The New Los Angeles Times
In a city that hypes itself as the Entertainment Capital of the World, it was somehow fitting that a live soap was being performed not far from Hollywood’s backlots — at the Los Angeles Times. For a decade, the venerable newspaper had been rattled by one crisis or another, among them: a nasty recession, a riot, a major earthquake, wildly shifting demographics and, to add a bizarre twist — a ceo and a publisher who, combined, knew less about journalism than a summer intern. This led to the appalling Staples Affair, a sort of journalistic Black Sox Scandal in which the publisher, Kathryn Downing, basically sold out the paper’s journalistic integrity. The troops began to flee. “It was like the place was burning down and people were on the ledges ready to jump,” says an executive at The New York Times about the wave of résumés that flooded in.
So when rumors whipsawed through the newsroom on that Friday afternoon in March 2000, many of the battle-weary shrugged them off. A merger with the Chicago Tribune? Impossible. Leo Wolinsky, then the Times’s executive editor, says, “There were provisions in the Chandler family trust that forbade the family from selling the Times Mirror Company piecemeal, or selling it whole for twenty or thirty more years.”
That night the Times staff got all dressed up and headed over
to the Beverly Hills Hotel for its annual dinner to give itself
awards. En route, Michael Parks, the paper’s editor, remarked
to Wolinsky: “I’m sure you’ve been hearing all
these rumors about the Tribune.” And he added: “Well,
I can’t comment.”
Taking his cue, Wolinsky asked the media writer David Shaw to
check out the rumors. “The last thing we needed,”
Shaw says, “was to be scooped on our own story.”
On Saturday, March 11, Shaw tried to see Times Mirror’s chairman and ceo, Mark Willes, only to find his door locked. Finally, at 11 p.m. Sunday, Shaw got confirmation from Willes, and the headline TIMES MIRROR AGREES TO MERGER WITH TRIBUNE CO. appeared on page one the next morning.
Thus began the next chapter in the story of the newspaper that had dominated southern California for 118 years, indeed had shaped its very landscape and, for much of the twentieth century, its political leadership as well. Still, it is a newspaper, so not everyone who worked for it was thrilled.
John P. Puerner, a longtime Tribune Company executive, and one of those prowling the sixth floor trying to make the merger happen, became the Times’s new publisher, president and ceo. He knew exactly whom he wanted to run the paper: John S. Carroll, the deceptively folksy, imaginative editor of the Baltimore Sun. By April, he had his man.
“I figured this is gonna be great,” recalls Carroll, sixty, as he sits in his remodeled office off the third-floor newsroom. “They’re going to announce this thing, but they’re not going to be able to take it over for a few months so I’ll take my boat down the Chesapeake and knock around for a month.” It turned out, however, Tribune did have enough legal control to fire up its new regime right away. “I didn’t get a day off,” Carroll says.
Critics of the Times could have handed Carroll a litany of what was wrong with the paper. Many stories were bloated and unfocused. The Metro section contained little actual metro news. Pieces about the mayor, the city council, and the governor appeared so infrequently one wondered if anyone ran the city at all. Political correctness often trumped objectivity. Articles out of Washington and foreign capitals, though filled with first-rate reporting, often were presented in a way that precluded any reason to read them. Even the manner in which the paper was thrown together — sections tucked into sections tucked into sections — taxed the patience of the most devout reader.
Also muddled were the three Calendar sections — the daily one, the Thursday tabloid, and the Sunday one — overseen by three editors who didn’t communicate. The Sunday magazine was like a teenager, not knowing from one week to the next what it wanted to grow up to be.
In many ways, the Times was like the city it served — vast, unconnected to itself, and with a sensibility that outsiders, including a string of editors brought in from the east, found baffling. The paper seemed to revel in its quirkiness, sticking to its own ideas of what a story was. Often this was determined by a story’s tie to Southern California. Whether because of distances, time zones, or a westerner’s inbred sense of independence, Angelenos have traditionally shown little interest in much beyond their backyards. Or, in the case of the movie industry, beyond its cloistered backlots. The Los Angeles Times reflected this.
