LA Times suspends pressman blogger

Los Angeles Times pressman Ed Padgett says his bosses suspended him for blogging about last Thursday's production problems that led to delivery problems Friday morning.

Padgett, who posts at the Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20 Year Club, said the suspension could lead to termination, pending the outcome of an internal investigation:

I was told I had been warned in the past regarding my blogging, but I was only warned about broadcasting circulation numbers and nothing else. 

So much for first amendment rights.

Padgett posts included the news that the Times had to restart its Orange County printing presses after having shuttered the facility days before and the rising temperatures inside the Olympic plant. (The warning he refers to came last June when he reported that the paper's circulation had fallen below one million.)

Padgett also called for unspecified changes at Times in response to the production problems, which might be the post that got him into hot water. Here's part of what he said:

I’m not certain how many subscribers have fled the Los Angeles Times over the fiasco yesterday, but the numbers will be revealed to the pressmen shortly as the amount of newspapers produced daily will most definitely decline deeply. ...


The public relations damage at the Los Angeles Times was great, with thousand’s of dollars in rebates to the advertisers for newspapers not delivered to our readers. We have a few anchors here at the LA Times that need to be jettisoned overboard, and quickly.

Back to Orange

After Friday's delivery troubles, the Los Angeles Times has restarted the presses at its Orange County facility, only days after shutting the plant down.

Needless to say, the Times' pressmen are not happy - but are trying to keep cool.

Four in the morning

1. Not sure if this is a consequence of the closure of the Orange County printing plant, but the Los Angeles Times got delivered late today in parts of L.A. and Orange County due to problems with its remaining presses. LAT

2. The iPad revolution continue to revolve, with Time magazine's latest app getting the Gizmodo staff all googly eyed. Gizmodo

3.Making Twitter shorter. New Yorker

4. (Self-promotion alert) On today's "To The Point," Wikipedia is more popular than ever but fewer people are contributing - that's led to an interesting change in policy. TTP

Orange crush

The Los Angeles Times shuttered its Orange County printing plant today, according to Times pressman Ed Padgett:

The Los Angeles Times Orange County Production Facility, opened in 1968 to much fanfare, died on a quiet note early this morning with the printing of the LAT Extra edition.

The remaining two crews at the facility will now move to the downtown Los Angeles production facility this weekend.

There had been some hope that changes in ownership at the Orange County Register could win the plant a reprieve. It wasn't to be.

L.A. Times shutters Orange County plant, shrinks in size

In a continuing effort to cut costs, the Los Angeles Times today announced that it will close its printing plant in Orange County and consolidate operations at its press facility in downtown L.A. The 80 press workers at the OC plant will be fired.

The consolidation plan will lead to earlier press deadlines. As a result, the newspaper will create a new section to capture late-breaking news. From the story:

To accommodate earlier deadlines necessitated by the elimination of the plant, the paper will launch a new section dubbed LATExtra to run late-breaking news that was previously published in individual sections. LATExtra will appear Monday through Saturday, beginning Feb. 2, according to the memo.

The changes "give us the opportunity to expand and further showcase the terrific enterprise reporting of this newsroom, as well as produce the first new news section in many, many years," Times Editor Russ Stanton said in a memo to the newsroom.

The Times also plans to eliminate the stand-alone business section on Mondays, move the food section to Thursdays, and will cut the width of the newspaper to 44 inches, down from 48 inches.

What's up with the Times' OC printing plant?

Some of the press workers at the Los Angeles Times think the paper will shutter its Orange County printing plant in the coming months. A report on Ed Padgett's blog has fueled the speculation, which seems to be based largely on insider rumor. I'll update if I see anything concrete one way or the other.

A new voice from behind the Orange Curtain

A new nonprofit online newsroom called the Voice of OC hopes to get off the ground by the end of the year. The website, which will model itself after the Voice of San Diego, will cover public affairs in Orange County and be edited by former Orange County Register reporter Norberto Santana Jr., the Los Angeles Times reports.

The initial funding for the site comes from the Orange County Employees Association, which kicked in $140,000. Supporters hope to raise $600,000 to cover first year expenses.

The nonprofit board for the venture includes Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Irvine Law School and trial lawyer Tom Girardi. Former LA Times reporters Harvey Weinstein and Dan Morain also sit on the board.

Labor unions, trial lawyers and journalists are not the first things that come to mind when thinking about Orange County....

First Amendment lesson

Another school year has begun and another high school principal has tried to stop the publication of a student newspaper over an uncomfortable, but factual, article.

Sue Vaughn, principal at Santa Ana's Orange County High School of the Arts, a public charter school, halted publication of the student-run "Evolution" newspaper over a report that the cafeteria's private food vendor, Alegre, was on a mission "to serve God."

From the Orange County Register:

Vaughn confirmed Thursday that Alegre's religious affiliation was one of the factors that led her to authorize the printing delay, but denied trying to censor the students' work.

"We're in no way trying to censor anything," Vaughn said Thursday. "We were given the copy to look at after it was sent to the printer. There were errors in it that need to be corrected, and then the printing will be continued."

Alegre's religious proclivity is factually correct – that's evident from the company's Web site – but Vaughn noted that a school official had been misquoted in that article. ...

Vaughn never makes clear what the misquote was (wouldn't a correction have taken care of that?) and the reporter stood by her story.

As usually happens in such cases, the freaked out administrators trying to censor the article have drawn more attention to it than if they'd simply let it run.

(via Romenesko)