by James O'Shea
As Madigan spelled out the broad outlines of the proposed deal to Willes, he referred to it as a “merger.” But, in reality, the Tribune Company planned to use its financial muscle to assume control of Times Mirror, eliminate its corporate staff, and run the show as it saw fit. The smaller paper with the financial chops would be taking over the larger, more prestigious Los Angeles Times. Though he didn’t spell it out to Willes that day, Madigan’s projected $200 million in cost savings would involve cuts to the editorial staff that would threaten the Times’ esteemed foreign and national news bureaus, the bread and butter of the paper’s journalistic reputation. Nor did Madigan discuss who would be chairman of the surviving company, although he probably had a pretty good idea.
Both men have different recollections of their reactions to the proposal that Madigan put on the table. “He [Willes] initially thought it was a great idea when I sketched out the positive aspects of a deal,” Madigan later recalled. “He said it made a lot of sense. He thought the people in his management group were the best in the industry, and he didn’t understand why they didn’t come up with this. He was kind of kicking himself. So I felt quite good after the meeting.”
But Willes said he told Madigan that he had no interest in selling Times Mirror:“It was a very informal meeting. We didn’t have any charts or any data, just a conversation. I told him I wasn’t interested in selling Times Mirror, but I’d be happy to look and see if it made sense to buy the Tribune. I think he was particularly interested in leveraging print and broadcast properties. And then I said, oh, by the way, the Chandler Trust would prohibit a sale, even if we wanted to. We went back and did a quick analysis and concluded it didn’t make sense. I told the board, and John [Madigan], about that, and I thought that was the end of it.”
Regardless of the different recollections, two things were clear. First, Willes didn’t do a serious strategic review of the proposal. Second, he made the mistake a lot of people make when dealing with Madigan: he underestimated him.
As the Chicago Tribune’s deputy managing editor for news at the time, I supervised coverage of any big story about a major merger, whether in the media, manufacturing, or the medical industry. As much as the prospect of an acquisition by the bottom-line-driven Tribune scared journalists like Wolinsky at the Los Angeles Times, the idea intrigued those of us at the Tribune, raising hopes that our paper might finally get the recognition it deserved from its snooty rivals on the coasts. The largest newspaper between New York and Los Angeles, the Tribune never enjoyed the respect afforded papers like the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times, even though the paper routinely delivered outstanding journalism to its readers. One reason for the Tribune’s junior-partner treatment was a simple fact of geography: A paper located in the middle of the country didn’t get the attention bestowed on papers on the coasts. And it took a long time to live down the reputation of someone like the Colonel, whose jarring use of the paper to promote his personal and political agendas stained the Tribune for decades. The Tribune’s efficiency, legendary under Brumback, also worked against it. When editors at other American papers clashed with management over budgetary issues, publishers, armed with data that major papers shared with each other, would ask their editors why they needed so many resources when the Chicago Tribune could get the job done with less—a reminder of the paper’s nimbleness that didn’t earn the paper any friends in the clubby world of journalism.
But the main reason for the dismissive treatment of the Tribune had to do with status and power. Although editors and reporters pay lip service to the quality of their journalism, the traditional pecking order measured big metro papers by the size of their staffs, the clout of their Washington operations, the reach of their foreign staffs, and the number of staff-written stories that filled their pages (as opposed to those filed by wire services, such as the Associated Press, the newspaper cooperative that services all member papers).
As an editor, I often used wires for routine pieces, freeing Tribune staff writers to craft stories I couldn’t get on the wires or to bring enterprise and spark to the big stories of the day, a practice that benefited readers but denigrated the paper in the eyes of journalists who felt that every story should be staff written. Reporters appearing regularly on the network news talk shows and National Public Radio boosted a paper’s status, too, but Tribune journalists, as stewards of the Midwest, were interviewed less frequently than their counterparts on the East and West coasts. When media critics wrote about news organizations that covered foreign and national news, many failed to mention the Chicago Tribune, even though the paper maintained two dozen prize-winning news bureaus throughout the United States and the world. I hoped that the Tribune, by acquiring the Los Angeles Times, would gain the power and stature necessary to give voice to the Midwest and create a platform to showcase our outstanding journalism.
After Willes and Madigan met, both returned to their respective headquarters. Months would pass before their paths would cross again. Willes forgot about the proposal, but Madigan didn’t. A backstabbing billion-dollar drama would play out in the city where drama is literally made.
No one has ever told the story of the biggest merger in the history of American journalism and its long-lasting implications. Embedded in the failure of the marriage of the Tribune Company with the Times Mirror Company is a far broader story of monumental egos, fallible souls, larger-than-life characters, and cultural clashes about the collapse of newspapers—the institutions that write the first, crucial draft of history and the only industry America’s forefathers considered important enough to single out in the U.S. Constitution. The conventional wisdom is that newspapers—and by that I mean the credible, edited information they deliver, and not just the paper and ink—fell into a death spiral because of forces unleashed by declining circulations and the migration of readers to the Internet. But the Internet and declining circulations didn’t kill newspapers, any more than long stories, skimpy attention spans, or arrogant journalists did. What is killing a system that brings reliably edited news and information to readers’ doorsteps every morning for less than the cost of a cup of coffee is the way that the people who run the industry have reacted to those forces. The lack of investment, the greed, incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy, and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public’s are responsible for the state of the newspaper industry today. I saw it, both as a longtime reporter and as an editor at the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.
