Departures from the increasingly Tribunized L.A. Times are beginning. Tim Brown, the national baseball writer since leaving the NBA beat, is jumping to Yahoo! Sports, where the former #2 at LAT sports, Dave Morgan, is now the #1. The staff email from Times sports editor Randy Harvey:

Sent: Friday, November 24, 2006 12:17 PM
Subject: staff message from Randy Harvey

Staff,

We received word this morning that Tim Brown is leaving the paper for Yahoo Sports.

While this is good news for our friend Dave Morgan, it is very bad news for us. Tim is a born baseball writer, one of the very best in the business, but the fact is that there isn't a writing job in our section that Tim couldn't do with equal style.

He certainly proved that with his exceptional coverage of the Shaq and Kobe Lakers. That was a high point for our department.

We will miss him personally and professionally. We wish him well.

Randy

Newsroom gossip also has Washington Bureau reporter (and Spring Street Project mainstay) T. Christian Miller and the New York bureau's Ellen Barry headed for the New York Times. Meanwhile, Philip Terzian, now Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard, last worked at the L.A. Times in the 1980s (as an op-ed editor) and has a lazy piece in his magazine today that reads like it was written then. His thesis is that the Times is an overstaffed velvet coffin, but it's as if he missed the hundreds of reductions via buyout, layoff, retirement and firings since his day.