New Yorkers Edit Los Angeles

Like big brothers who want to make sure their younger sibling does not embarrass them, the Los Angeles Times is now being edited by New Yorkers.

The Chicago Tribune, who owns the Los Angeles Times, is perfectly positioned in their corporate headquarters between the two largest cities in the country to promote literary homogeneity.

I loved that the Los Angeles Times was a little more homespun and definitely more sarcastic than The New York Times. It’s what made the Los Angeles Times, in my opinion, a much more enjoyable newspaper. Plus, having a California spin on the news is always more interesting, because, hey, here we are in California. And we Californians take things a little less seriously and we sort of, I don’t know, laugh at things sooner than we get all righteous.

Now that the editors have changed, the tone has gotten more somber. It’s just too bad.

But what’s even worse is the infusion of the same fucking vocabulary words I always have to look up when I’m reading The New Yorker. Don’t get me wrong. I love The New Yorker (and to a lesser extent The New York Times), but I’ve already spent the past year looking up words like hegemony, heuristic, ersatz and pseudonymous. And having a decent memory, I’ve learned the meanings of these words and would be very thankful to never have to see them again.

But there they are in my Los Angeles Times newspaper. Like that young man of yesteryear, must everything, “GO WEST?”

Will I wake up tomorrow and have to face the prolix terror of penumbra, apostasy and supererogation? And must I look up desultory just one more time before I die? And the dreaded spavined! It has something to do with a horse hock. I’ve read that word about twenty times this year in The New Yorker. I hate it for its overuse and now, I fear, it will end up in the Home Section of my Los Angeles Times.

It seems to me there is some awful editor king somewhere in midtown Manhattan who has a very large vocabulary, but a limited one, nevertheless. And this king, not happy to only lord it over The New York Times and The New Yorker, has aggressively acquired our little duchy of the Los Angeles Times. I would like, very much, for him to be deposed before I have to put up with riparian, demotic, exegesis, sui generis or fustian fluttering in my face while I try to read my cool, snarky L.A. Times and drink my morning herbal tea in peace.