The NYT has an interesting piece on Michael Kinsely’s attempt to shake-up (indeed, radically rework) the LAT’s op/ed page: Upheaval on Los Angeles Times Editorial Pages.
The piece does not lend itself well to excerpt, so I shan’t attempt to so so (although one nugget of wisdom one can glean for it is: be careful what you leave in the copier). Overall, it sounds like Kinsley has some interesting ideas about moving the op/ed page into the 21st Century–all of which are quite intriguing, but likely to irk establised journalists who may be liberal poltically, but are often quite conservative when it comes to their profession.
For example:
As for outsiders writing editorials, a domain traditionally reserved for the newspaper’s staff, that is up in the air. “We might have a few adjunct board members with special knowledge write editorials that we commission and we would set the editorial line, but we haven’t decided,” Mr. Martinez said. The paper has already run three such editorials.That notion troubles Jack Nelson, the newspaper’s former Washington bureau chief. “I think it’s absolutely crazy to have outsiders writing editorials at all,” he said. “What happens to the institutional voice?”
Translation: “You can’t do that! That’s not the way we’ve always done it!”
June 13th, 2024 at 8:53 am
I’ve actually written editorials before. Generally, the newspaper’s editoral board would assign me a topic and a stance, and my job was to set out the newspaper’s stance on the issue and support it based on the discussion in the editorial board … which included outside “community representatives,” though the publisher controlled 51 percent of the vote when it came time to what went in the paper.
Jack Nelson’s objection is unpersuasive. The “institutional voice” would be preserved because the editoral board itself would still set the general direction for the newspaper’s editorials, even if the specifics are filled in by “outsiders.”
–|PW|–