The Deal from Hell (34 page)

Although I didn't have experience as the editor of a paper, I had run a big newsroom as a managing editor of the
Chicago Tribune
and had strong journalistic and leadership credentials. The staff was properly suspicious of my
Tribune
pedigree, but I was determined to do something about that. Journalists are creative people who can't be ordered to write good stories or great headlines. But if they respect you, they will follow you anywhere, because good journalists traffic in
fairness. With that knowledge in the forefront of my mind, I climbed onto a desk in the
Los Angeles Times
newsroom on November 13, 2006, looked the assembled staff square in the eye, and declared that the new editor was above all a journalist and a seasoned newsman who would make tough calls but would also be fair. “I will make decisions that won't be popular,” I told the assembled staffers, “but I will also make decisions that won't be popular in Tribune Tower, just as I did in a variety of jobs in Chicago over the years.” All I asked from the newsroom was an opportunity to earn its respect. Managing editor Frantz told me afterward that he thought my remarks had gone over well.
Times
reporters videotaped my speech and my Q&A to put it on the web (for the record).

Fortunately for me, Baquet's endorsement helped me immensely. Key editors like Frantz, Montorio, and Wolinsky rejected rumors of the suicide pact that had buzzed at the news of Baquet's replacement. But it didn't take long for me to determine that the culture wars between Los Angeles and Chicago had taken a severe toll.

From the outside, the
Times
appeared to be an army of journalists united in defense of its defrocked editor and in opposition of the marauding horde in Chicago. In reality, the staff resembled a pack of quarreling tribes. Tribune-mandated budget cuts had ignited intense internecine warfare as editors scrambled to lock in their share of diminishing resources instead of confronting the huge challenges on the horizon. When I met with department heads, metro's head complained to me about how the national and foreign departments had somehow bypassed cuts. Ditto in business, sports, and features. The budget scrum was really no different than what was happening in Chicago; it was just more intense and more public. The truth was, everything you did in Los Angeles was public; news would be leaked almost immediately to Roderick at
LA Observed
. When I wrote a memo, I was aware that it was only a matter of hours before it would become public fodder.

As I settled into the newsroom at the
Times
, I sympathized with Baquet. He hated the budget and management part of the job (he'd
delegated that to Wolinsky), and he'd focused the lion's share of his time and talent on journalism: talking to reporters about their stories, editors about their sections, and everyone about their jobs. By 2006, though, he had started spending an increasing amount of time fighting budget cuts. Over dinner during my first week on the job, Baquet told me he had deferred many hard decisions with the hope that he would eventually prevail and would fix them later. I soon discovered I faced a dysfunctional online operation, an abortive redesign of the paper, chronic misallocation of resources, and a raft of special deals that elevated the status of some reporters at the paper. The
Times
had three people in each of its Denver, Seattle, and Atlanta bureaus, but only one staffer was covering the San Fernando Valley, home to 1.8 million people starved for news about their community. Janet Clayton, who ran metro, stunned me when she admitted that she had not replaced the overnight police reporter (a footnote in the slew of cutbacks), leaving a paper covering Los Angeles without anyone reporting on the police beat at night. To me, it was unthinkable.

A lunch with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger telegraphed the rocky road ahead. When I asked him what he liked and disliked about the
Los Angeles Times
, I expected him to mention a story that had angered him or his wife, Maria Shriver (like the
Times'
infamous election eve story about his tendency to grope women). Instead, he replied that he hated the font of the headlines on page one. I thought: “If the headline font is so garish I have Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about it, I'm in serious trouble.”

