The Hot Blog

Honestly, at this point I don't even think it matters, the LA Times criticism ship has sailed. All the best film criticism I know of is online. Even the journalists who are still in print, like Ebert, are doing their best writing on their blogs.

This is one of those moments where I feel like being a realist and pointing out that, as long as it's good writing, I don't really care in what format it's being published. Print is dead, as they said in Ghostbusters 24 years ago.

It's all your fault, David. They read your remarks of a few day ago -- "Experience has great value. But so do new ideas." -- and were inspired.

I assume there is supposed to be a "never" in the bolded part? Honestly not 100%, this isn't a typo flame.

"Due respect to Ms. Sharkey – who has certainly been anything but generous to me over the years – I will"

perhaps a bad construction, but no, AS, there is no "never."

LAT has been very unkind to me and thin-skinned about me for years. (Some over there feel the same way about me.) Ms. Sharkey, whom many people I like feel is a very good person, may or may not have been part of that unpleasantness. But she certainly never helped build any bridge.

Joe... see your humor... but how much more ambitious and thoughtful a move would it have been to have hired some like Kim Voynar away from us/cinematical or someone off the indiewire roster or someone from the VVM group (currently employed or not) or even someone from Variety... any kind of fresh voice that had already built some level of following - even if mostly amongst other critics - to bring new life to the party.

Again, I hope Ms. Sharkey turns out to be smart and entertaining as hell... and I don't think the hire was really like hiring a new critic from the outside, but a business call. Let's see what she does. But let's not let it pass without noting that it is yet another opportunity lost.

David: This is only a theory, based on what I've seen and heard at other newspapers in the wake of lay-offs. I have no contacts at the LA Times, so I have no way of knowing if this is true, so I repeat, with all due respect for everyone who's involved, this is just a theory. OK?

As I understand it, if you've just laid off Person A from a job, it's diffcult, for a variety of legal and union-contractual reasosns, to immediately go out and hire Person B as a replacement. Not unless you want Person A to have grounds to sue you. It's much easier, and far less of a headache, to simply give someone already within the organization a promotion. I saw that happen first-hand at The Houston Post several years ago. And I've heard of it happening elsewhere. And that may -- repeat, may -- be what happened here.

Of course, Betsy Sharkey may be one hell of a writer, and will end up surprising all the naysayers, much as A.O. Scott did.

You do have to read the LA Observed piece and be alarmed... it's not the A.O. story.

It's most definately not the AO Scott story, which was more along the lines of the Janet Maslin story.

It is also, unlike the LA Observed story, not anything to do with any kind of choice between Carina and any other critic. That was a reach and an unkind, unneccessary one at that.

What you get at is what I am suggesting, Joe... that job slotting, which all major corporations do, is probably a part of this. "Promotion" is a relative concept. This is not one for Ms Sharkey.

And Carina was laid off with a lot of other people. Let's not forget that.

Not a good time to be a print journalist or a critic.

With all this "talent" being laid off and flocking to the internet, there will be more competition online.

Online ad revenues are already beginning to plummet. Next year will be even worse.

Thanks to "bloggers", journalism has been eroded even further. With the last 10 years of the "legitimate" media turning everything into tabloid stories, and people with no journalistic principles being cited as sources, the american concept of journalism is unspooling before our very eyes. Here's what i blame.

1. Fear based media tactics requiring a constant stream of negatively spun stories turning some people into news addicts and others into looking to other places for "news", like talk radio.
2. The creation of 24 hour news networks requiring manufactured stories to maintain credibility for the existence of 24 hour news networks.
3. Celebrity gossip becoming a staple of news broadcasts. It's always been there, but it's become a compulsion.
4. The internet. The killing blow. Journalism will never recover.

I was just complaining last night about how lazy some websites are about reporting. They don't even do the basic editing.

One site did a story about the Spirit and was on a rant about Samuel Jackson and referred to the character he played in Pulp Fiction as "Vincent".

I saw another story on a website about Hugh Jackman hosting the Oscars, referring to him as "the first non-stand up comic host since Whoopi Goldberg".

The erosion of standards + the splintering of the readership/viewership + disintegrating ad rates + the internet = the end of traditional journalism.

It really isn't as bad as all that, Anghus. What we have is a generation of way too smart college grads with a lot of time on their hands. If a writer gets something wrong it is usually immediately corrected by readers. It's all a big wiki - which makes it fluid and interesting. Think of how long it takes to print a retraction no one ever reads.

2 things...

1. The internet is responsible for lost revenues at newspapers... not for the dropping in standards... trend-chasing and an inability to reconsider how people get their news and what they respond to and how to monetize that is a failure of response, not a coup by a new medium.

2. Whoopi Goldberg was not a stand up. Just because there are now stand ups who do one-person shows does not mean that everyone who has done one-person show is a stand up.

"2. Whoopi Goldberg was not a stand up. Just because there are now stand ups who do one-person shows does not mean that everyone who has done one-person show is a stand up."

Either you're mistaken, or its a matter of semantics, or a number of people are making the same mistake. Yahoo! Movies, IMDB, and Warner Bros. official site, among others, describe Goldberg as a stand-up in their respective biographies. Even critics reviewing her one-woman shows have referred to her as a "stand-up". I couldn't find an instance of Whoopi referring to herself as a stand-up.

Whoopi Goldberg came upon America, full grown, 24 years ago on Broadway in a one-woman show directed by Mike Nichols. The show came out of her self-created one-woman show, which I believe was in SF.

To my knowledge, there is no history whatsoever of Whoopi doing traditional stand-up, which is to say, walking around a stage doing jokes. She did do Comic Relief with two actors who crossed over from being stand-ups, but she was not one of them.

Lazy use of language by others is unfortunate, probably created by ignorance of her past. I had the good fortune to be in NY when she happened.

You're probably right. It seemed like several of these sites were cribbing off each other anyway.

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

URL:
Remember me? YesNo

Comments: