By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
nytimes.com
July 30, 2007


“The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today’s Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment,” began a July 24 item on the Web site L.A. Observed. “Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed.”

The site ran the 1,450-word column, which “fell into our hands,” in its entirety. In it, Mr. Goldstein proposed that his newspaper promote itself by following the lead of The Mail on Sunday in Britain, which inserted Prince’s latest CD into 2.9 million copies, and also give away music.

“While the Times still is a profitable business, our revenue was down 10 percent in the second quarter while our cash flow was down, as our publisher put it the other day, a ‘whopping 27 percent, making it one of the worst quarters ever experienced,’ ” Mr. Goldstein wrote. “Times are so hard at the Times that the publisher has proposed putting ads on the front page to generate new revenue.”

L.A. Observed’s founder, Kevin Roderick, a former senior editor at The Los Angeles Times, reported that the column had sailed through the copy desk but was killed by John Montorio, a managing editor.

Neither Mr. Montorio nor Mr. Goldstein returned messages from The New York Times seeking comment, and a spokeswoman said her paper does not comment about its editing process.

Mr. Goldstein, however, issued a statement to Nikki Finke, who writes the Deadline Hollywood blog for L.A. Weekly. “Obviously, no columnist is ever happy about having their column killed,” he wrote. “But I’m much more disappointed that the column that was killed was full of ideas about how to help my newspaper.”

Mr. Roderick said he was at a loss to explain the incident. “There wasn’t anything particularly controversial or critical of The Times,” Mr. Roderick said. “It has run many, much more critical pieces about itself in the last six months, which have been very tumultuous,” he said.

The paper has had newsroom shake-ups, and a sale of its owner, the Tribune Company, is pending.

Keeping the column out of the paper hardly kept people from reading it. The L.A. Observed page was visited more than 18,000 times, and “many thousands” more subscribers had it sent to them electronically, Mr. Roderick said. Many Web sites like The Huffington Post, Slate and Gawker also sniped about it.

“A killed story used to be pretty much dead unless it got leaked to another newspaper,” Mr. Roderick said of the preblog era of print-based newspapers. “It’s very hard to keep secrets in a newsroom anymore.”

“They’re in the business of killing stories these days, not publishing them,” Steven den Beste, one of the Internet’s earliest bloggers, wrote of the incident on Instapundit.com. “But they no longer have the ability to close the gate because thousands of bloggers have dug tunnels under the fence.”
ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07.....ness&oref=slogin