The Deal from Hell (13 page)

Squires didn't fare as well, though. He faced incredible pressures to deliver budgetary miracles to meet a demand for higher and higher profits, pressures that would never cease. After he left the company, Squires blasted Tribune and the industry for its failure to reinvest in their newspapers to finance improvements that would have better served readers. “The profitability of newspapers,” he wrote, “has come to depend on an economic formula that is ethically bankrupt and embarrassing for a business that has always claimed to rest on a public trust: the highest profitability comes from delivering advertising sold at the highest rates in a paper containing the fewest pages and sold for the highest possible retail price to the fewest high income customers necessary to justify the highest rates to advertisers.” Zeroing in on the hypocrisy of newspaper publishers who ask for special legal and political rights on the ground that they exist to protect the people's right to know, Squires noted, “Nowhere does the Constitution define
the ‘people' as the predominantly white upper 30 percent of the population between twenty-five and fifty years of age who make $50,000 a year.”

Yet manipulating newsroom resources to maximize advertising revenues is how Squires battled the
Sun-Times
. Like many before and after him, Squires allowed his bosses to capitalize on his reputation as a solid, professional journalist, essentially ushering in the policies he later described as bankrupt. To Squires' credit, he always pushed the staff to cover issues that affected the rich and poor—minority housing, Chicago's bankrupt schools, the plight of the underclass, and corruption at City Hall. When Cook decided to step down, the two contenders for his job were John Madigan, the investment banker brought in to take the company public, and Brumback. Charlie often frustrated Squires with his miserly ways, but Madigan was someone Squires thought was far worse. “Squires never liked Madigan,” Brumback recalled. Squires said he openly campaigned against Madigan for the top job. Meanwhile, he made a speech to the board extolling Brumback's business acumen, his value as a mentor, and his wisdom in leaving editorial decisions to journalists. “I just made the case that Madigan had never run anything. Actually, Charlie was a pretty easy sell. None of them [company directors] liked Madigan,” said Squires.

Instead of thanking Squires, Brumback reneged on a budgetary pledge he had made to his editor in order to post record profits. When he was named Cook's successor, Madigan was given Brumback's former job—Squires' nemesis was now his boss. “There was no way for someone who had fought Madigan's ascent to power as vigorously and openly as I had to remain a power at the newspaper,” Squires said. “I lost the war. I knew I was dead.”

Squires didn't help himself with his remarkably prescient report, “Project Prosperity,” in which he urged Tribune to adopt new attitudes toward circulation and advertising, to invest its dollars in the company itself, and to abolish the industry's reliance on advertising rate increases justified by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the industry-funded organization that certifies circulation totals.

After he wrote his report, one of Squires' friends in the corporate office said Squires' enemies, led by Madigan, used it to brand him a “dangerous heretic.” At the time, he was not even fifty. Despite his ego and his faults, he was a fine editor and leader, a man who had a vision for the paper that was bigger than himself. He acknowledged that in his drive to adjust to a new “business paradigm and to excel at cost cutting and profit making in exchange for total control of editorial policy and news content, . . . I stayed too long and accepted too many bonuses to make a martyrs' list.” Nonetheless, he gave journalists a powerful object lesson in grappling with the real power of the press as we struggled to save the journalism that we cherished.

On his last day at the
Tribune
, Squires visited Brumback, who informed him that his problem was that he didn't “talk like us.” When told in retrospect that Brumback admitted Squires would probably have been the better choice to run the company than Madigan, Squires laughed: “Well, at least the old son of a bitch finally admitted it. All he ever did was add up the numbers and turn out the lights. All of the ideas of what to do were mine.”

L
eo Wolinsky stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor of the
Los Angeles Times
, a maze of hallways and corridors that twist and turn like a pretzel before emptying into a large, bright atrium surrounded by the corporate offices of Times Mirror. The path from the cluttered, cramped newsroom with its frayed green carpet to the spacious corporate offices was so familiar to Wolinsky, he could have walked it blind. By 1996, he'd been at the
Times
for nearly two decades, had seen publishers and editors come and go, had survived putsches and coups, and had winnowed his way to the top as a managing editor in charge of the holy grail: page one. Steeped in the
Los Angeles Times
way of doing things, Wolinsky knew his way around the block. A natural newsroom politician, he was also a friend to many of the men and women who had toiled alongside him for years. Striving side by side to get the paper out everyday will teach you a thing or two about people, and Wolinsky was someone you could count on. Even more importantly, he had mastered a skill crucial in any newsroom: He knew the ins and outs of the production process; he was a pro who could get the paper out every day.

But in nearly twenty years at the
Times
, he'd never seen anyone quite like Mark Willes, who had summoned him to the sixth-floor meeting. In many respects, Willes was the
Los Angeles Times
equivalent of Brumback. Both were financial disciplinarians, and both had been recruited to their respective companies with the same mission: Cook had hired Brumback to improve productivity at Tribune Company; the Chandler family had brought in the evangelistic Willes from General Mills to be the CEO of Times Mirror and to do God's work on the
Los Angeles Times'
bottom line.

