Danger! Violent, potentially mellow-harshening metaphors ahead: Hugh Hewitt buries the Los Angeles Times in a speech to the L. A. Press Club. Meanwhile, fellow southern California resident Burt Prelutsky writes, "If The Times Were A Horse, They’d Shoot It".

Speaking of mellows being harshed, Tim Porter writes on "The Mood of the Newsroom":

The amount of anger and hostility, of distrust and suspicion, of inertia and ennui that pollutes the journalistic environment in these newsrooms at first surprised me. Now, when I first step into another newspaper I only wonder how long it will take to surface.

Initially, before the realization grew within me that the negativism was not sporadic but pervasive, I tempered my perception of it with the desires I heard from so many journalists to do good work, to chase on still after the dreams that drew them into reporting or photography - speaking truth to power, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, and, of course, the byline.

After a time, though, I came to see that many of these journalists, and not just those swimming in my end of the generational pool, used these nostalgic desires as substitutes for the actual passion and energy necessary to achieve their journalistic dreams in today's new world of news media. In other words, their notion of "doing good work" meant doing journalism the way it was done "before," a temporal concept loosely bound in the wrappings of time before cable, before Internet, before loss of authority, a time in which "the paper" was "the news."