One writer recalls doing a story for the magazine about George Gershwin as a painter. His editor phoned and said, “Could you keep it to just paintings he did of California? Or Los Angeles? This isn’t a national magazine.”
In time, the paper became less quirky journalistically and more eccentric at the top. Until the top finally toppled.
Even now, two and a half years after The Staples Affair, the very idea that a respectable paper would publish an entire Sunday magazine devoted to the city’s new sports arena — and split the advertising profits with that arena — still mortifies the staff. “I should have seen it coming,” Wolinsky says. “Mark Willes didn’t have a newspaper background but he was very charismatic. He seemed to say all the right things.”
Nowhere in his résumé was there a kernel of journalism; he was a cereal man and good at it.
Wolinsky and others grew more leery. “Mark and I had a discussion once about editorial independence,” Wolinksy recalls. “Mark said, ‘Why do you need editorial independence?’ I said, for credibility. If people think we were bought off by our advertisers, nobody’s gonna believe the information we have in the paper. He said, ‘So the issue is not independence, it’s credibility.’ I said, but you need the independence to get the credibility.
“As time went on Mark became more intemperate,” Wolinsky adds. “He would have meetings and be upset because things he said would get published in other newspapers. He said he’d never worked at a place where stuff leaked out. And I’m thinking, it’s a newspaper, hello. Just his lack of understanding of how this place operated was stunning to me.”
Willes’s intentions weren’t bad, merely naïve or sorely misplaced. Wanting to broaden the paper’s appeal, for example, he urged reporters to quote more women and minorities; editors’ compensation would be tied to the results. Sick humor coursed through the newsroom — would you, for example, get “double points” for quoting a Hispanic woman?
Soon, more precursors of doom were loosed. In 1997, Willes decreed himself publisher. Advertising, circulation, and marketing executives joined the newsroom exodus. The death-row feel of the place intensified in June 1999, when Willes, just as abruptly, undecreed himself publisher and installed his protégé, Kathryn Downing, who was working in the Times Mirror legal publishing division, and who had not even a snap, crackle, or pop of newspaper background.
It was Downing who signed the ad deal with the Staples Center. Though various editors had an inkling that something odd was afoot, not one intervened to stop it. In David Shaw’s exhaustive 30,000-word Watergate-style post mortem, which filled a fourteen-page Times supplement, those who had circled the time bomb all pleaded not guilty. Nobody, it seemed, knew when they knew what they knew.
Six months later, in walked Carroll, tall, dignified, assured, with calm blue eyes that missed nothing. “I fully expected that I’d spend my first six months pulling people down from the ceiling and just settling things down,” he says of the dispirited staff. “But within a week, I realized the journalists here were just like those I’d always known. If they felt a good-faith effort was being made to move the paper forward in a sound journalistic way, they would go to the ends of the earth to support that.”
It should be noted here, for nearly everyone on the staff would insist on it, that for all the plagues visited upon the paper in that dispiriting decade, and despite some inherent flaws, the Times did not suddenly leap from a French judge’s four to a Canadian judge’s six. The paper had, after all, won seven Pulitzers in the nineties (and twenty-five overall) and could legitimately count itself, along with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, one of the nation’s most respected newspapers. “I would be hugely embarrassed,” Carroll says, “if I gave the impression that the paper began two years ago. When I arrived here, there wasn’t a day when there wasn’t something in it that was eye-poppingly good.”
Or ripe for a major overhaul. The L.A. Times may have fared well in a national pennant race, but The New York Times, like the Yankees, had a dynasty going. “They’ve been the great paper for a hundred years,” David Shaw says. “We, forty with an asterisk.”
Yet given the tremendous resources of the Times and the attractiveness of its market, shouldn’t the paper be better? More critically, how could it shape and redefine itself to serve a geographical area bigger than some states with a fast-changing demographic that spoke more than ninety languages? Former mayor Richard Riordan sees the Times treating the city “like it was a bad adopted child.” His solution is to start a competitive paper.
