Show of courage by LA Times editor not seen at biz magazines

Forbes.com columnist Gary Weiss wonders why the show of courage shown by Los Angeles Times editor Jim O’Shea, who was essentially fired this weekend for refusing to go along with newsroom cuts, hasn’t been seen at the struggling business magazines.

Weiss wrote, “I know, it’s easy for me to suggest that other people, men with wives and families and negative-amortization mortgages, throw out their livelihoods as a matter of principle. But the biz magazines — I spent 22 years of my life there so I feel strongly about them — are suffering from a massive and sustained decline in advertising revenues.

“The result has been layoffs, including a recent bloodletting at my alma mater, Business Week, that was shocking. I’m told by editors there that there have been layoffs just about each of every recent year. The number of line editors and writers has declined, with the bureaus being especially hard hit, even as the ranks of higher-level editors has swollen.

“While it’s not a strictly comparable situation, I think back to my experiences with a long-defunct news service that ran into hard times in the recession of the early eighties. After our joint venture partner UPI filed for bankruptcy, we were deprived of our No. 1 source of income.

“We could have struggled along, and continued to stiff our freelancers as we had begun to do. But the head of our little operation, a distinguished former Harper’s editor named Michael Macdonald Mooney, decided that the most honorable thing was to pull the plug.”

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