For those of you not following the publishing biz, one of the biggest shake-ups in the industry is happening over at the LA Times. The “City of Angels” is in a heaven-and-hell-like war between the old ways, the news ways, quality, quantity, money and morality. A lot of the bashing, on the part of the editorial staff and writers, is focused on a man named Sam Zell. As I understand it, Zell was quite the innovator and entrepreneur in real estate, but in newspapers, he’s been labeled as quite the opposite.

The latest bruise that he’s been accused of is in planning to cut down all content in the LA Times by about 500 pages. His end goal is to publish a periodical that is half advertisements and half stories. He also, apparently, plans to slash staffers even more. The logic behind the cut: His research shows that staffers at local newspapers write 300 pages a year compared to staffers at the LA Times, who only write 51. Apparently, he can cut the staff by more than a handful of writers and editors without harming the quantity or quality of the product.

I hope your mouths are agape because seriously?! An anonymous LA Times staffer at TellZell.com (a blog detailing the downfall of a city’s great award-winning newspaper) has written a very good rebuttal to those “facts.”

A snippet:

“I caveat with the weasel word “appears” because Michaels [one of Zell and co.] used a strange formulation. He said that the average journalist in LA “does about 51 pages a year. But the average journalist in Hartford or Baltimore does over 300 pages a year.”

The first question to ask Michaels is to define his terms of battle. What the hell is a “page”? I have a hard time even guessing. A blank newspaper page has about 120 column inches. It seems unlikely that any journalist, anywhere is filling up 51 entire newspaper pages per year, much less 300. Nor does it seem likely to be an HTML page. That’s not really a measurement of news content, but web production.”

If you want a less impassioned take on this struggle for the very definition and future of journalism in Los Angeles, take a look at LA Observed, which links out, posts memos, and keeps the active L.A.ian citizen abreast of how their paper is falling apart.

For a writer, editor and/or lover of knowledge, the whole business is very, very bleak indeed.