Meanwhile, Carroll & Co. waded into revamping a newspaper with ten feature sections, four regional editions, a national edition, twenty-three foreign bureaus, eleven domestic bureaus, ten more in California, plus the headquarters downtown, and more than 1,000 journalists — a colossal endeavor. “It’s like trying to move a tanker,” says Stephen Randall, the Los Angeles-based executive editor of Playboy and a lecturer at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. “You need 4,000 tug boats just to turn it one-eighth of a degree.” Says the Washington bureau chief, Doyle McManus, “It’s like fixing the U.S. government. Starting with the State Department. I think John underestimated the amount of work he had ahead of him.”
As he did when he took over the Baltimore Sun, Carroll started with his infrastructure, working to get the right editing team in place. “You’ve got to build the instrument,” he says, “before you can spend the whole day playing it.”
With his first hire, Carroll symbolically threw down the gauntlet by stealing a New York Times favorite son, Dean Baquet, the highly respected national editor who has a passion for investigative reporting. Then Carroll captured a New York Times associate managing editor, John Montorio, to be deputy managing editor in charge of features. Montorio in turn hired two more from the Times: Rick Flaste as features editor and Michalene Busico as food editor. Carroll also landed Kevin Sack from The New York Times Atlanta bureau to be a national investigative reporter. After a decade that saw the L.A. Times lose more than thirty people to The New York Times — or as the Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz puts it, “The New York Times used the L.A. Times like a farm team” — the bleeding had finally stopped.
There were other hires, notably Miriam Pawel, Newsday’s assistant managing editor, to take over the conflicted Metro section, plus Marc Duvoisin from The Philadelphia Inquirer, to serve as a sort of varsity writing coach.
And so the die was cast. “Real journalists were coming,” says one longtime staff member. “This, after a publisher who promised she would take journalism classes.” But as the newsroom began to exhale, skeptics questioned whether the new top generals, easterners all, could replant themselves in Paradise and “get” the locale’s subtle nuances.
Meanwhile, wary eyes tracked Carroll and Baquet, noting every person who entered their offices — and how long each one stayed.
Carroll attended few meetings, rarely read memos, and refused to waste time gladhanding civic leaders. “There’s a myth these days that an editor has to be something of a community leader,” Carroll says. “I don’t buy it.” Rather, his lengthening to-do list broke into two parts — first, and most crucial, creating a distinct identity for the paper. “We’re not a colony of the East Coast here,” he says. “This is the fifth-largest economy in the world. This is a great experiment. Why should Los Angeles have an East Coast newspaper? It’s a feast here and we’re not partaking yet.”
But what, exactly, this new “identity” would be remained elusive. One strategic move to redefine the paper: getting rid of the fourteen weekly Our Times supplements, which Willes had begun in an attempt to cover neighborhoods. They were financial and journalistic failures. “I want to be the big metro paper that gives the very best coverage to the most important, biggest, and most-difficult-to-cover stories,” Carroll says. “We want to put all of our eggs in that basket, not just some of them.”
The second part of the to-do list — improving nuts-and-bolts coverage — was easier to attack. Topping Carroll’s list were the A and B sections. He wanted the front page to carry one story that readers would not expect, preferably pulled from another section of the paper. He added two pages to the A section by shifting the state news, which started on page three, into Section B, Metro. But Metro was a mess, as untamed and meandering as the city’s geography. It came in four regional editions — Los Angeles, Orange County, Ventura and the San Fernando Valley, and several subzones — and it reflected each region’s sensibility and the regional editor’s whims.
“The Ventura zone would list every pot luck dinner because that’s what the Ventura Star did,” Baquet says. The Orange County edition could hog as many pages as it wanted and was the fattest; the L.A. edition the skimpiest. “Sometimes it was only six pages,” says Carroll. “Three of those pages were claimed by editorial, op-ed, and weather. So you had a metropolitan area of eighteen million people and we were giving them three pages of regional news.”
