Out, Demon, Out!

Breaking News Alert The New York Times Mon, October 18, 2010 -- 11:39 PM ET
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Tribune Board Said Ready to Oust Chief Executive

The board of directors of the Tribune Company is expected to ask Tuesday for the resignation of Randy Michaels, the controversial chief executive of the company, according to a person directly involved in the matter.

The individual, who spoke on condition of not being identified, said the board had lost confidence in the ability of Mr. Michaels to lead the troubled company. Mr. Michael's resignation would follow by days the exit of another top executive at the media company, Lee Abrams, Tribune's chief innovation officer, who resigned on Friday after sending a sexually explicit memo to the entire company.

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And now, an excellent example of the startling innovation in the L.A. Times portion of the collapsing Trib empire.

Many yrs. after the Times stopped publishing a telebision guide, it was suddenly decided to run one again. A wk. or two ago they inserted the non-"lite" version (glossy cover, more — but not much more — listing detail) in the Sunday edition, to tempt possible subscribers. And now, if you don't subscribe, you get the "lite" version, w/ newsprint cover. We can't imagine that anyone under 70 would give a shit. Why not? Take a look at our bookmarks bar:

Click to read. (Did you really need us to tell you that?)

Yes, those are eight different (somewhat, long story & you don't care) Internet telebision listing services. The one on the far right (No, not that far right.) "ZAP2it", is owned & operated by the very Trib Co. itself. No one under 70 is going to subscribe to anything because they can get a crummy tee vee guide again. And the over-70s who do won't be subscribing for too long. Sorry, old & soon-to-be-dead people. (Of which we am one.)

Not that it makes a heck of a lot of difference to us. We finally stopped buying the fish-wrapper a few wks. ago, having found that:

1. We can print their crummy crosswords & do them in pencil (as nature intended) rather than typing the fucking thing on-line.
2. We can read every professional, newspaper-quality (Go ahead, we're laughing too.) comic strip we want on-line, in color, & w/ the Sunday throwaway panels.
3. The damned rag published some crap which claimed our friend & sexual associate was an ineffective teacher. You could type her name in a box & it would reveal some pointless something about I don't know what. As if one could determine the effectiveness of someone teaching second graders. We doubt they traced the SAT scores of her students of X yrs. ago.

Now, we get a carton of smokes, stock up on food & see if we can avoid going any farther from the bunker than the mail box for a wk. Or more.