Protest Blog Aims at Tribune Boss (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

One problem with managing a bunch of print journalists is that when you fire them — or cut their budget, or the size of their newspaper — they are still journalists, prone to grumbling about whatever they consider unfair.

At the Tribune Company, the grumblers have found an outlet in a blog, Tell Zell, that lets them rip into Sam Zell, the Chicago real estate mogul who took Tribune private last year for $8.2 billion. The blog, set up in May, is mainly an encyclopedia of gripes about cutbacks at The Los Angeles Times, though other Tribune papers, like The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel and The Baltimore Sun, get their turns. One scoop last week was an unconfirmed list of about 100 people leaving The Times, either through buyouts or layoffs.

The owner of TellZell.com answers to InkStainedRetch, Retch for short, who claimed in an e-mail interview to be on the editorial staff at The Los Angeles Times, “for now at least.” The goal of the blog is “to stop Sam Zell from destroying The L.A. Times, one of America’s great papers,” wrote Retch, who declined to identify himself or herself.

Retch does not suffer from a lack of material. Last week alone the Times’s publisher, David Hiller, and The Tribune’s editor, Ann Marie Lipinski, resigned. And new cutbacks were announced.

Jim Rainey, the media columnist at The Times, said that “people here read TellZell.”

they act as if life owed them a journalism job.

Yes, they do.

To them, journalism wasn't a job or even a career, it was a mission. They grew up believing that the pen was mightier than the sword and saw plenty of examples of it -- Woodward and Bernstein bring down a president, Cronkite single-handedly ending a war, etc. They reinvented themselves as "journalists", informing the world that they were much better than their blue collar "reporter" counterparts and adopted a rock star attitude to go along with it. Journalism schools popped up at universities across the land to accommodate this new Protector of the Trvth.

Journalism was more than reporting; just telling the story as it happened wasn't good enough. The story had to be told in context, i.e. the "journalist" had to explain to the dumb reader exactly what story meant, which involved adding commentary and insight that only a journalist could possibly have. It was good times when cable TV sprouted 24x7 news channels that added a plethora of opportunities for journalists to spout their wisdom to the masses.

Then the Internet happened. Suddenly anyone could be a journalist, and many took the opportunity to do so. This new media was better, faster and cheaper than the old media--a trifecta that is rarely seen in new technology. The old media railed against the new media in the typical high school rivalry fashion: "they're amateurs"; "they can't stand up to our professionalism"; "they shouldn't be allowed to do what they do". In reality, they knew deep down inside that their goose was just being put in the oven and it was just a matter of time before the fork was stuck in.

The realization that what you do for a living can be done by any Tom, Dick or Harry with a PC and a handful of grammar skills must have been a horrifying feeling. Not only was your job in jeopardy, but the entire industry was destined for the ash heap of history. That's pretty sobering.

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