LA Times Hires MORE New York Writers To Write About LA! Will The Madness Never Stop?

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2005/10/joel_stein_gets_new_lat_c.html

Kevin over at LAOBSERVED has the latest gossip on the never ending purge of everything LA from the LA Times. But first, the sole piece of good news; long time Times writer and LA resident Gregory Rodriguez will now have a weekly column in the Opinion/Current section. And no one more deserves a column than he does. The only bad part is that his column is in Current instead of the weekly paper where someone might actually find it and read it, but it's a start.

After that, it's all downhill.

First, the Opinion/Current section has a new articles editor - Sonni Efron - a foreign affairs specialist based in... Washington DC. And with so many readers fleeing the Times due to the paper's lack of foreign news coverage, this is, of course - the obvious way to counterbalance the Current section's current over coverage of local news

Second, New Yorker Joel Stein, having mined all he knows about Hollywood - his real life - and his fantasy life - will now cover everything else he knows in a new column. What he will do after next spring, has yet to be decided.

Third, the Times also hired an LA-based writer to do a column - and they actually mentioned she is an LA-based writer since that is considered such an oddity slightly down Spring Street. And she is... Meghan Daum.

Yup - that Meghan Daum. The one born and bred in the greater New York area. The one who hit the really big time after she left New York for Nebraska and wrote about the differences between New York and Nebraska.

That is our new 'LA-based'- writer of 12 - or is it 18 months? The good news for her is all she needs to do now is substitute LA for Nebraska - and she's got her first two years of columns down cold.

Now to be fair, she is not a good writer. She is a superb writer. As good as they come. And I will look forward to reading her every Sunday morning - though, in reality - it will, of course, be on-line on Saturday night.

But why - why?? - does the LA Times feel the only way to reach of the people of LA is to hire only new people from... New York City?

I guess the folks in Chicago are so ecstatic with the results so far - they figure, why mess with success?