Kinsley Plans to Change Jobs

NYT reported Michael Kinsley, the provocative editorial and opinion-page editor of The Los Angeles Times, said yesterday that he would be changing jobs in the next few months and most likely would no longer be running the department. He will not necessarily leave the editorial page, he said, but his new role is still being worked out.

Nikki Finke writes in LA Weekly All day Monday, the offices of the LAT’s editorial, Op-Ed and newly christened Current sections swirled with water-cooler talk that boss Kinsley would be leaving now that he has to report to the commercial, and not the editorial, side of the newspaper. His staffers were already reeling from that under-the-radar bombshell: the announcement that LAT Editor John Carroll would be moving out of, and Managing Editor Dean Baquet into, the Spring Street power office, and that, “as part of the leadership transition,” Kinsley would report not to Carroll but to recently installed Publisher Jeff Johnson.... In typical Kinsley fashion, self-serving and self-righteous, he beat his own paper to the punch and on Monday gave the news of his stepping down to the LAT’s arch-rival, The New York Times....

I wonder what the LA Times thinks. The first article is from the NYT, this one is from LA Weekly. I checked the LA Times, and all they had were some of Kinsley's columns.

“It’s a very complicated arrangement I have, and not all aspects are working as well as others,” he told the NYT. “This living in Seattle and editing the editorial page is not an ideal arrangement. It’s not ideal for me and it’s not ideal for the paper. I don’t think it’s terrible. I think I’m doing a pretty good job. But that’s the one thing that is not working out, so we’re going to try to fix it.”

A pretty good job? On what planet? A more accurate description of his tenure at the LAT would be a pretty horrible job that’s proved disastrous both to Kinsley’s persona and to the paper’s prestige

It is just a guess, but I suspect Nikki Finke does not like Michael Kinsley. I recall some time ago that Michael Kinsley seemed to be at war with Maureen Dowd. I wonder if Nikki and Maureen were friends.

.... One minute he was announcing with great fanfare a new feature of regular “wikitorials” as if he’d reinvented the Internet; the next minute he was deleting comments filled with porn and swear words. He declared this obvious failure a wild success even if in his eyes only.

It was a major failure. Wikis are good way to develop opinions from many knowledgable people on non-controversial subjects, but that is the antithesis of an editorial

That’s because his primary purpose was to attract attention to himself on the East Coast among those journalism peers and political pundits he’d carefully cultivated in New York and Washington over three decades of schmoozing and sucking up.... The one-time New Republic and Slate editor brought to the party an old-school liberal penchant for placing witty banter ahead of serious argument. An example is that recent Kinsley-penned LAT commentary downplaying the significance of the so-called Downing Street Memo concerning the timing of the decision to go to war with Iraq and the Bush administration’s distortion of the related WMD intelligence. He had the arrogance and audacity not just to pooh-pooh the memo’s contents but also to poke fun at the progressive movement for pumping up the volume surrounding it. “I don’t buy the fuss. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it, as an encouraging sign of the left’s revival. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes ideological self-confidence,” Kinsley ridiculed. Rush Limbaugh couldn’t have been more dismissive.