The Wall Street Journal (via L.A. Observed) just reported that the Los Angeles Times has fired its editor, Dean Baquet. The Times parent, Tribune Company, has been on a mission to eviscerate what remains of the paper by slashing personnel. A month ago they fired the publisher, Jeff Johnson, for refusing to go along with the cuts. Baquet tenuously agreed to stay on in the hopes that he could forestall any further newsroom terminations.

The new publisher, David Hiller, made the announcement after the news was leaked to the Journal. This smells like an attempt to lose the story in the thick of election night madness. But this story is only going to grow. After the Johnson firing, three top editors (Doug Frantz, Leo Wolinsky, and John Montorio) promised to resign if management pushed Baquet out as well. We’ll see if they are true to their words.

Baquet will be replaced by James O’Shea, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, where Hiller had come from. Obviously they are stuffing the deck with ringers from the home office, probably with the intent to sell the hollowed-out shell of a newspaper to another hack conglomerate. It’s unclear what they will have to offer a buyer without an editorial staff.

They won’t have much of a subscriber base either. For the six-month period ending September 2006, the Times circulation delined 8%, the largest drop in the industry. And they are about to lose even more. Aside from me, there is already a Subscriber Revolt site set up to put the paper on notice. Here is an excerpt of the letter you can send via this site:

“I am a Los Angeles Times reader who has watched with dismay the attempts of the Tribune Co. to squeeze ever-higher profits from my newspaper by slashing its ability to gather and publish news…..The Times is our irreplaceable civic resource, and I will not sit back as you dismantle it.”

The letter includes an explicit threat to cancel by December 31, if Baquet is not reinstated and other remedial steps are not taken. I’m not sure I can wait that long.

This paper can be saved if Tribune would sell it to local operators. There has been interest from folks like Eli Broad, Ron Burkle and David Geffen. Any one of them would be an improvement over Tribune. An even better plan would be for an academic institution to purchase the paper and run it as a not-prifit. But it will never be worth a damn if Tribune is allowed to carry out its destructive and short-sighted agenda.

And we can stop them: Subscriber Revolt