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L.A. Times Editor Fired For Refusing to Cut Staff
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" Dan Baquet, the editor of The L.A. Times has been fired for refusing to make personnel cuts at the newspaper.

Dean Baquet, the editor of The Los Angeles Times, who defied orders from his corporate bosses to cut jobs, was forced out of his own job yesterday, shocking the newsroom just as it was gearing up to cover election returns. He is to leave his post Friday and be succeeded by James O'Shea, the managing editor of The Chicago Tribune, who will start Monday.

Mr. Baquet's departure follows that of the paper's publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson, who openly objected to cuts ordered by the Tribune Company in September and was fired last month. David Hiller, who succeeded Mr. Johnson as publisher, said in a statement yesterday that he had had discussions with Mr. Baquet about staffing levels. While the company maintained its position that further cuts might be necessary, Mr. Baquet still considered them excessive. "After considerable discussion during the past several weeks," Mr. Hiller said, "Dean and I concluded that we have significant differences on the future direction of The Times."

Colleagues of Mr. Baquet said the firing had less to do with a dispute over job cuts than his vocal resistance to them, made plain in a speech last month in New Orleans, in which he encouraged editors at other newspapers to "push back" against owners who wanted to cut newsroom staffs. In fact, when Mr. Hiller addressed the newsroom yesterday, he said he expected no job cuts, at least for the rest of the year, and he told editors it was still possible that any further cuts could be reached through attrition, according to people at the paper.

NBC's recent decision to mainly devote the first hour of its nightly prime time to low-cost "unscripted" shows is rattling TV scribes already alarmed by the shrinking number of network comedies requiring their services.

"It's absolutely more bad news for scripted television writers like me," said Tim O'Donnell, whose credits include "Clueless." "It just eliminates the shelf space available for networks to put on what I pitch." NBC has been under pressure from corporate parent General Electric Co. to reverse its profit slide and avoid a repeat of its fourth-place finish last season. NBC is relying on reality and game shows in its first prime-time hour as it faces escalating costs in scripted television.

But executives say they are responding to audiences' desires, stressing that they remain committed to scripted shows as evidenced by the hits "The Office" and "My Name Is Earl." "Viewers are voicing a preference for unscripted choices in the 8 p.m. hour, but that doesn't lessen NBC's commitment throughout the rest of prime time to the most ambitious and accomplished scripted programming on television," NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly said.

Still, NBC's move is especially disheartening for writers who recall the 8 o'clock hour as the launching pad for some of the industry's most successful and celebrated situation comedies, including NBC blockbusters "Friends" and "The Cosby Show." "It's a huge development," said Daniel Petrie Jr., former president of the Writers Guild of America, West. "It gives a sense of surrender on the part of one of the largest and most historical networks."

When I got to John Simpson and his band of lexicographers in Oxford earlier this fall, they were working on the P's. Pletzel, plish, pod person, point-and-shoot, polyamorous - these words were all new, one way or another. They had been plowing through the P's for two years but were almost done (except that they"ll never be done), and the Q's will be "just a twinkle of an eye," Simpson said. He prizes patience and the long view. A pale, soft-spoken man of middle height and profound intellect, he is chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and sees himself as a steward of tradition dating back a century and a half. "Basically it"s the same work as they used to do in the 19th century," he said. "When I started in 1976, we were still working very much on these index cards, everything was done on these index cards." He picked up a stack of 6-inch-by-4-inch slips and riffled through them. A thousand of these slips were sitting on his desk, and within a stone's throw were millions more, filling metal files and wooden boxes with the ink of two centuries, words, words, words.

*****

The English language, spoken by as many as two billion people in every country on earth, has entered a period of ferment, and this place may be the best observation platform available. The perspective here is both intimate and sweeping. In its early days, the O.E.D. found words almost exclusively in books; it was a record of the formal written language. No longer. The language upon which the lexicographers eavesdrop is larger, wilder and more amorphous; it is a great, swirling, expanding cloud of messaging and speech: newspapers, magazines, pamphlets; menus and business memos; Internet news groups and chat-room conversations; and television and radio broadcasts.

