Bye-bye now

LA Times Editor Dean Baquet has been forced out. Well, I’m crying no tears. Someone in the news business pushed me yesterday with the idea that Baquet was doing God’s work and I went ballistic. Quite the contrary, I said, rather than pushing to preserve the past, he should have been pushing his bosses to be investing in the future. He should have been investing in networked journalism to take the paper hyperlocal and in online and audio and video to take the paper past paper. He should have made his own cuts in the old newsroom to pay for those investments. He should have had a vision and strategy for the future. Whining at corporate is no damned strategy at all. Dean Baquet was dangerous for journalism because he was defending the past rather than fighting for the future. Bye-bye now.