Rutten on Tribune's time in Los Angeles

The Tribune Company takeover by Sam Zell prompted Times media columnist Tim Rutten to pronounce the seven years of Tribune ownership at the LAT "a disastrous journalistic experiment...there's no need to belabor the multiple reasons for that failure, but suffice to say that, as of Wednesday, there were only three places in the world where you still could find people who believed in the efficacy of Brezhnev-style bureaucracy and central planning: North Korea, Cuba and Tribune Tower in Chicago." Not that anyone really knows what to expect from Zell, who promised Los Angeles more autonomy, but who dropped hints that if the front page displeases him somebody might get a phone call. Everybody's an editor....

It was Rutten's final Regarding Media column. He's moving to the Op-Ed page, and "someone else" will comment on media. It was a pretty good five-year run, with more hits than misses, and injected the Times into the conversation about media in a way that the paper never had been included before.