In the fall of 2006, Tribune executives asked me to leave my job as managing editor running the Chicago Tribune newsroom to become editor of the Los Angeles Times. In normal circumstances, being named editor of a storied paper would have been a capstone to a successful career. But these were not normal times. If I took the job, I would become the paper’s third editor in just over two years, preceded by editors who left after nasty, public fights with their financially pressed bosses back in Chicago over continual demands for budget cuts. The Los Angeles Times newsroom had become ground zero in a saga that pitted editors of newspapers against their owners and Wall Street patrons.
Each day, I had walked into the newsroom where I was determined to fight for the integrity of the news, no matter what. My passion for journalism and the interests of my staff had earned me respect in Chicago. But in Los Angeles, my long-standing ties to the Tribune Company would overshadow any of my accomplishments as an editor and journalist. “I don’t care what you do here,” one longtime friend and member of the Times staff told me. “You will always be viewed as a hatchet man from Chicago in this newsroom.”
Many friends and acquaintances urged me to turn down the opportunity. The odds that I would fail were high, particularly given the mistrust and resentment in Los Angeles of anyone from Chicago. The Chandler family had lost faith in Tribune Company and created a poisoned atmosphere in the city and in the boardroom. A new editor would be greeted by attacks from readers angry about cuts in staff and space that the city father
s blamed on Chicago. A number of friends at the Chicago Tribune couldn’t understand why I would go to rescue journalists who had treated us so disrespectfully. “Remember,” one close friend said, “these are the people who refused to wear lanyards [securing their 2004 Democratic National Convention credentials around their necks] because they had the name Tribune on them.” The prevailing view was that I would walk into an impossible situation.
But I had always followed my guts in a business where instincts rarely failed me, and my guts argued otherwise. As the son of an electrician and a housewife who had never finished high school, I had watched my parents overcome incredible obstacles. When I was a teenager, my dad died after a heroic battle with throat cancer. At age thirteen, I literally fought and conned my way into my first job, selling peanuts and hot dogs at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. I had survived military school, the notoriously tough Christian Brothers, the U.S. Army, and a grandmother whose husband called her the “War Department.” I responded to challenges like Pavlov’s dogs to a bell. I rejected the conventional wisdom, too. I would not be walking into an impossible situation.
Of course, I had doubts about entering such a poisonous atmosphere charged with raw emotions, wounded pride, and barely concealed contempt for anyone from Chicago. But my grandfather, a born storyteller nicknamed “Sawdust,” had taught me early on the power of a good narrative to overcome adversity. I had a good story. I was first and foremost a journalist, someone who had represented other journalists well and who was not afraid to challenge authority. I was a newsman who would try to solve the huge problems that the Times faced without diminishing the quality or integrity of a great newspaper. I could not pass up the honor and challenge of being editor of the Los Angeles Times. So I took the job, hopelessly entwining my story and my fate with the narrative of a mega-merger that would go bad, one that would play a signature role in the collapse of an entire industry. For better or worse, I became eyewitness and participant in “the deal from hell.”
1
Beginnings: Des Moines
Gene Raffensperger swung around in the chair in front of the city desk and looked at his new reporter. I had shown up for my first day as a journalist on a daily newspaper wearing a wafer-thin, butter-colored safari jacket, tennis shoes, and bell-bottoms, which would have been fine were I in, say, Dallas. But I was in Des Moines, Iowa, a good two feet of snow covered the ground, the wind howled, the temperature hovered in the single digits, and the snow continued to fall. Scanning me skeptically from head to toe, Raffensperger, known in the newsroom simply as “Raff” finally asked, “You O’Shea?”
“Yes,” I replied, somewhat sheepishly, wondering whether I should say anything about my clearly out-of-sync wardrobe. In my own defense, I had planned to buy a good winter coat in Columbia, Missouri—en route to Des Moines. It was in Columbia, at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, that I’d just earned my master’s degree. But I was in my twenties, a carefree time of life when I opted for parties, pot, and pretty girls over a decent winter coat. “O’Shea,” Raff said, scanning my face. “ We’ve got one hell of a story on our hands.” He explained that five high school kids on the east side of Des Moines had gone to a drive-in movie the previous night. They’d kept their car running to stay warm, but snow had fallen so hard it had blocked the car’s tailpipe. Exhaust had seeped into the car, and all five kids had been asphyxiated. Raff ’s order to “go over there and talk to the parents,” seemed unreal. I had never imagined that my first day as a reporter on a metro daily would involve talking to parents about their dead kids. “Get pictures from the high school yearbooks, ages, quotes, everything,” Raff barked. “We want everything, everything.”