The drain on resources could be comic. If a reporter in L.A. wrote a story on why school children carried heavy backpacks, the Ventura bureau would assign a reporter to plug in similar quotes from local kids, and a photographer shot a new picture. The Valley edition sent its reporters to city hall to cover the San Fernando Valley’s determined effort to secede from Los Angeles — an obvious concern to Los Angeles, but a story the L.A. edition often did not report. Or reported differently. None of the four B sections even looked as though it belonged to the same paper. “Some resembled a Gannett paper with short items and lots of graphics and flash,” says Carroll. “The editors heeded the voices of people in the community who insisted there be nothing in that section but news pertaining to their community. In Ventura, we literally blew up mug shots of dogs to fill the space. Anything to squeeze L.A. news out of the section.”
Enter Miriam Pawel. A slim brunette with a soft voice and a shy
manner, Pawel collected degrees from Harvard and Columbia before
joining Newsday. In 1996, she oversaw the paper’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800. Her limp
handshake belies nerves of steel. A native New Yorker who lived
on Manhattan’s west side and commuted to Long Island every
day, Pawel hit Southern California in fifth gear without missing
an exit ramp.
What she discovered in Metro was a section that, among other things,
had no police beat reporter or anyone assigned to LAX or the courts.
One transportation writer covered the state. “Part of the
mission was a return to stressing beats,” Pawel says, “which
had been very ignored and really looked down on.”
Granted, there had been little space to run such stories. But publisher Puerner found a way to add pages. He reallocated the newshole, shifting pages so that the net effect was to add to the L.A. edition, and got rid of some of the subzones. Finally, Metro got a new name, California, and was redesigned to look the same in all four regions.
Now the section carries regular stories about such things as the mayor, the recently ousted police chief, the governor’s race, and the Valley’s latest secession moves. More transportation writers have been added; a full-time reporter covers LAX. Moreover, despite the city’s lack of connection to its many parts, Steve Lopez, a columnist who had previously written for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Time, seems to find a common sensibility that eluded columnists in the past.
“We were looking for more creative definitions of beats as opposed to “the west side,” Pawel says. “Some things that struck me as important to defining life here we weren’t covering. Like the coast. That’s now a beat. It combines hard-edged investigative pieces about land use with stories about diving for abalone. Also, this is a place where people live in their cars and it has tremendous possibilities for producing a range of stories. So now we have a weekly column called ‘Behind the Wheel.’”
Along with her Pulitzer, Pawel arrived with a backstory. In 1997 she stirred the newsroom by sending a pig’s head from a staff party to a Newsday columnist who had been critical of a Pawel-led investigative report on special education. (Apologies followed.) “I’d rather not talk about that,” Pawel says.
Soon after he arrived, Carroll began a tour of the Times bureaus. A former correspondent in Vietnam, the Middle East, and at the White House, he particularly favored investigative reporting, as Doyle McManus learned on Carroll’s maiden visit. The Washington bureau had four investigative reporters. “After some pleasantries over lunch,” McManus recalls, “John leaned across the table, looked deeply into my eyes, and said, ‘I’d like to double that. Can we do it?’”
After McManus recovered from it all, Carroll asked what projects the bureau was undertaking. McManus said David Willman was looking into how unsafe drugs had won approval from the Food and Drug Administration. “When he’s ready,” Carroll said, “I want to edit it.” McManus assumed Carroll would be too busy to bother.
So did Roger Smith, the column one editor in Los Angeles, when Carroll again raised the subject in September. In October, Willman arrived in L.A. armed with a first draft and found Carroll, Baquet, national editor Scott Kraft, and Smith awaiting him. “John read the piece and said he thought we needed to restructure it,” Smith remembers. “He gave a clear set of instructions.” Weeks later, Carroll read the revised first ten grafs and offered another critique. “My experience is that at this point an editor is basically done,” Smith says. “But John must have gone over the first ten grafs a dozen times. ‘We’re getting closer,’ he’d say each time. It was like looking through the lens of a camera, positioned high up, shooting down on a fisherman. The camera goes lower and lower until at last you’re looking at the pores on the fisherman’s hand. John wrote the headline, the subheads, and the captions. Really, he was the impresario.”
