Over the weekend, there was a parting of the ways between The Times and former editor James O’Shea.

In a defiant speech delivered in the newsroom, O’Shea, 64, complained about what he called the “pervasive culture of defeat” manifested by repeated cutbacks in newsroom spending across the country. He attacked Tribune’s budgeting process for its reliance on “voodoo economics,” saying that “journalists and not accountants should seize responsibility for the financial health of our newspapers.

I don’t know much about the internal politics of the decision so I won’t even try to speculate. One thing that amazes me though is the way that other parts of the LA media got inside information so quickly.

• How is the L.A. Times like ‘The Wire’?
• Zell OK with change at LAT
• Editor Jim O’Shea Out at LA Times

I’m re-reading Douglas Rushkoff’s Get Back in the Box and finding it extremely more interesting and thought-provoking at the Times then when I was at EarthLink. The chapter I just finished was on social currency and it was mirrored some things that Hugh Macleod has been posting about social objects

Here’s Hugh’s definition of a social object:

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.

Now what I’m trying to figure out is how can a newspaper become that social object? And by newspaper, I don’t mean just the print edition, instead any piece of the content around the newspaper can be that social object. Any article written can be talked about around the water cooler, whether real or virtual. Any review of a restaurant, movie or a television show can be blogged about or sent via instant messaging causing more interactions to happen.

But this doesn’t happen automatically. You can’t talk about something that you can’t find or something that doesn’t stay around for longer than a couple of weeks. That’s the challenge for newspapers as I see it. I realize there are plenty of surrounding issues involved but to me, the most important one is getting folks to view the newspaper as that conversation piece, as the social object that brings people together and causes further conversations to happen.