On arrival in Los Angeles, I had immediately taken Wolinsky out to lunch and asked him what the hell he'd been thinking about when he decided to meet with Geffen. Wolinsky told me he had been criticized in the Staples affair for not knowing what had been going on, and he'd wanted to have an upper hand on the news this time. He apologized profusely, and I decided that, although he'd clearly stepped out of line, it wasn't a firing offense. And besides, I needed someone with Wolinsky's knowledge of producing a massive, complex newspaper in a city I didn't know. F. Richard Ciccone, a former managing editor at
the
Chicago Tribune
, once pointed out to me that if I got hit by a truck on my way to work, the paper would still come out on time the next day. But if editors like Wolinsky—who knew the production process cold—got hit, the paper might not come out. Wolinsky had the kind of vital knowledge that was crucial to a new editor. I could always move Wolinsky if I wanted to, after I had more time in the editor's office. During the first couple of months, there were some surprises, but things generally developed as I had expected, except for one challenge I hadn't anticipated.

Even under the best of circumstances, stress defines the relationship between a publisher and editor. Smart publishers usually delegate deadline duties to their editors and focus on the business side of the paper for good reason. A publisher's intervention in a story can easily trigger a conflict or signal favoritism—at best an embarrassment, at worst a threat to the paper's editorial integrity. “When people complained, I always told them there's nothing I can do about it,” Madigan once confided in me, “because it's the news.” The publisher's office is the
one
place in a newspaper where the line between editorial and the business side can be most easily breached. For whatever reason, that line was not sacred to Hiller.

In a perfect world, I don't think Hiller, FitzSimons, or Smith would have selected me to be editor of the
Los Angeles Times
. I had clashed with each of them many times, just not as publicly as Baquet had. I was simply too independent for people who valued team players above all else. I had worked often with Hiller when he was publisher at the
Chicago Tribune
, but our relationship changed when I arrived in Los Angeles. In Chicago, I had Lipinski, the formidable editor of the
Tribune
, as a buffer to separate me from Hiller. In Los Angeles, it was just the two of us.

To many locals, Hiller seemed a curious choice for publisher of the
Los Angeles Times
, particularly given the lasting legacy of Otis Chandler. Otis had worked his way up through the newsroom and resembled a Greek god who could toss a spear across the Pacific. He was muscular and handsome, a motorcycle-riding sportsman
who rebelled against his family. Hiller, by contrast, had never worked as a journalist. Slender and well groomed, with wavy gray hair and a relaxed sense of humor, he was a Harvard-educated lawyer from Park Ridge, Illinois. He had joined Tribune Company as general counsel before working in the company's development arm putting together and sealing deals. Prior to becoming publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
, he had run the newspaper company's Internet operation. A single man in his fifties, he lived in a Santa Monica apartment in a building that he was fond of telling people had once been home to Lawrence Welk.

Although Hiller had limited publisher experience in Chicago, his political roots and loyal nature appealed to FitzSimons. A self-described member of the political right, Hiller had served as an assistant attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department but also as a law clerk to Associate Justice to the Supreme Court, Potter Stewart, a judge with liberal leanings. He had also worked at the Tribune's law firm, Sidley Austin. He communicated his political leanings with the halting, lawyerly questions he used to make a point.

Many Tribune employees back in Chicago liked Hiller, and for good reason. He was friendly, intelligent, funny, and perhaps most importantly, he was the consummate team player. He came off as a kind man, someone who wanted desperately to be liked. The kind of guy who ran for class president. And he loved to sing. In the midst of a crisis, I'd get the feeling Hiller was about to jump up and sing, “Everything's Coming Up Roses.” As publisher of both the
Tribune
and the
Times
, he successfully lobbied the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers to let him sing the national anthem in Wrigley Field and in Dodger Stadium. At a staff party celebrating the paper's 125th anniversary, Hiller grabbed a microphone and started crooning show tunes.

Being the editor of a paper is like few other jobs in America; it's like owning a baseball team—a business that at heart belongs to the public it serves. If you breach the public's faith in your product, you fail. I viewed my job as a custodian of a public trust—a role
that involved a lot more than collecting a big salary. I had to protect the integrity of the institution I ran and by extension the news at all costs.

As I assumed the responsibility of editing the
Los Angeles Times
, maintaining that public trust had become increasingly difficult. The industry faced an unprecedented assault by everyone from bloggers and blowhards on the political right and left to critics of the so-called mainstream media. Editors of papers large and small struggled with newsrooms in denial and owners under the gun to maintain solid financial returns to their shareholders.