[W]hat makes the O.E.D. unique is a quality for which it can only strive: completeness. It wants every word, all the lingo: idioms and euphemisms, sacred or profane, dead or alive, the King's English or the street's. The O.E.D. is meant to be a perfect record, perfect repository, perfect mirror of the entire language.

They were the children of Hemingway and Faulkner and survivors of World War II: young, muscular writers who lived hard, worshipped the craft and believed that through the Great American Novel, they could capture the world. Norman Mailer. James Jones. Irwin Shaw. And William Styron.

"I guess it felt like an opportunity," Kurt Vonnegut told The Associated Press as he talked about his longtime friend, who died Wednesday at age 81. "There had been such grotesque injustice to be fought against the Nazis, and the Japanese, and afterward you really got the sense that we were the good guys."

Styron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose explorations of the darkest corners of the mind were charged by personal demons that nearly drove him to suicide, died in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. He had been in failing health for a long time.

Although often cited along with Vonnegut and Mailer as a leading writer of his generation, he produced little over the past 15 years. Styron was reportedly working on a military novel, yet published no full-length work of fiction after "Sophie's Choice," which came out in 1979.

"He had a lot of things wrong with him," Gore Vidal told the AP. "He had a bad ending."

Showing no let-up in its aggressive tone, the WGA West drew an estimated 900 members Wednesday morning to an enthusiastic "unity rally" at the Pan Pacific Park amphitheater followed by picketing outside CBS Studios in Hollywood. Although the current WGA film-TV contract doesn't expire for 13 months, WGA West president Patric Verrone promised that the rally was only the first of a string of such events.

"As we build up to the 2007 contract negotiations, this guild will be hosting more of these rallies, more meetings, more events," Verrone told the crowd. "We will be taking all sorts of actions as needed. Your support is vital." Event coincided with the season's launch of "America's Next Top Model" on the CW, part-owned by CBS. "Top Model" has been struck by its dozen writers for the past nine weeks over the netlet's refusal to grant the WGA jurisdiction. Despite the WGA's inability to organize a single reality show, Verrone insisted the guild's not wavering from its increased emphasis on organizing non-union work.

"The purpose of this morning's rally is to unite writers of various disciplines -- TV with features, fiction with nonfiction, live action with animation, daytime with latenight, new media with traditional markets," Verrone said. "And it is in that regard that I announce today the WGA doctrine for the 21st century -- that every piece of media with a moving image on the screen or a recorded human voice must have a writer. And every writer must have a WGA contract. For our friends in the press, that was the sound bite."

Loudest cheers during Verrone's speech came when he asked the crowd to recognize the striking writers from "America's Next Top Model." And he cited guild unity as the key factor in WGA advances -- from pension and health benefits and residuals to recent deals for "The Daily Show," "Lost," the vidgame version of "The Family Guy" and the Fox feature "Everybody's Hero." "When we win a contract for the writers of 'America's Next Top Model,' and for all the reality writers and editors who stand with us today, it will be because we are united," he added.

Dennis Publishing's Maxim magazine - known for cover photos of sexy women - will try to sizzle in another business. On Wednesday, it will announce the launch of a bar and steakhouse chain under the Maxim name.

In a partnership with Jeffrey Chodorow's China Grill Management, at least 15 Maxim Prime restaurants will open over five years, the first in spring.

The deal is part of the media company's strategy to bolster its bottom line through licensing the well-known brand name for other ventures. The men's magazine has also put its brand on shower curtains, furniture and a soon-to-be-built casino.

Maxim Prime will be designed to appeal to customers in their 20s and 30s, Dennis CEO Stephen Colvin says. The average age of the Maxim reader is 27.