Ailing Angelenos

I can't really tell what's worse.

The Los Angeles Times, a prestigious, if struggling, fixture of the journalism world has continued to offer exactly what it was tasked with offering. A once-in-a-lifetime storyline of mass misappropriation of California's already anemic budget was handled brilliantly. Every angle, from the misdeeds and wrongdoers to the collateral damage dealt to the everyman, was was covered with equal aplomb.

Resulting from the successful coverage is status as front-runner for a handful of Pulitzer awards, and continuing disdain from local readers.

In a recent New York Times article, one Edie Frère, a stationary store owner in the city’s Larchmont Village section, lamented the fall of the publication's once great socialite section.

“We need a paper that’s more, and this is less,” said Ms. Frère, 66. “I think it’s just not a world-class paper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world-class paper.”

Little did we all know that what separates a world-class paper is indeed not what happens in the world, but rather what happens in Lindsey Lohan's bedroom.

Frère is apparently not alone. Readership of the Los Angeles Times has plummeted at an even faster rate than what's expected of a major metropolitan newspaper. In the last decade, the Times' circulation, and in turn its staff, have been halved.

Again, I can't tell what's worse. That such a wonderful publication has had to survive through such staff-thinning and revenue-evaporating straights, or that its constituents, whose minds have apparently become as plastic as the rest of their husk-like bodies, haven't noticed.