OF CAREERS AND READERS at The Los Angeles Times:

This, in a nutshell, is the essential problem with the L.A. Times: Those who work there care a great deal about their careers and very little about their readers. I’m not one of those who think the paper should dismantle its foreign and national bureaus – of course a big-circulation paper in a major city like L.A. should have at least some of its own reporters around the world – but it’s possible to maintain all that while also realizing that readers can now just as easily subscribe to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal for home delivery as the L.A. Times.

So you’ve got to give locals a reason to get their local paper instead, and probably that means a renewed emphasis on local news, even though, yes, being a foreign correspondent is much more glamorous.

A good example of how the L.A. Times constantly fails at all this comes courtesy of Sharon Waxman’s smart, engaging little piece last week in the New York Times, about Carrie Fisher, a Los Angeles personality who’s about to appear in a one-woman show at a Los Angeles theater. So naturally, the New York Times did the story first.

Kaus has been complaining about the LAT’s lack of local coverage for years.