by James O'Shea
A new generation of young men and women was to carry Otis’ torch into the future. In a sense, the journalists who fought to preserve the unique brand of journalism that Otis created and championed were the unsung heroes and villains of the Los Angeles Times. Fiercely loyal to Otis’ standards, journalists like Wolinsky also treated the mere whiff of change as a dire threat to the man’s legacy. Longtime Los Angeles Times editor John Arthur once told a magazine writer: “Otis is Zeus.”
On the surface, Wolinsky was an odd keeper of Otis’ high journalistic standards. Growing up in East Los Angeles, Wolinsky didn’t read the Times. Like me, he was not one of those kids who started a neighborhood newspaper and became the editor of his high school newspaper. “My dad was an electronics developer at McDonnell Douglas. I’m not even sure what he really did. My mom was a housewife. We didn’t take a daily paper. We couldn’t afford it,” he recalled. Wolinsky’s neighborhood wasn’t Times territory, either. A vast swath of barrios and industrial shops between the Los Angeles River and the city’s eastern border, East Los Angeles, is a throwback. The once-dusty streets are now paved, and backyard chicken coops and citrus groves are rare. But the east side is the underbelly of a city better known for glitz and glamour.
By the time Wolinsky graduated from the University of Southern California, Otis had built the Times into one of the best and most prosperous papers on the globe by following the money. The paper’s readers didn’t live on streets like Bleakwood, or in barrios like Boyle Heights. They lived in Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Culver City, the South Bay, or Malibu, alongside moguls and movie stars.
Given how large and diverse Los Angeles was, the Times needed people like Wolinsky, locals who understood the challenging nature of the vast metropolis the paper covered. Reporting on a large metropolitan area is no easy task for any newspaper. Under Otis, the Times circulation area grew to encompass some eighty-eight separate municipalities, ranging from Pasadena, the tony, tree-lined town that seems as midwestern as sweet corn, to Little Saigon, a vertical strip mall that rests on a flat sandy plain home to some 135,000 Vietnamese. Parts of Santa Ana in Orange County would be easy to mistake for a town in Mexico, while the neighborhoods around South Central and East Florence in Watts resemble the most hard-boiled ghettos in the Bronx. The northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley stretch to an urban desert, and the posh enclaves along the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica symbolize raw wealth and power. The Los Angeles Times circulates in an area about as large as the state of Ohio, but one that ultimately lacks a center of gravity. Despite years of development, downtown Los Angeles remains a drab urban landscape; its most enduring features are Frank Gehry’s sweeping stainless-steel Walt Disney Concert Hall and a skid row that resembles a Palestinian refugee camp. (In one ten-square-block area, some 114 dialects are spoken.)
Though he grew up in a barrio, Wolinsky understood Los Angeles as well as did Otis, who had created several local editions of the Times to serve its diverse constituencies. One edition of the Los Angeles Times served the San Fernando Valley; one, Orange County. There was a paper for the San Gabriel Valley, and a paper for San Diego. “The way it was supposed to work,” recalls Pete King, a longtime Times writer and editor who would one day recruit Wolinsky to run the a.m. city desk, “is that we would produce six different papers.... These papers had their own editors and in some cases, publishers. The talent level was so high that we could take the best of the stories for these papers and put them into one paper. We made a mega paper out of the six papers for people who wanted it.... The LA Times was important to a certain Los Angeles—the suburban, middle-class, upper-class Angelino. It was never a paper of East LA or the barrios.” Over the years, the paper would be accused of having a bad case of penis envy of the New York Times, but King said the brand of journalism that Otis had created really wasn’t about “knocking the New York Times off its perch.”
“There was an LA Times way of doing journalism,” King explained. “We didn’t get plaudits for it. In fact, we were sometimes ridiculed by East Coast papers. But we were wildly successful. We had some excesses and we had some bad days. But on our good days, you wouldn’t see anything like it in any other newspaper. . . . It was doing it our way. It fit the city. . . . It’s not like we didn’t do daily journalism. Like I’m city editor and Rodney King happened,” said King in a reference to a police assault of the African American man that led to highly publicized riots in the 1990s. “It was not like we didn’t cover the news. But we also did the narrative story. That was our ‘A’ game. I had a goofy theory. A story would jump [from one page to another] so many times, but the coverage was like LA, a city of sprawl. People didn’t leave for work until 9 a.m. because of the traffic. So they had time to read.”
