Categories: OLD Media Moves

LATimes kills Wartzman's column

Former Los Angeles Times business editor Rick Wartzman‘s “California & Co.” column in the business section has been scrapped, according to Kevin Roderick of LA Observed.

Roderick wrote, “Wartzman, you may recall, got the column when he left the paper abruptly in December to become a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Until then, he was viewed as a rising star, the former editor in charge of the Business staff who was tapped to reinvent the paper’s Sunday magazine as West. Friends say he left ten months into the new magazine’s run because it was clear that, after LAT editor in chief Dean Baquet left for the New York Times, West would be gutted by associate editor John Montorio. The column was apparently a negotiated part of Wartzman’s departure.

“He used it to write often, though not exclusively, about labor, worker and class issues. His May 11 column, for example, urged a ‘real, honest debate about implementing a citywide living wage.’ Well, that’s not the most popular beat with today’s Times editors, as ex-labor writer Nancy Cleeland opined recently.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.