Kausput

Mickey Kaus of Slate apparently has issues with the Los Angeles Times. Today he writes:

P.S.: The L.A. Times ran the Prop. 72 comeback story in the B section, with a little tease in a box on the A section front. More evidence that the Times's editors still don't know a front-page story when they see it. They must think they're competing with the New York Times and need to front all the big global stories on Ukraine, intel reform, Chinese mine explosions, etc. But the LAT's value to upscale Southern California readers who already get the NYT would be precisely in coverage of more local stories the big East Coast papers won't carry, including crime stories. Duh! ... P.P.S.: This may explain why the LAT has gotten oddly less compelling as it has become a much better paper under its new Chicago Tribune management. It used to at least be entertainingly, uniquely bad. Now it's just a 90-percent-as-good New York Times or WaPo. ... P.P.P.S.: I still resist bringing the thing into the house. It's what you should never be in California--namely fat. Too much newsprint to recycle! They should pay me to read all those ads. ... P.P.P.P.S.: As long as I was in the LAT B-section, I aimlessly leafed through its back pages just to see what they had in them. It turns out they have a whole editorial page back there, with op-eds and everything! Who knew? ... 9:48 P.M.

Perhaps this is the angst of a non-native Angelino, or, more telling, the subliminal twitching of an east-coaster who, somewhere in the nether regions of his cortex, remembers that in 2004 the New York Times garnered Pulitzer Prizes for two of its writer, while the LA Times shocked the publishing world with five.