On the first installment of this last season of the superlative HBO series The Wire, which aired Monday night, a miserable newsroom hack relegated to research at the declining Baltimore Sun confides to a co-worker that his dream is to hit the big time.

Meaning what, she inquires. The Post, he responds, or the Times.

He doesn’t mean LA.

To be a journalist in Los Angeles is to be made aware, sooner or later, of the second-class nature of this particular occupation in this particular place.

Here in LA we have no Bob Woodward, no David Halberstam, heck, for all she annoys me with her compulsive narcissism, not even a Maureen Dowd.

We are left to settle for the transplanted pugilism of Steve Lopez (who made his name on the East Coast) and the reactionary warblings of Caitlin Flanagan.

I worked at the LA Times in the mid-1990’s, well past the two-decade golden era of Otis Chandler (1960-1980) but close enough to be surrounded by acolytes running on its fumes.

I wrote for the Ventura County bureau of the paper, which existed, depending on whom you believed, either to stanch the hemorrhaging of precious Southern California ad revenue or to stoke the ego of Mr. Chandler, who made the county of citrus groves-turned shopping malls north of LA his home.

He was reputed to relish steering his beloved motorcycles down the hairpin turns from his house in the hills of Ojai to the Oxnard warehouse where he stored his collection of bikes.

Whatever the explanation for its existence, the Ventura County bureau put out its own section every day (for a time separate east and west county sections) and I spent my days scrounging for stories on tumbleweed abatement and traffic control to fill the gaping news hole.

When I moved to the San Fernando Valley-based Daily News, I found the lack of pretension refreshing but the devotion to the bottom line self-defeating. (On my first day I was made to sign a ledger for my allocation of two pens and a notebook. When I requested more I was told to come back when those ran out.)

After about a year I moved to the LA Weekly. As an “alternative” paper, the Weekly never had to face the pressure of competing head-on with the esteemed East Coast dailies. Instead, while Sue Horton was editor, writers could pick and choose, reporting and writing deeply on whatever they were passionate about.

It was during that time that Howard Blume developed his incomparable investigative expertise about the LA public school system, a knowledge that, years later, when he became a casualty of one of the paper’s ugly staff purges, led to a reporting job at the LA Times.

It was during those years that Erin Aubry Kaplan honed her considerable talent as an observer, thinker and writer on the intersections of race, the self, culture and politics.

And it was during those years that executive editor Harold Meyerson, through his Powerlines column, solidified his standing as the city’s leading political analyst.

Where do LA journalists go when their platform collapses? After a stint as an editor at the Jewish Journal, Blume eventually landed the LA Times job, and the paper’s education coverage is reaping the benefits of his work.

But the good news ends there. Erin Kaplan had a gig as a columnist on the Times’ op-ed page (the first African American woman to hold that position), but they nixed it without explanation last spring. Harold Meyerson decamped for the American Prospect and the Washington Post– no surprise, considering his appetite for politics in a town not known for its interest in such matters.

It’s disappointing that we (as in the collective “we” of journalists in Los Angeles) couldn’t muster the imagination to hold on to him.

Meyerson’s work appears now and again in the local press, most recently on the cover of the Sunday Opinion side of the LA Times' weekly flip-doll pull out (the upside-down-reverse being the Book Review).

Of course, the entire notion of old school, place-based journalism is a bit nostalgic in the era of blogs, the 24-hour news cycle and the bottom line-driven phenomenon known as Sam Zell. Still, when it comes to creating content based on original reporting, traditional media remains far ahead of the web.

Meyerson’s piece examines the upcoming County Supervisor race between State Senator and ex-city councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas and Councilman and ex-police chief Bernard C. Parks.

The piece is classic Meyerson: energetic analysis and information delivered in a clear and absorbing way that leaves you smarter about, more invested in and less cowed by this most unwieldy town.

With characteristic wit, Meyerson likens the election to that of a pope: “once in, they’re sitting pretty.” The piece reminds us that the whole supervisorial system, in which one person at the local government level somehow represents 2 million constituents, is incredibly bizarre, not to mention undemocratic.

"The five supervisors represent districts so vast, have campaign kitties so deep (coming in good part from companies having business with the county) and remain so consistently indistinct to voters that incumbents seldom face serious challengers," Meyerson writes. "Unlike popes, they're not actually expected to die in office, but they generally take their leave on their own terms."

As Meyerson observes, only two people have held the 2nd District post since 1952. Since then it’s changed from predominantly white to predominantly black to increasingly Latino. And here’s this race, between two leading African American pols, to see who will be the newly anointed one.

Meyerson boils it down to a fight between business (Parks) and labor (Ridley-Thomas) for the allegiance of L.A.’s black community.

Who knew?

It’s a story worth reading about a battle worth watching. And it’s a tantalizing tidbit of what we might be enjoying on a regular basis if we took ourselves seriously as a news town.