At lesser papers, booted editors are quietly shown the way to the parking garage, accompanied by security guards, with at best a brief wave of the hand to the writers and editors they're leaving behind.

The L.A. Times is not your typical newspaper, and there booted editors are given to delivering exit speeches to the staff before leaving the building. The latest to do so was James O'Shea, who got sacked late last week after just 14 months on the job.

Like his predecessor, Dean Baquet, O'Shea got the boot for refusing to impose further cuts to the newsroom staff. But O'Shea was unlike Baquet in one important regard: He was a Tribune man, a loyalist brought in from Chicago by Times publisher David Hiller to make the cuts Baquet had refused to impose. O'Shea had already cut plenty as managing editor of the Chicago Tribune.

But the Tribune loyalist in time revolted as well. Friction between Hiller and O'Shea intensified in recent months, finally erupting when the editor point-blank refused to chop another $7 million from the Times newsroom budget.

In his farewell yesterday to the Times newsroom, O’Shea left no doubt about his reason for refusing further budget cuts or of his opinion of Tribune management over all.

"I disagree completely with the way that this company allocates resources to its newsrooms, not just here but at Tribune newspapers all around the country," he told reporters and editors. "The current system relies too heavily on voodoo economics and not enough on the creativity and resourcefulness of journalists."

O'Shea advanced what would seem a radical notion: "Journalists and not accountants should seize responsibility for the financial health of our newspapers so journalists can make decisions about the size of our staffs and how much news remains in our papers and web sites."

That statement is not nearly as radical as it might sound.

O'Shea points to several innovations at the Times on the editorial side that led to increased revenues, like the revamping of the Sunday magazine, which had been losing money, and beefing up the paper's web site, which has led to increased online revenues.

Increasingly papers around the country are making similar investments and seeing good returns from them, mostly notably The New York Times, which has been rolling out a string of new features on its web site.

The reality, as newspaper analysts have been warning for some time, is that papers can only cut so much before they cut into their own economic viability. And cuts alone will not revive profitability. That can only come from innovation, figuring new ways to connect with readers and deliver for advertisers.

That point where cuts no longer work may well have been reached at a number of newspapers around the county.

Indeed, in the ongoing shakeout, chains like Tribune are most at risk, run as they are by essentially accountants with fancy titles. Accountants, for all their good qualities, are not newspaper people, and they know little about how to build circulation and ad revenues. And as O'Shea suggests, their worst failing may be their ability to come up with innovative ways to improve editorial without spending buckets. That's a job for editors.

The challenge now facing the L.A. Times and Tribune management is finding a replacement for O'Shea who can be trusted not to balk as his or her predecessors did after only months on the job. Several top editors are in line for the job.

It doesn’t look that promising. Tribune has been endlessly embarrassed by its inability to wrestle the Times into line, and each failing weakens that control further.

Now there’s new management led by Sam Zell, the real estate mogul who acquired control of Tribune just a month ago. In the recent days, Zell has made clear who he’s siding with, and that’s publisher Hiller. While it’s the expected stance of a CEO, it leaves little wiggle room to begin working with the Times news operation. That promises more conflicts to come.