Results tagged “james rainey” from Ron Kaye L.A.

The premise of my new journalism as I gear up for the full launch of OurLA.org is that all politics is local and everybody's got the right to speak up so I'm putting together citizen and professional writers to tell the story of our community.

NBC revamped its website a year ago to bring together local news from a wide variety of sources and now is launching "The Filter with Fred Roggin," a mix of fast-paced commentary, satire and humor. I'm happy to be one of the commentators as you can see in these short clips from Monday's first show where Roggin, attorney Leo Terrell and I bat around some news items. (It will be broadcast regularly Monday-Thursday at 7 p.m. on NBC's experimental digital Channel 225 starting July 20 and may come to Channel 4 itself if successful.)

Every news outlet on radio, TV and newspapers is cutting staff, slashsing costs and trying to figure out how to survive in the Internet world with audiences fragmented and revenue declining sharply.

There's a lot of desperation to these efforts at reinvention.

A case in point is LA Times media columnist James Rainey, apparently under pressure to be interesting and provocative. Three weeks ago, he called  for the firing of the widely-respected LA Weekly news guru Jill Stewart. As far as I could tell Rainey suffered from story envy since Stewart's reporters have been beating the Times to death on the LA story.

Then, this morning, Rainey called for KTTV's weather and lifestyle anchor Jillian Reynolds to be fired along with the 25 percent of the staff getting the axe in September because she talked about intimate details of her sex life with Howard Stern on satellite radio.

Maybe Rainey doesn't like women news people or the mayor for his affairs with media women. Or maybe he just doesn't like women news people named Jill. My guess is he's just run out of ideas.

His columns are part of an anything-goes-as-long-as-you-attract-an-audience mentality that is widely shared in the news business. Certainly that has something to do with the unbelievable hype and non-stop coverage of the Michael Jackson story, the spectacular success of Glenn Beck on Fox and a lot of other things we're seeing and reading.

Personally, I love it. Let's all try everything we can think of to attract an audience, provide value that holds them and get their participation.

For too long, the news media has stagnated and gotten out of touch with the public as giant corporations reaped spectacular profits and imposed rigid rules and standards on journalists. Rupert Murdoch, always the boldest innovator in the corporate world, put Fox TV on the map by breaking a lot of those rules.

Now, the rest of the media is trying to break the mold. I don't see how the public loses from the wide-ranging attempts at reinvention and the vast increase opportunity for free expression and the free exchange of ideas.

I thought that what was America and the First Amendment were all about even if it includes Jill Stewart's exposes of City Hall's failings, Jillian Reynolds' exposes of her private life and James Rainey's contempt for both of them.

In any case, here's a sample of what we're trying to do on the "aggregation" segment of "The Filter with Fred Roggin:"

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Editor's Note: LA Times columnist James Rainey, following the lead of several former Times and LA Weekly writers, today slammed the aggressive coverage of city politics in the LA Weekly and the person responsible for its prize-winning stories, News Editor Jill Stewart. Stewart, whose body of work over many years is as good and as important as anybody's, fired back in an email blast (jillstewartresponse.doc). It's all too much for Bruno, the lover of dog trainers.

By Bruno
LA's Watchdog

You may assume I make of habit of peeing on the The Dog Trainer - AKA the Los Angeles Times - both literally and metaphorically (how do you like that for a dog?), but sometimes those guys downtown just make it too damn easy.

Case in point:  Jim Rainey's "On the Media" column this morning that damn near calls for news editor Jill Stewart to be dragged out of the LAWeekly and shot for her alleged sins against journalism.

As my dear old dad used to say:  "People who live in stone houses shouldn't throw glass." (Hey, he was just a dog.)

Rainey -- whose own paper recently wrapped an entire edition in an ad for a TV show - under the masthead! -- bemoans the fact the Weekly isn't the same old lefty publication it was in the old days before his pals got fired, then attacks Stewart for being, well, just too hard on the elected officials his colleagues pal around with.

"... Stewart's more important, and insidious, influence has been not as an ideologue but as a pedagogue -- pushing for what one writer who has worked with her called "gotcha, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey journalism."

(Like most of those who spoke to me, this scribe declined to be named because he feared Stewart could hurt his chances of writing for the Weekly, a risk he didn't want to take in a contracting market.)

Whoa Jimbo!  Is that an anonymous source you're quoting?  Isn't that what you always do? And are you allowing "this scribe" to dump on someone who might have been his or her boss? 

I'm just a dog, but I thought that was forbidden under the guidelines established by The Dog Trainer after it was embarrassed by one of its writers a few years ago.  Regardless, isn't it only fair that your readers know the name of "this scribe?"

Rainey devotes a lot of his column criticizing a LAWeekly piece that eviscerated our mayor for not working hard enough.  He doesn't like the analysis of his schedule.  He feels the same way about the Weekly's look a crime stats.

I guess his subscription to Los Angeles magazine expired.  He probably really hates its recent cover declaring Antonio a "failure."

Rainey wraps up his piece by saying:

"I don't see the Weekly regaining its equilibrium as long as Stewart remains in charge of the news section."

Bruno has a suggestion for Rainey's next "On the Media" column:  Try to find your boss Russ Stanton and ask him why The Dog Trainer has euthanized his staff, pretty much killed local political coverage and sold its soul to advertisers.

I'll read that one - before I relieve myself.

Woof!