The rise and fall of news

I heard some sad news today from a fellow transit junkie friend of mine. Steve Hymon, the transit reporter for the LA Times, was laid off along with 30 other people at the paper once regarded to be one of the nation's best. It's amazing that there are still enough people in that building to actually put together enough stories to produce a paper, and the quality level definitely reflects these staffing changes. Just a few of the things he's reported on recently include: LA's plans for the stimulus money with regards to transit, the Expo and Gold line construction, and not to mention his excellent Bottleneck Blog. It's disconcerting that in a city with as much transportation issues as LA, the main newspaper would choose to decrease the amount of reporting on this extremely important topic.

Seeing as I now must rely on the New York Times for reliable and interesting news information, I found this somewhat hilarious post about Paul Krugman in the Freaknomics blog. My favorite economist wrote a scathing opinion on the new plan to price "toxic" assets in the public-private partnership developed by the Treasury Department. I know it's not fair that Krugman gets to criticize all of Obama and Geithner's moves without having to develop a solution (that is politically viable) but it's important that someone is pointing out the possible pitfalls. For the taxpayers' sake, let's hope that this Nobel award winning Economist is wrong, at least this once.

Finally in reference to my previous post, check out Steve Lopez's column about the last hired, first fired policy at LAUSD.

And for those of you who watched the Presidential Press Conference last night, please take a moment to watch Jon Stewart explain how conferences should go. HILARIOUS!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
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