Moving Monoliths: The LAT Editorial Board

Michael Kinsley, Mr. News & Opinion at the LATimes, is shaking things up, as Hugh Hewitt and NYT readers already know.

About five writers will go, but some will be replaced, with the page ending up with 11 staffers instead of the 13 it takes now to turn out two or three editorials and edit some op/eds dialy. How high quality is the ivory in that tower?

Kinsley's an interesting character. He infuriates regularly, but he's not a one-dimensional idealogue and he knows how to laugh at the peculiarities of the media and the LAT. His creativity is going to be seen and tested this week as he launches "wikitorials." Here's how the NYT explains it:

This week, the newspaper, will introduce an online feature called "wikitorials," as a way for readers to engage in an online dialogue with the paper. The model is based on "Wikipedia," the Web's free-content encyclopedia that is edited by online contributors.

"We'll have some editorials where you can go online and edit an editorial to your satisfaction," Mr. Martinez said. "We are going to do that with selected editorials initially. We don't know how this is going to turn out. It's all about finding new ways to allow readers to interact with us in the age of the Web."

It's an interesting idea. But with divisiveness so extreme and the Left so given to obscene rantings, it may be difficult to control. Still, it's a stab at trying something different, something more interesting than traditional newspaper editorializing. The first one hasn't appeared yet, but I'll be watching.

For all these wikitorials show of a man who's trying to retool a ponderous machine gone wild, his idea of signed editorials shows just how stuck in the past the machine remains. Under the "revolutionary" new Kinsley policy, editorial writers get the opportunity to print one signed editorial a year, and they can only use that one opportunity to write a rebuttal to an unsigned LAT editorial.

Why just one a year? Why any unsigned editorials at all; is this a firing squad or something? And why not run rebuttals whenever there is one?

Why? Because it might crack the ivory, that's why.