By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, July 2012
In late July 2012, LA Times media reporter James Rainey announced he was switching beats to politics ahead of the 2012 election cycle. He would be giving up his media column to contribute to the Times’s political blog Politics Now. LA Observed broke the internal memo.
Then
James Rainey had been the LA Times’s media columnist for years prior to the July 2012 beat switch. His media-column work had been one of the recurring LA-region media-industry analysis voices through the late 2000s and early 2010s.
The 2012 election was the proximate trigger — the Obama-Romney general election was the kind of substantive political moment that periodically drew media reporters into broader political-coverage work.
Kevin Roderick’s LA Observed had been the central LA-media-industry blog across the entire 2000s-and-early-2010s period.
The broader question the FishbowlLA framing implicitly raised was about LA Times media-coverage continuity. The paper’s media beat had been a substantial institutional position for decades.
Matthew Fleischer’s FishbowlLA framing was substantively concerned. The piece treated the move as a meaningful editorial transition worth tracking.
Now
James Rainey continued at the LA Times across the post-2012 years before subsequent transitions to NBC News (where he has covered politics) and other outlets.
The LA Times’s media beat itself has continued, though with substantially reduced dedicated-staffing relative to the early-2010s era. The paper’s post-2018 Patrick Soon-Shiong ownership cycle has produced multiple subsequent editorial reorganizations.
LA Observed continued operating across multiple subsequent years; Kevin Roderick stepped back from active LA Observed editorial work in the late 2010s.
Politics Now — the LA Times political blog Rainey moved to — went through multiple subsequent reorganizations and was eventually folded into the paper’s broader politics-coverage infrastructure.
The 2012 piece reads now as a small documented moment of the broader LA-region media-coverage contraction that has continued across the entire interval since.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.