Four months later, Willman’s story won the Pulitzer for
investigative reporting.
Meanwhile, newsroom eyes continued to monitor Carroll’s
office. A protocol was gleaned. If Carroll asked you to have a
seat on the other side of his desk, the meeting would be brief.
And possibly not pleasant. If you were asked to sit at the round
table, the conversation ran longer. If, however, a reporter was
asked to sit on the couch — well! A star was surely on the
rise.
Shortly after his trip to Washington, it struck Carroll that the Democratic national convention was coming to town and with it, the national press corps. “Our reputation had taken some hits and it suddenly occurred to me that the whole journalistic and half the political world was coming, and it would be best if we put out some decent papers,” Carroll says. He ordered a special convention section to run each day and asked all department heads for a seven-day plan of “great coverage.”
Bret Israel, then editor of the Southern California Living section (and now senior editor of the three Calendar sections) recalls, “John really wanted to make the paper sing.” He began thinking up ideas. Among the pieces that ran: Sex and the Democratic Party, in which prostitutes were asked if they were excited about the convention coming to town; a story about marriage mills on Broadway that had turned into divorce mills; and the culture of food on television.
But the biggest story that third week in August took place far from Los Angeles: the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk. Remembers Israel: “At the news meetings, John was on the edge of his chair. He kept wanting to send more people.”
Carroll also wanted a story that no one else would have. The solution: a piece describing how it felt to be trapped in a sunken sub. William Tuohy, a retired Times correspondent who had won a Pulitzer in Vietnam, was researching a book on submarine warfare. Reached in London, Tuohy shared the names of several surviving U.S. Navy men who had been trapped in subs during World War II. The resulting page-one column, according to Carroll, “Almost made you feel you were suffocating just reading it.”
In September 2000, Baquet arrived, ebullient, armed with a sly humor, a trunkload of ideas, and a mission to craft the paper’s identity. A year and a half later, he still seems giddy at the prospects or, as one person puts it, “like he’s been given a new Ferrari.” (In truth, all the East Coast transplants appear indecently cheerful for journalists, perhaps afflicted by Palm Fever, or Born Again LaLa Landism). Dapper and with small wire-rim glasses, Baquet, forty-five, shared (with two others) a Pulitzer for investigative reporting at the Chicago Tribune for a story on corruption in the Chicago city council.
According to his check list, “We’ve got to be the best paper in the country covering Mexico and all of Latin America. We’ve got to be the best covering Asia. And entertainment. I want the people who care about Disney to view it not as something the paper covers because Disneyland is here. I want them to read about Disney because I’m going to tell them what’s happening with the markets in New York and how that affects their lives. We’re adding a reporter in Washington to cover entertainment.” A pause. “We also want to gear the paper as a paper of the West.”
He looks up as Carroll walks in. “I played basketball this morning with [deputy editor Bob] Baker,” Baquet says. “He’s got a great outside shot and I’m in pain.” He laughs. Carroll admits he has yet to explore the company gym and wanders out.
At The New York Times, Baquet was viewed as a man on the fast track, possibly headed to the top. In Los Angeles, he has been given more than a usual m.e.’s responsibilities and it’s widely speculated he will, in time, succeed Carroll. “Dean has a wonderful management style,” says former colleague Bill Schmidt, an associate managing editor of The New York Times. “He’s really good at getting people on his side with his enthusiasm and passion. I’ve heard him on the phone drawing reporters out. He’s not a budget guy or a detail person. He’s more interested in the big picture.”
One piece of Baquet’s big picture is to cross the moat and climb the wall that Hollywood has constructed around itself to keep reporters out. “Theoretically, I could call our Washington bureau and ask them to demand a copy of the federal budget,” Baquet says. “But I can’t get Disney to prove to our satisfaction that Pearl Harbor was a financial success.” He says he had lunch with Disney’s ceo, Michael Eisner, “and I said why not show us the books if it was a success? But we haven’t heard from them. Still, it’s not like trying to cover Howard Hughes.”