A meeting with the business side of the paper was nothing new; there'd been countless sessions with consultants over the years. But Willes and Kathryn Downing, the hopelessly challenged publisher, had engaged a new batch of consultants in a drive to increase the paper's circulation from about 1 million daily to 1.5 million or more. Publishers and journalists around the country mocked Willes' and Downing's wellpublicized efforts. The golden era for newspapers was officially over: Most papers struggled mightily to maintain what circulation they had. Journalists and industry experts dismissed Willes' drive to grow circulation by 50 percent as ludicrous. Under Willes' and Downing's leadership, the venerable
Los Angeles Times
looked downright silly. Within the newsroom, Downing was known as “Calamity Kate,” while CEO Willes was dubbed“Cap'n Crunch,” a derisive reference to his legacy at General Mills.

But Wolinsky had a more nuanced view of the new numbers man. For one thing, Willes respected the power of print journalism. Wolinsky recalled, “I had mixed feelings about Mark. He was always calling in the consultants with all kinds of crazy ideas. But he was also smart and engaging; he really loved being in charge of the paper. He had a vision. It may have been nutty. But at least he had a vision. He really believed in the newspaper. He said our future was squarely in print. He ignored the Internet, thought it was just a fad. You had this great feeling that here was a guy who really believed in us.”

On the hot morning Wolinsky was summoned to the so-called Salon, he was met with a scene worthy of a column all its own. A literal sniff test. As he later recalled,

Wolinsky and his colleagues suppressed laughs as they listened to the consultants' take on the situation: Most Angelinos, sitting down for breakfast didn't want to pick up a newspaper that smelled like fish. But there was a solution, the consultants crowed: They could make the paper smell like Starbucks and coffee cake. And so it went.

Working for the former head of General Mills—a man mystified by the staff 's reverence for Otis Chandler—anything could happen. Willes had been hired in May 1995, about a decade and a half after Otis had stepped down as publisher of the paper with a dazzling record that had earned him a well-deserved reputation as an icon of contemporary American journalism. Otis had left the publisher's office at the relatively young age of fifty-three, fed up with the backbiting ways of his hidebound conservative relatives. They were, in Otis' words, a “pain in the ass.” He told his biographer, Dennis McDougal,

Wolinsky joined the staff of the
Los Angeles Times
three years before Otis stepped down as publisher. But Wolinsky didn't see Chandler often, and when in January 1981, Otis, a man who was always cool to the touch, became chairman of the board of Times Mirror, he withdrew into the newsroom shadows, deferring decisions involving his beloved paper to his successors. Eventually, a new generation of journalists arrived, clueless about the tensions that would surface in the imminent struggle at the paper. “Younger staff members took their editorial freedom for granted,” McDougal observed in
Privileged Son
, a biography of Otis Chandler, “ascribing only token credit to the tall, fit and shy grandfather whom they occasionally ran into while waiting for the elevators or standing in line for the daily gourmet buffet in the executives' Picasso Room cafeteria.”

A string of publishers and corporate politicians would follow Otis, only to get lost in his shadow. Tom Johnson, the affable Georgian Otis handpicked to succeed him as the first non-family publisher since 1882, came under immediate pressure from Robert Erburu, a lanky lawyer with Basque roots who would eventually play a hand in ousting Otis from the Times Mirror chairman's office a few years later. Doing the Chandler family's bidding, Erburu started to chip away at the wall Otis had erected to protect the newsroom from the pressures of the business. So skillfully had Erburu removed Johnson as publisher that some eleven years later, Johnson admitted to McDougal that he
still
didn't know, “why he was ‘promoted' to the vacuous position of chairman of the Times Mirror Management Committee.”

Johnson had named his own editor when Bill Thomas, the papers' longtime editor, retired in 1988. He was Shelby Coffey III, a handsome, glib young southerner from out East who ran marathons, pumped iron, and got credit for bringing a breezy wit to the
Washington Post
's style section. “His deal was literary journalism,” said Wolinsky. “Internally, he was seen as something of a dilettante. He quoted obscure poets, things like that. He loved Hollywood, and created literary teams. Column One really thrived while he was here.” Under Coffey's tenure, the
Times
continued to excel, but hard-edged investigative reporting took a backseat to spot news coverage and the artful turn of phrase. Soon after he became editor, Times Mirror promoted another
Washington Post
refugee as publisher of the
Times
, David Laventhol, a highly regarded journalist who had run
Newsday
with a flourish. Coffey and Laventhol couldn't have been more different in appearance. Coffey was neat and preppy, while Laventhol was unkempt and always seemed to walk around with his shirttail out of his pants. Both generated controversy in the newsroom, too. Coffey, for a redesign that unfairly drew comparison with Gannett's
USA Today
, and Laventhol, for pulling back the
Times
' efforts to build circulation outside Los Angeles and eliminating first-class air travel for the staff.

“When Laventhol came in, it was the beginning of a slide in a way,” Wolinsky said. “I stupidly offered to debate him on the first-class air travel. He started pulling circulation out of San Francisco and the Central Valley; he paved the way for the
New York Times'
national edition in California.” Soon after they got their jobs, Laventhol and Coffey both confronted a poor economy that Erburu handled by imposing cutbacks, creating a drift in the paper's fortunes marked by relatively flat circulation and financial performance.

By 1992, Times Mirror reported its first net loss in a century: $66.6 million in red ink, a glaring number that was blamed on the recession that hammered California's defense industry and real estate markets and on costs incurred in a buyout. But the
real
reason for Times Mirror's fading fortune was the way in which Erburu and Laventhol ran the place. They opened the door for Willes.