The Strange Tale of the LAT Reporter Who Didn’t Get Laid Off (But Left to Work For a Blog)

Tina Dupuy of our sister blog FishbowlLA has an interview with Richard Rushfield, who (get this) quit his job at the Los Angeles Times — not laid off, quit — to write for a blog.

OK, it isn’t just any blog, as Dupuy points out, but the popular Gawker. Rushfield is now Gawker’s West Coast editor. In this entertaining interview, Rushfield discusses his bold career move as well as his book, a memoir titled Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost.

You can read the entire interview at FishbowlLA, but here’s one snippet:

FBLA: So how is the switch from traditional media to new media?

RR: Ah yes. The switch is invigorating. This is where the conversation is.

FBLA: New media is where the conversation is?

RR: There were so many times when you’d write a wonderful article for the LATimes, or break some news and it would just be met by the sound of crickets. When you are at the LAT you’re at a place where even the website isn’t in the central flow of the nation’s cultural conversation. But at Gawker one is very much in and a part of that conversation and as one who is writing, in part at least to communicate, that’s where you want to be.

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