena - Rutten was the dessert. A tart dessert at that.
Striking a scholarly pose with a gaggle of eye-glasses hanging from his neck, Rutten said his forced retirement left him with "a profound sense of relief" because he no longer had to "pretend to care for people (at the Times) for whom I had no respect." Harrrumph! But if Rutten were ill-humored who could blame him? He devoted his entire adult life to the Times, almost 40 years. And when the paper let him go, it was an anonymous HR employee (a "little girl" from the Chicago home office) who informed Rutten - a man who had chronicled and commented on Los Angeles' contemporary history - that he was now history himself. Defenestration. Brutal. Impersonal. And very, very corporate. (And before we forget, 30 other Times editorial workers were let go that same day, part of an incremental hollowing out of the Times that's been going on for several years).
When asked by the HR person if he needed counseling to help him adjust to unemployment, Rutten thundered - "what kind of counseling would that be - for suicide prevention?" At this, several wizened Old Farts tapped their canes on the floor in a show of empathy.
About the future of the Times? Rutten was not optimistic.
He told the OFS'ers he expects the New York Times to pick up the pieces of the LA Times' empire, one way or another.
And so it went. I had to leave early but if I had had time, I would have thanked Tim for one of his largely unsung contributions to readers.
In his own recent tribute to Rutten here in LA Observed, Bill Boyarsky recalled that Rutten was part of a team running the paper's coverage (under then-editor Michael Parks, Boyarsky was city editor) during the late 1990's. This team decided to ignore the paper's conventional way of story-telling when it came to investigative pieces. The Times' usual approach had been to tell an investigative story in one giant, mind-numbing novella that jumped from page to page. Who read those monsters and lived to tell about it? Why not, the iconoclasts argued, give the story all you can in one day, write up what you've got and put it the paper? Simple. If there's more to tell - well, there's another day to dig deeper into that same story and tell more about it again. And there's another day after that. That's how the Times city desk - of which Rutten was a big part - decided to handle the Rampart-LAPD scandal. More recently, the Bell story.
So, as Boyarsky told it, Rutten played a role in restoring this old-fashioned story-telling technique to the Times' signature big stories. This technique goes a long way toward restoring the wonder, the excitement, the suspense of picking up the paper each morning. We can all surely thank Tim for that.
PS: A shout-out to TV producer and author Pete Noyes (his book, The Real LA Confidential, now available on Kindle), a news legend in his own right, who was kind enough to invite me to the Old Farts Society event.