Before he became national editor of The New York Times, Baquet
wrote investigative pieces out of Washington and is still stuck
in the habit. “I must hear from him six times a day,”
says McManus. “It’s bad enough when a managing editor
has a lot of bad ideas. It’s insufferable when he has a
lot of good ones. And Dean has more good ideas than we have people
to carry them out.”
Baquet also oversees the paper’s coverage of the war, directing,
at any one time, six reporters in and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“We have a project under way,” he says, mysteriously.
“Uh, you’re trying to find bin Laden?”
“Yes!” Baquet laughs. “We’ll capture him like the old Front Page days.”
But asked about his game plan for what Mark Willes dubbed “The newspaper of the capital of the twenty-first century,” Baquet, too, is at a loss. “I wish I had one,” he says.
Meanwhile, newsroom paranoia and relief continue along parallel tracks. “The new people approached us like we were tainted goods,” complains a reporter for the California section. “Someone heard Dean say we were all just chess pieces.”
“With the new people, there’s no small talk, no eye contact,” adds a veteran reporter. “Miriam is clear in her thinking. She doesn’t mince words.” A pause. “She was heard shouting at a reporter who was late on a deadline.”
“The paper is better managed, better edited, but don’t think this is a well-oiled machine,” warns one editor darkly. “It’s still the L.A. Times.”
“The Times is like China,” says another staff member. “It goes through great periods of welcoming outside influences, and great periods of shutting them out. The new regime has brought a refreshing new openness, a symbol of what is possible. I hope.”
“These people do everything by e-mail,” grumbles another.
“Really,” declares a reporter, “I don’t
see how the paper’s improved at all.”
Downstairs on the second floor, John Montorio looks out from his
glassed-in office at the 200 people (including support staff)
he must marshal into the paper’s ten feature sections. Stylish
as a GQ cover subject, and prone to fits of laughter, Montorio
is asked if he has a game plan.
“People keep saying they can’t wait to see my plan,” he says. “Actually, I don’t have a plan.” He giggles. “But I told John and Dean that I did.”
Montorio arrived last August to fill a job that had been vacant for two years and, excluding the weeks after September 11 when the entire paper was mobilized, spent much of his time talking to his staff and trying to make sense of the place. “What I found was that the features department was like a bunch of parallel universes,” he says. “There were sections — universes — that were hardly aware that life existed on other planets. So first, I had to make everyone in the features realm feel like their planets were in the same galaxy. What’s remarkable is that for two years, virtually on their own, with little oversight and direction, they were putting out a high-quality product.”
As Montorio patrolled the terrain, he decided that food-slash-entertaining was not being given a high enough priority, given Angelenos’ propensity to entertain at home. Hollywood coverage he found “a little press-release driven and faux-event driven. We’re trying to change that. We should own arts and entertainment coverage the way The Wall Street Journal has a lock on Wall Street.” As for the magazine, the paper’s step-child, Montorio says, “It doesn’t have a focus right now. I don’t think we can compete head-on with The New York Times. That’s a hell of a product. But we’re not published on Forty-third Street, we’re published on Second Street in Los Angeles and the magazine should reflect that. It has to be more L.A.-centric.”
By mid-March, Montorio and his deputy, Rick Flaste, at last handed Carroll a long-range plan. “We’re talking major overhaul, not fine-tuning,” Carroll says. “We may drop some sections, add others. One thing we will do is carry a lot more stories about three areas that define L.A. That’s popular entertainment, life-style, and outdoors. We’re hoping to start the process with two or three sections this year.”
