Shaken from the blogging doldrums

It's not that I haven't thought about blogging since Thanksgiving, nor is it that I haven't had the time. But in Kindergarten we're taught if we don't have anything nice to say it's better to say nothing at all. As a blogger, I've adapted that to if I don't have something valuable or interesting or funny to blog, then it's better not to blog. I've read too many blogs that lack points.

So it was today that the L.A. Times, specifically media writer James Rainey, stirred me to blog. In this first-person commentary he lets the readers know that despite massive slashes to the L.A. Times newsroom and business and productions staff and despite an industry in the middle of an evolutionary selection, honor has not left the building.

COMMENTARY

Courage in the face of danger -- and bankruptcy

Times journalists respond to Tribune's hard times by working hard.

By JAMES RAINEY

December 14, 2008

I've seen my colleagues plunge into rioting mobs, drive into the hills as they exploded with fire and -- on days when the earth shook -- leave their anxious families to rush to crumpled buildings.

You think a little bankruptcy scares this crew? You think Chapter 11 has us down? You think we fear the future?

Well, yes. Yes. And hell yes. In the ragtag old Los Angeles Times newsroom, emotions run as threadbare as the quarter-century-old carpet.

Editors quip about whether their company credit cards will work. Reporters wonder what a crew chief at McDonald's might earn. Dark thoughts abound about Tribune boss Sam Zell, who bet on the real estate market just right and the news market oh so wrong.

But luckily for the newspaper and the customers who read it, Times people multitask like nobody's business.

So, in the hours after the wires announced that Tribune had filed for bankruptcy, Tina Susman got out of her sickbed, donned her long black coat and head scarf and took to the fearsome streets of Baghdad.

Howard Blume spent another long day glued to the phone, so he could ...

Click the link above to read the rest, latimes.com could use the traffic.