Further Circulation Declines at the LA Times

Last Friday Los Angeles Magazine published a story that drew very little attention in the Blogosphere, by former Los Angeles Times senior projects editor and senior editor at The Los Angeles Times Magazine (1994-2000), Kit Rachlis. Here’s one paragraph from his three-paragraph article:

"Journalists have a terrible tendency to be sentimental, so I want to be careful not to romanticize the Times. As good as the paper has been, it’s always had galling limitations (I say this as someone who worked there for six and a half
years): an opinion section that rarely generated heat; a record of ignoring wide swaths of the region; a disinterest in local politics. Still, for all its flaws (and my list, I’m sure, is different from yours), few newspapers have matched
the Times’s ambition and reach. Now that ambition has vanished. According to sources, Zell’s ultimate plan is to reduce the paper’s daily circulation to 500,000 (at its height, in 2001, it was 1.2 million) and its staff to 600 (half of what it was in 2004). To make the ratio of editorial to advertising pages equal, the paper will cut 82 pages of news each week—or to put it in starker terms, the Times will lose 4,000 editorial pages in one year".

My sentiments parallel Kit’s very closely, just didn’t feel the circulation would take such a great dive. If the Los Angeles Times circulation were to tumble to the half million target, as Kit suggests could occur, we would most likely see the LAT Orange County Facility shuttered. If the newspaper continues the trend we have all witnessed this year, shedding editorial employees and dropping sections from the hard copy of the newspaper, this may become a self-full filling prophecy.