If you put John Johnson Jr. in the search box at this site it will lead you to the more than 80 times that his byline and his stories have been cited here. Not for much longer, at least not at the LA Times. He’s on the latest lay off list.

After receiving a tip from another staffer at the Times, I asked Johnson about it. He replied, in part, “The separation agreement forbids me from disparaging the company, which I would be uninclined to do anyway, since the Times paid me well for a long time and allowed me to range from Big Sur to Baghdad to Geneva in pursuit of stories. I do think it’s unfortunate that science continues to be whittled away at newspapers across the country. I went to a physics conference last year in St. Louis and I think I was the only daily newspaper journalist there. At AGU conventions niche publications rule the day. There are very fine science websites out there, but I still tend to feel that newspapers — whether in print or on Kindle or some other form — drive the national conversation, whether the topic is politics or the new European collider.”

Our best wishes to Johnson, whose copy is always clean. His departure is also a blow to the LA Times readership. He has been covering space and astronomy mostly, at least during the tenure of the  ksjtracker. Such stories tend to provide the sort of good-news tonic that science journalism does better than most beats, countering the usual run of crime, catastrophe, corruption, and celebrity canoodling that takes up so much of our time. He wrote largely of smart people using impressive tools to expand the sphere of human knowledge just a bit, generally delivered with a good sprinkling of implicit amazement.

Pic source laist blog More Layoffs at the LA Times;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 3:13 pm and is filed under About Journalism, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.