Steven A. Smith was considered to be one of the most innovative newspaper editors in the country, Webcasting his morning news meetings, building a radio sound studio and shifting staff and focus to the online edition of his paper, the Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review. So of course the self-destructing newspaper industry had to go and ruin that, by asking Smith to fire most new online people less than a year after he hacked away 25 percent of the overall staff. Smith naturally resigned, an event that was covered by NPR. Some old newspaper hands are grumbling that Smith should have toughed it out, but up-and-coming print journalists will be looking at his decision and reaching the opposite conclusion: If this guy, of all people, can't deliver newspapers safely to the future, it's probably time to leave. (Photo via NPR)

Could the editors at the Los Angeles Times be any more useless? Their newspaper is going down in flames, with cash flow declines ranked worst among the deeply troubled Tribune Company newspapers. Their best hope for salvation is the Web, where the paper is desperately behind upstart competitors like Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood and the Huffington Post. Just last year the paper installed new publishing software that couldn't even handle hyperlinks. And yet newsroom "leaders" just spent 18 months in a fucking (ahem) committee debating what swears LATimes.com bloggers should be allowed to use, and when. The byzantine machinations involved some sort of appeal to a "ruling" of a special committee about some formal guidelines, and of course resulted in a tedious and useless memo that should make anyone who ever cared about the once-great newspaper want to slit his wrists. Its insufferable, self-indulgent stupidity lies after the jump. Oh, and it basically says no one can use "pissed off" because it's crude and might tarnish the LA Times's sterling image in the remaining months before the paper's now-all-but-inevitable collapse.

"While 72 percent of the children online belonged to a social networking site (usually MySpace), 60 percent of them said they rarely or never read blogs." [Times]