Y the Fuss?
NOT ONLY DIDN’T THE WORLD STOP AS MIDNIGHT STRUCK AROUND THE
globe to usher in 2000, the world hardly even sputtered. It just kept spinnin’ ’round. Makes you wonder how much to credit businesspeople and bureaucrats for successfully taking preventive measures to avert a computer meltdown, or how much to credit consultants and doomsayers with milking a non-issue. In the Southland, there was a bug problem all right, but it wasn’t digital,it was of the flu variety. Which maybe is a hint that early in the new millennium genetics will supplant silicon as all the rage.
Spare Inventory
ANYBODY NEED A PORTABLE GENERATOR, A GUN OR SOME BOTTLED WATER?
Oh-Oh
THERE IS A Y2K PROBLEM, OR AT LEAST A Y2K ANNOYANCE. IT’S GETTING
accustomed to writing “00” on checks and other documents that require a date. And I still haven’t heard anyone come up with a good name for the coming decade. Do we call it the aughts, the zero-years, the O’s or what? Oh, well. While I’m clearing my mental data deck to cope with the year ahead, here are three famous double-zeros to ponder: James Bond, Jim Otto and Mr. Owl.
I Did It!
FINISHED, THAT IS, THE 14-PAGE TOME BY DAVID SHAW IN THE DEC. 20 LA TIMES
on the newspaper’s Staples Arena “scandal.” I bet you didn’t. Of course, unless you’re a member of the media, you wouldn’t want to read it, and you probably couldn’t read it all the way through even if you tried. Or if you did, you’d probably still be unable to fully comprehend what all of the self-indulgent fuss was about.
The fuss centered on the newspaper’s agreement to share the profits of the Oct. 10 edition of its Sunday magazine with the new downtown Los Angeles arena, in return for the arena’s help in promoting the issue, which was devoted entirely to the arena.
To appreciate the outcry, indignation and self-flagellation that gripped the Times in the wake of this disclosure requires delicate ethical antennae. These sensors are normally developed only after one has achieved at least a bachelor’s degree in journalism. (The editorial side of the Times was more or less in the dark about the paper’s profit-sharing agreement with the Staples Arena, and did its stories without corporate or advertiser interference. In the real world, this is called “no harm, no foul.” In traditional journalism, this is called “tearing down The Wall” or “the most serious single threat to the future survival and growth of this great newspaper.”)
Let me be clear, I think the Times-Staples arrangement stunk. However, it is obvious from Shaw’s exhaustive recounting that the problem stemmed from bureaucratic bungling, and not, as too many of my fellow journalists want to assert, from corporate malevolence.
Underlying the outcry was a general resentment or concern among Times staffers toward their current management’s bottom-line focus and attempts to increase inter-departmental communications; these objectives, again, cut against the grain of what one learns in Journalism 101. Now, in the wake of the Staples fiasco, the Times is reexamining these new internal policies. That could be too bad for the Times. Rather than being an example of what harm can come when a newsroom bridges the wall separating editorial and advertising, the Staples fiasco demonstrates what can happen when neither side is capable of seeing around it.
I find the indignation expressed by the Times newsroom over the paper’s compromised integrity a little hard to swallow, inasmuch as the reporters and editors didn’t become collectively exorcised about the Staples deal when they first heard about it. The breast-beating only began in earnest after the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal wrote about it (in other words, after their fellow high priests shamed them).
That was two weeks after the first details of the story broke,in our sister paper, the Los Angeles Business Journal. In explaining this slowly dawning ethical awareness, Shaw observed condescendingly, “Apparently, few Times reporters or editors read the Los Angeles Business Journal, and those who do don’t pay any attention to it.” Shaw is flat wrong, of course. Dozens of Times staffers subscribe to and read the LABJ, as they and Register staffers do our paper. And they read us closely.
As the folks at the Times continue their ethical cleansing, they are advised also to examine some of their attitudes and misconceptions, which in these fast-changing times can wall off inquiring minds. It’s admirable to be ethically pure, but it also helps to have a clue.
“NASDAQ
THE STOCK MARKET FOR THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS.”
Well, not yet.
