Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Michael Kinsley is leaving the newspaper after a little more than a year, saying his attempts to alter the nature of opinion journalism and buff up its profile on the Internet mostly failed.
Times Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson announced Kinsley's departure Tuesday and said the onetime host of television's "Crossfire" has been replaced by Andres Martinez, his top assistant. Martinez, a former finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is the first Latino to head the paper's editorial and opinion pages.
The press release announcing the change said Kinsley was "resigning," but the outgoing editor painted a less-than-amicable parting in an e-mail to his staff Tuesday morning.
"For whatever reason," Kinsley wrote, "Jeff isn't merely uninterested in any future contribution I might make, but actively wants me gone."
Johnson was traveling to Chicago and his secretary said he did not want to expand on the company's official announcement, in which he said he had "concluded that it was best to make a clean break" with Kinsley.
Kinsley spent 14 tumultuous months at The Times, during which he proposed eliminating non-byline staff editorials, forced out some of the newspaper's most veteran editorial writers and tried to enhance the Times' opinion offerings in alternative media, including the Internet.
He also became a magnet for criticism from conservative commentators such as Bill O'Reilly, who routinely charged that Kinsley epitomized liberal bias in the mainstream media.
The 54-year-old editor's reputation within the paper was mixed. He won praise for sharpening the focus of editorials and eschewing a single orthodoxy. But he alienated much of his own staff through his personnel moves and an apparent preoccupation with international and national affairs at the expense of local issues.
Kinsley's innovations included full-page color cartoon strips on the cover of the Sunday Opinion section, recently redesigned and renamed Current. An attempt to let readers rewrite an editorial on the Internet, a so-called "Wikitorial," had to be killed when online vandals posted expletives on The Times website.
"He was trying to remake the editorial pages and the Sunday section, to make them more engaging. I think he was trying for a younger demographic," said Bill Boyarsky, a lecturer at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and former city editor of The Times. "The idea of trying to change things was good. But what he did and the way it turned out was bad."