A tough editor in his forties who spit out questions like a Gatling gun, Raff wore horn-rimmed glasses and smoked a pipe. He could be funny at times and gruff at others, particularly when he was working with a rookie like me. Before I headed out the door on that cold winter day on my first assignment for the Des Moines Register, Raff rubbed his head and eyeballed me quizzically. “You ever done anything like this before?” he asked, his voice pitched with excitement. When I told him no, I hadn’t, he sat me down at a nearby desk and stared straight into my eyes. His voice softened. “You probably think these parents are going to think, ‘This guy’s got a lot of nerve showing up here at a time like this,’ right?” I didn’t have to answer. “Look, O’Shea, just go there and you tell them, ‘We know this is a bad time and you’re in grief, but we want to get everything in the paper right. You may be upset at my coming here, but we know you would really be upset if we got something wrong.’ Got that?” Raff demanded. I nodded and out the door I went, slipping and sliding in my old green Ford Maverick through the snowy, unfamiliar streets of east Des Moines, a working-class neighborhood.
Despite Raff ’s pep talk, I would rather have spent a night in jail than show up at the front door of a house full of mourning parents. When I finally found the house where they were assembled, I approached the front door, knocked, and watched with dread as it swung open and I looked at the stricken faces of grieving family members staring at an intruder with the unfathomable sadness of parents who had lost their children. I took a deep breath and, before I thought twice about it, gave my pitch. Raff was right; the families wanted to talk, and talk, and talk. Late that evening, I left with everything I could imagine that Raff would want. Now I had to write the story. After my first day as a daily newspaper reporter, the next morning’s Register had a six-column banner headline story on page one, “By James O’Shea.” Only the pros at the paper could spot the deft touch of an editor like Raff, who could write about tragedy as easily as most people could write a check.
I wish I could say that my first day in the newsroom of the Des Moines Register represented the culmination of a classic newspaper apprenticeship that started with a paper route, evolved to the editor’s chair at the high school newspaper, and ended in a real newsroom. But my journey took a different path. I grew up in a working-class north St. Louis neighborhood so pronouncedly Catholic and Democrat that I felt sorry for the kid down the street whose dad was a banker and Republican. I had a paper route, but not for any dream of headlines and press passes. Guys in my neighborhood hustled newspapers to pick up spare change, but in my neck of the woods, the real reason they coveted a paper delivery job was because Fuzzy, the man who recruited us, would show us photographs of naked women once we’d signed on.
In St. Louis, I attended a military high school run by the Christian Brothers where the only thing I really learned was how to take a punch. I graduated third-lowest in my class, only because I rallied academically in my senior year. My older sister says she knew I was destined to be a newspaperman when, at the age of nine, I sold her diary to her boyfriend for five bucks.
By the time I got to the University of Missouri, most of my family expected I would be quickly tossed out, including my dad, who had told my mom that sending me to college was a waste of time. Thanks to my mom, the only person who believed in me at the time, I prevailed against all odds and graduated with a degree in English and philosophy, a Hemingway/Spinoza spin-off with zero idea what I was going to do with my life.
I got into the newspaper business in the army during the buildup to the Vietnam War. Instead of a tour in the steamy jungles of Southeast Asia, I ended up with an emergency assignment to Korea after some North Koreans shot at a bunch of GIs clearing brush in the demilitarized zone. The Pentagon, fearing an attack by a hostile North Korea, sent me and hundreds more to Korea during a frigid January so the North Koreans would be forced to stop and kill us before going south. We had rifles but no ammo. Bluffing North Koreans by running around with empty guns wasn’t my idea of gallantry, so I started looking around for another opportunity and secured a spot on the 7th Infantry Division newspaper, The Bayonet. Long story short, I got into the newspaper business to get out of the infantry, not exactly an altruistic motive, but one that led me back to graduate school after the army and to the newsro
om of the Des Moines Register.
I wasn’t too sure I would like Des Moines. On my initial trip to the city on a job interview, a man told me Des Moines was a “pretty swinging place.” Looking around, I just figured I had missed something. Then he added, “Of course, it’s no Omaha.” Walking back to my hotel, being whipped by Arctic winds, I kept thinking, “Jesus Christ, it’s no Omaha?” But the optimism in me conquered the cynic, and in January 1971, I joined the staff of my first daily newspaper.
A statewide paper, the Register was a perfect place to start a career. In a glass case in front of the building that housed the paper’s printing presses, a sign read: “There’s only one paper in America that’s won more Pulitzer Prizes for national news than the Des Moines Register. Our congratulations to the New York Times.” Populated by would-be poets, editors, and reporters who knew Jim Beam as well as Jimmy Breslin, the newsroom looked like something out of The Front Page, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s classic play about “yellow journalism” in Chicago during the 1920s. Stubbed-out cigarette butts littered the linoleum floors; big rolls of carbon copy paper hanging on wire hangers fed bulky Royal typewriters bolted to gray metal desks. Black dial and push-button phones rang incessantly as canisters stuffed with copy whizzed through pneumatic tubes to ink-stained printers and clanking Linotypes a floor below.
