In mid-February 2007 LA Weekly freelancer Luke Thompson took a hard look at the LA Times’ Jim Rainey, the paper’s media reporter who had drawn the unenviable assignment of covering Tribune Company’s ongoing woes — including, awkwardly, its impact on his own employer. The piece was a small documented moment in the city’s media-on-media coverage cycle.
Then
Thompson’s LA Weekly piece — published under the headline “Covering the Bosses” — surveyed local media watchers about the structural difficulty of Rainey’s beat. Ken Reich, the longtime LAObserved-adjacent media critic who ran the Take Back the Times blog and made a career out of needling the paper, told Thompson that Rainey was underplaying the LA Times circulation drop. Rainey, for his part, told Thompson he felt “picked on.”
The original FishbowlLA framing — Kate Coe’s wry pickup — landed on Rainey’s response to LA Weekly’s photo request: “feisty,” in Thompson’s word. The dynamic was its own kind of media-coverage Russian doll: an LA Weekly freelancer reporting on the LA Times reporter covering the LA Times’ ownership crisis, with FishbowlLA reporting on the LA Weekly piece. That recursion was a 2007 specialty.
The substantive question Thompson surfaced was real, though. The LA Times in early 2007 was in genuine corporate trouble — Sam Zell’s leveraged Tribune buyout was about to close, the bankruptcy that would follow was eighteen months away, and the paper’s own staff was directly affected by the news Rainey was assigned to cover.
Now
Jim Rainey continued at the LA Times for years afterward, including time as the paper’s TV reporter and as a senior media-and-politics writer. The structural conflict-of-interest problem he was navigating in 2007 — a staff reporter covering the parent company that signs his check — was eventually written about extensively in media-ethics literature as the LA Times went through bankruptcy, multiple ownership turns, and the eventual 2018 Soon-Shiong sale.
Ken Reich continued his Take Back the Times blogging through the end of the 2000s and into the early 2010s before stepping back from active media criticism. The LAObserved ecosystem he was part of — Kevin Roderick, Reich, and the broader LA-media-watcher crowd — has largely thinned out, with active LA media criticism now mostly happening on newsletter platforms and inside academic journalism programs.
Luke Thompson moved on from LA Weekly within a few years and has had a long subsequent career writing about film and television, including a long-running TV-criticism beat at multiple outlets. The recursive-media-reporting genre — alt-weekly reporting on daily-paper reporter covering daily paper — still happens, but the alt-weekly side of it has thinned out so substantially that the city no longer has the institutional infrastructure to keep producing the pieces at the cadence Thompson and Rainey were operating at in 2007.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: February 2007 snapshot