In Baltimore, a wealthy hedge-fund investor had just forced the Knight Ridder chain to put itself on the auction block, and in June 2006, the Sacramento McClatchy publishing chain had stepped up and bought much of the company. McClatchy promptly began selling off papers it didn't want, including the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
, which sold the following year for $530 million, a staggering $670 million less than McClatchy had paid for the paper just nine years earlier. The sale shocked an industry where papers had routinely commanded far higher prices.

In my quest to deal with problems that could no longer be deferred another day, I worried most about diminishing the newspaper. The
Los Angeles Times
put out an excellent newspaper with 1,200 journalists in the newsroom, and I felt I could produce an equally excellent paper with just over 900. But I searched my soul asking at what point the cuts, bureau closings, and newsprint savings would fundamentally dilute the quality of the newspaper. Readers in Los Angeles complained about cuts in the paper far more than they did in Chicago. I told myself that I would not dare leave until I improved the paper that I'd inherited.

I had barely settled in Los Angeles when my worst fears were realized. Almost immediately, the Tribune Company pressured me for a staff cut. My experience in shaving budgets taught me that the Tribune numbers game was a road to nowhere. The corporate staff assessed the needs of the company, engaged in the give and take that
public companies routinely practice with Wall Street analysts, and figured out how much excess cash the business needed to prop up the stock price and deliver 20 percent plus returns.

Once the finance guys set a target, each paper had to submit budgets that hit the magic number measured by cash flow. If Tribune needed $100 million in cash flow to keep Wall Street happy (and fund management bonuses) and the
Los Angeles Times
contribution was $50 million, then the paper would have to move heaven and earth to reach the goal, readers be damned. It was a lazy process in which accountants did the math and ordered cuts to reach a budget goal. The exercise put a premium on cost cutting and devalued the kind of enterprise or editorial risk taking that could actually generate revenues. The unstated understanding was that the newspaper could always be cut, because not that many readers noticed, and most didn't have an alternative source of news.

I had not entered Los Angeles with a budget or job-cut target. Smith and Hiller had asked me to commit to a reduced staff level, but I told them I couldn't say how many people I would need to run the
Los Angeles Times
since I had never worked in that newsroom. “I'm a reporter,” I told Smith, “and a pretty damned good one. If I go out there, I'll do some reporting. The only thing I'll guarantee you is an honest answer. If I can do it with less, I'll tell you. If I think I'll need more, I'll tell you that, too.” I was adamant that I wouldn't weaken the newspaper with indiscriminate, thoughtless budget cuts.

Significantly, Smith and I agreed that I would manage the budget so that it would not exceed an unspecified percentage of the paper's revenues, generally around 12 percent to 13 percent, which was about the same level as the
Chicago Tribune
. How I achieved that level would be up to me. The process gave me more flexibility and the newsroom a stake in fixing the revenue drain that most papers faced at the time. We had a revenue problem that we were treating like a cost problem, which would only make the revenue problem worse. If revenues tanked, as they usually did during a recession, I was more vulnerable, but it was a gamble I was willing to take.

In point of fact, my budget deal with Smith was somewhat unusual in a newsroom. Traditionally, editors didn't concern themselves a great deal with revenues or finances; they were journalists, after all, people who were supposed to worry about the news regardless of financial consequence. But that attitude—that revenue was the realm of the business side of the paper—had developed when monopoly ad markets minted money and newspaper editors were driven to work in chauffeured cars. I had a budget of about $130 million, which sounds like a lot of money until you consider what it takes to cover everything from Hollywood and Washington to the war in Iraq (the Baghdad bureau alone cost me about $1.5 million a year). If I didn't want to cut the budget, I had to figure out a way to help
finance
our journalism. I couldn't just do it by slashing a budget or sitting tight and waiting for things to get better. Those days were over.