The Los Angeles Times is a gutsy newspaper. In mid-June, it experimented with a website feature that allowed readers to rewrite the newspaper’s editorials.
Its first foray was a Friday editorial about American troop withdrawal from Iraq. Readers were asked to add their comments and many did.
Said the paper in that same Friday’s print edition, in which it explained the experiment, “the result is a constantly evolving collaboration among readers in a communal search for truth. Or that’s the theory.”
Alas, the search for truth took an awkward turn when foul language and pornographic videos overwhelmed intelligent discourse. The Times took the feature off line after only three days and it is reviewing the experiment.
Read Also

Crop insurance’s ability to help producers has its limitations
Farmers enrolled in crop insurance can do just as well financially when they have a horrible crop or no crop at all, compared to when they have a below average crop
Would there be many takers on an offer to rewrite Western Producer editorials? Healthy participation in the Open Forum section suggests the strong possibility. But would such an offer degenerate into profanity and pornography?
Not from our readers, we hasten to assert, but the worldwide web is a wondrous and sometimes wayward place where lack of governance is a risk as well as an appeal.
While we’re thinking about it, we’ll keep publishing as many opinions as we can in the Open Forum, available for all to see. That’s a true beauty of print – solid stuff readers can hold in their hands, compared to the comparatively fleeting media of websites and television.
And in other media news, an article in the June 12 edition of The New York Times Magazine makes us print journalists even happier to remain in the ink-stained ranks rather than the realms of television’s talking heads. In that issue, contributing writer Clive Thompson talks about the unintended consequences of high-definition television, which magnifies every detail, including the smallest facial flaws.
As Thompson explains it, new high-definition TVs can display two million pixels, nearly 10 times the number on regular televisions. Ordinary pores look like moon craters, he says. Normally insignificant facial marks “stand out like a third eye.” The artifice of makeup is more obvious and even the tiny seams from plastic surgery “look Frankensteinian at such high resolution.”
What journalist needs that kind of close-up? Will the visages of Lloyd Robertson and Peter Mansbridge look as imposing and trustworthy under HD TV? Time and technology will reveal all.
Considering that kind of potential scrutiny, those of us here in the WP newsroom are just as happy to appear only as bylines and the occasional small mugshot. That way our ordinary pores and insignificant facial marks don’t get in the way of the message.