LAist: A Little Too Full of "Theirself"

Monday, June 27, 2005, at 11:39AM

By Eric Richardson

I know, I beat LAist up a lot. But I swear it's just that "they" constantly give me a reason. Today the object of my ire is a piece on the LA Times' coverage of the slumping box office.

A story in the paper today which talks about the slump in box office for films in the USA and worldwide. The article blames the slump, in large part, on the poor quality product coming out of Hollywood. Too many sequels and other junk. Sounds familiar. Are we the first to say that most Hollywood films are not very good, especially lately? No. Have we been saying it recently and quite a bit? Yep. Does that mean the LA Times is reading LAist? Who knows?

Here's the thing: I'm pretty sure that everybody who's covered the "slump" has laid that out as a thing people are complaining about. In fact I bet you could go out on the street and poll people and come up with "poor quality product" as one of the top two answers. And I guarantee you that 99% of these people would have never heard of LAist.

Thirty seconds on technorati searching for box office slump found me plenty of month old entries blaming poor product. For instance, how about this one from 5/27:

As time goes on, Hollywood films get more and more inane, and as globalization continues, people are being exposed to films of a different, non-Hollywood nature. I think the public is beginning to get the idea that Hollywood sucks. It's time the movie industry adapted.

Or maybe this one from 5/12:

From other entertainment options to a lower quality of flicks to way too much Ashton Kutcher, all of the theories have been, well, theorized.

A month and a half later, LAist trys so desperately to hint that even though, yes, other people have mentioned the idea, the fact that the LA Times deemed fit to print it could just possibly mean that its reporters read LAist and found the not-so-unique idea there. Please, get off it. You're a group blog obsessed with the editorial 'we' that loves ads. Let that be enough.