APART FROM THE DEATH of a journalist, the saddest story for anyone in the news business--and the one most likely to waste expensive newsprint--is the martyrdom of an editor at the hands of his proprietor. There have been quite a few lately, and with the crisis of the newspaper business, there will be more.
The most recent episode involves Dean Baquet, editor of the Los Angeles Times for the past year. Since 2000, the Times has been owned by the Tribune Company of Chicago; and while that merger/acquisition was widely hailed at the time, it came at the height of the dot-com bubble and has suffered from the subsequent travails of American newspapers. Both the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times have lost circulation and advertising revenue, and the Tribune Company stock price has been anemic. Now, shareholders are demanding the sale of the company, in whole or in part; and it is probable that, by the end of the year, the Tribune, the Times, and other properties--including several newspapers and television stations--will have new owners.
Whether this is a Good or Bad Thing depends on your point of view. In retrospect, it is apparent that the corporate cultures of the two empires were ill-suited to one another, and that Chicago and L.A. were bound to collide. But the version of the story presented in the media--idealistic Times editorial staff struggling to maintain quality in defiance of philistine bean counters at the Tribune Company--is standard, and deeply misleading, press mythology.
Dean
Baquet lost his job this month because he and his publisher, who was also fired, publicly defied the instructions of the Tribune Company chairman, Dennis FitzSimons, to trim costs by cutting staff. Whether FitzSimons is a corporate visionary or a dumb businessman we may never know; but his presumption that the Times editorial staff is bloated and chronically oblivious to the needs of its customers is a reasonable presumption, and has been for years. This does not, of course, apply to every Times staffer--there are plenty of excellent writers and editors--but it is a fair generalization.
I was a member of the Times editorial staff in the 1980s, and still recall with wonder my first day on the job, when then-publisher Tom Johnson announced a six-month moratorium on first-class--I repeat, first-class--air travel for reporters. The level of anger and indignation in the newsroom could not have been deeper had he instituted a drastic pay cut. The Times newsroom was a quiet, comfortable sinecure--the Velvet Coffin, in local parlance--for correspondents at work on long-term "projects" and writers who produced annual, or semi-annual, stories. The Los Angeles Times, I was told, was a writer's newspaper--the very antithesis, logic would suggest, of a reader's newspaper.
While the Times built its reputation on long, self-indulgent, prize-minded series and "stories behind the news," the Tribune prospered by emphasizing comprehensive local coverage. In effect, the Tribune Company has sought to instill some consumer-minded habits at the Times, which could never successfully penetrate the San Fernando Valley or neighboring Orange County. This was a frustration to Times management, but hardly a mystery. As with most giant metropolitan newspapers, the Times regarded the suburbs of Los Angeles as benighted appendages to the city--roughly the equivalent of flyover country--and its condescension, not to say contempt, did not go unnoticed.
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