CATHY SEIPP offers advice to the L.A. Times: “Staff writers at The Times often turn in very little copy (one story a week is not atypical), which means some are getting paid around $2,000 per mediocre, grudging piece. Wouldn’t it be better to spend that money on freelancers (or bloggers!) who, if they can’t work themselves up into something worth reading, don’t get paid? Let the heads roll, I say.”

Read the whole thing. It certainly seems clear that bloggers know more about the L.A. Times than the L.A. Times knows about bloggers . . .

UPDATE: Meanwhile, way back in 2001, Matt Welch was writing:

What I mean to say is that there’s a new wind blowing, friends, and people who have been domesticated in mono-daily newsrooms these past 30 years will not be the ones to detect it first. . . .

It’s not just a question of underappreciated genius anymore. Something has been going on these past three months (not to mention the five years before that), yet 95% of large media companies – especially monopolist newspapers – seem utterly ignorant of it, or at best powerless to react to it. Have you ever been the hiring man at a newspaper? I have, twice. One of the fundamental duties of that job, it seems to me, is to be hyper-aware of the talent fermenting in your own back yard, and nimble enough to make room for it on your staff. Think that happens at any dominant newspaper in the country? This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we mean by the term “uncompetitive industry.”

And yet, they still haven’t learned.

MORE: Reader Michael Gebert emails:

I think you’re being unfair to staff writers at the LA Times. If Mickey Kaus is right about the layers of editors at that paper, writers may only write one piece a week, but I’d bet they write it ten times before it runs.

Glad I don’t own stock.