Via Romenesko, the LAist interviews a former LA Times reporter who left for an alt weekly after he got tired of writing for “middle-aged, middle-class white registered Democrat homeowner[s]“:

I owe The Times lots. They taught me so much. They gave me freedom and room to work, and pushed me to push myself. Everyday the people there amazed me, their talent and drive. But The Times has a very clear, very rigid tradition on how to report the news.
Shortly after I got there, I started having these long, tortured thought sessions with myself about my participation in the MSM. I saw how the people and places the paper chose to cover were automatically political decisions because for every thing you chose to cover there is something you chose to not cover. I started realizing that the mainstream style on reporting the news that most papers employ is not really concerned with depicting the truth, but concerned primarily with balancing lots of competing agendas and offending the least amount of interests as possible.
I saw how so much was looked at from certain assumptions and subtexts, and a very narrow cultural view. When I raised questions about such things, I was told we were writing for a “mainstream reader,” which I quickly figured out is basically a euphemism for a middle-aged, middle-class white registered Democrat homeowner in the Valley. From where I stand today, I had very little in common with this “mainstream reader” and I didn’t care to be in this person’s service. I wanted to talk across to people, not up or down to people. I had to get out. So I thought, why not experiment? Try different forms? Laurie Ochoa and the editors at the LA Weekly said, ‘Go ahead, abandon rote objectivity and embrace the subjective lens through which we all see the world—Just report it all out.’ It was ON.

This reminded me of a column Mary Katherine Ham wrote a few months ago about her decision to leave mainstream journalism for similar reasons. Although Hernandez and Ham come from different sides of the political spectrum, both rejected the rigid worldview of the MSM in order to explore other forms of journalism. The MSM is either going to have to adapt or get used to losing its most creative people.