Seattle cartoonist rails on Zell

David Horsey, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial cartoonist, takes on Zell —"the most vulgar embodiment of a pervasive bean counter mentality that is threatening the best of American journalism" — with a cartoon and on his blog.

What does Zell know about journalism? No more than any other billionaire real estate mogul. But that hasn't stopped him from telling off journalists at some of the country's best newspapers -- the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Hartford Courant, the Baltimore Sun and, finest of all, the Los Angeles Times. Zell has told these new employees of his that they are practitioners of an arrogant kind of journalism that doesn't give readers what they want and fails to make increasing company profits a key objective of news gathering.

Also: At another tour stop at Tribune's Washington bureau, Zell rattled reporters from four of its biggest dailies when he told them the bureau was overstaffed, the structure "unsupportable " and its "bloated" size is "unequivocally economically unjustifiable." More at Chicago Tribune