As the new regime passes its two-year mark, there’s no question the paper is improved. The front page, the California section, Business, Southern California Living, even the weekly Health section increasingly contain stories that catch the eye. Washington and foreign coverage remain first-rate. Last summer, stories appeared exploring Bin Laden’s terrorist network. In any given week the Washington bureau breaks as many stories as The New York Times. Starting with a an eight-page extra that hit the streets at 2 p.m. on September 11, L.A. Times coverage of the attack on America didn’t lag that of The New York Times by much. So it must have been dispiriting when it was learned in March that The New York Times had an unprecedented twelve Pulitzer finalists — two for foreign reporting by ex-L.A. Timesmen Barry Bearak and Dexter Filkins — while the L.A. Times received only two. (Both L.A. Times entries won, making the Pulitzer count twenty-seven. So did Bearak and six other N.Y. Times candidates.)
Even Rick Barrs, the mordant editor of New Times, the L.A. alternative weekly that has made sport of skewering the Times, admits, “It’s better than it was. John Carroll and Dean Baquet are really good. But they still don’t make sense of the city. Steve Lopez is a feature columnist. What they need is a bomb thrower. Like Royko.”
Indeed, making sense of the city will prove the biggest challenge. There have been important tactical changes. To cover the sprawl of Los Angeles, the editors have borrowed the model used by The New York Times — emphasis on the city core. The problem is, there isn’t one. Even the mayor, according to the confounding city charter, is really only a bit player in the scheme of things. Meanwhile, the quest for an overall blueprint, the “identity” thing, continues: how to make the L.A. Times reflect a city — one with subtleties best understood by the natives. But even they seem unable to describe what they are.
Over on the re-separated business side, morale is also improved, although the financial picture is murky. For the six months ending September 30, 2001, the last available ABC reporting period, the weekly circulation average fell 4.9 percent, dropping to 972,957. Puerner attributes this to a price increase for the daily paper from twenty-five to fifty cents. “We need quality circulation, not raw numbers,” he says. Ad linage dropped last year, as it did for most publications. The Tribune Company does not publicly break down revenues for each publication, but revenues for all were down 7 percent in January; 3 percent more in February.
Jack Fuller, ceo of the Tribune Company newspaper division, nevertheless says the financial performance of the Times “exceeded our expectations.” A $50 million investment was made to convert a Los Angeles-area printing plant to produce slick advertising inserts — a source of revenue, Fuller says, that had been gravely neglected. Additionally, the Times was part of most, if not all, of the sixty cross-media deals Tribune made through its Tribune Media Net sales organization. Media Net showed a 40 percent revenue gain in the first quarter of the year, according to Puerner.
One move, however, has irritated all the Tribune Company newsrooms. To demonstrate the reach of the company, Howard Tyner, vice president of news, asked editors to implement a new byline protocol. A story written by, say, the L.A. Times global affairs specialist Robin Wright is to be carried in other papers as, for example, “Robin Wright, Special to Newsday.” Says one miffed editor, “This bugs me. First, the story was not done for us and it’s misleading to readers. Second, ‘special’ means free-lance, something we would be involved in, and we’re not. Third, if a disaster struck the Sears Tower in Chicago, I think readers in L.A. would like to know the story carried in the L.A. Times was written by a reporter for the Tribune who knows Chicago.”
Asked if this policy foreshadows a move toward shared bureaus, Fuller says, “The Tribune Company has more foreign correspondents than anyone except AP and Dow Jones. We need to make the most of them. We don’t want to clump ’em all up in one area of the world and leave others uncovered.” Already, editors are being urged to consult each other about coverage in Latin America and Central Asia. “We don’t need six stories that say the same thing,” Fuller says.
And so The Tanker Turns. As a kind of footnote, The New York Times recently reported that Willes was last seen leading a group of 200 Mormon missionaries in Honolulu while Downing had enrolled in an intensive program that will train her for a new career — as a school superintendent.
But if the bathos is gone, the saga has found new subplots. Can the Los Angeles Times become the kind of cutting-edge product that California is so good at creating? Can the sunbaked easterners truly understand the place? Can the paper play in the same league with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal? “Otis Chandler once said the goal of the L.A. Times is to knock The New York Times off its perch,” Montorio says. “I don’t think that’s the goal. It’s an insane goal. The goal is to get up on the perch with them.”
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