It’s easy to see why King, Wolinsky, and other journalists would go to extraordinary lengths over the years to protect Otis’ legacy. Otis understood that the city he and his ancestors had built needed to be informed and entertained, and he capitalized on the power of his journalists and what they really cared about—their journalism—to provide that information and entertainment, elevating them to an almost mythical status in the newsroom and beyond. Reporters and editors at Otis’ Los Angeles Times didn’t live by the rules that applied to others. They were well paid, flew first-class on every trip over five hundred miles, and spared no expense on stories. And editors worked hard to make sure it stayed that way.
Nowhere was the ability of the Los Angeles Times to entertain on better display than in a celebrated feature that Wolinsky and other Los Angeles Times editors would fight to preserve for years: Column One—deeply reported, well-written stories. Through meticulous reporting and lucid writing, Times reporters and editors simply took their readers to places where other newspapers couldn’t or wouldn’t go. When editors needed an arresting profile on a controversial figure like Washington, D.C., mayor, Marion Barry, they called on a stable of gifted writers like Bella Stumbo who would capitalize on the paper’s fat expense accounts to fill its generous news hole with deep reporting and copy that crackled. Stumbo and other Los Angeles Times writers simply spent more time, more money, and more and better words on a story, overwhelming would-be competitors.
The Times that Otis had inherited from his father was fat—full of ads bought by companies and merchandisers who coveted Otis’ well-heeled readers. At the top of the front page on March 12, 1961, just after Otis became publisher, two numbers—21 and 430—competed for attention with the infamous signed editorial on the John Birch Society. That Sunday’s Times had 21 sections and 430 pages to hold ads for everything from Liquid Snail Killers from the Cha Kent Company to a spread for the Dinah Shore Models Wardrobe at a local department store. Otis built upon that solid foundation to make the paper more lucrative so he could pay his journalists top dollar. He took the Golden Age of Journalism to Platinum. Ads created holes for copy written by those lucky enough to work at the Times.
To Wolinsky, the Los Angeles Times was more than a fat and happy place to work: “For me, it was a symbol. When you saw the people walking down the street with the Los Angeles Times, it was a symbol that they’d made it in society,” he offered. The paper lured many star reporters westward from newspapers in the East and Midwest, but employed just as many Californians—journalists who’d labored at smaller papers to land a coveted job at the Times. Kathy Kristof grew up reading the Los Angeles Times and wanted to work there from the time that she decided to be a journalist. “I really didn’t realize what we had until I started traveling and saw other papers. It was a unique paper. There was nothing like it in the country.”
After graduating from USC, Wolinsky was bound and determined to “land a job at the Los Angeles Times.” After five years of applying unsuccessfully for a roster of Times jobs, he got a break when he was a reporter for The Breeze covering Inglewood, a community in the South Bay, a collection of towns south of the city. The Times had a reporter in Inglewood but her husband was under investigation for a conf
lict of interest (he had a stake in Inglewood casinos), and Wolinsky applied for her job.
His moxie paid off. He soon became the South Bay reporter for the Los Angeles Times.“At first,” Wolinsky recalled, with his trademark laugh, “I thought I had made a huge mistake. My editor was Hank Osborne. He’d assign these ridiculous stories. He once had someone cover the marathon and write stories about runners who would stop to defecate in the bushes. He’d have you go out and put a nickel, a dime, and a quarter on the sidewalk and when someone would stop and pick one up, you were supposed to interview them and write a story about what they picked up and why. I thought, ‘This can’t be the famous LA Times.’”
Even though most journalists native to Los Angeles coveted jobs at the Times, some balked at taking a job in a bureau such as the South Bay, one of several where reporters were referred to derisively as “zonies” by those lucky enough to hold jobs at the big newsroom on Second and Spring Streets. “The editors downtown were a little snooty about taking stories from the bureaus,” said Kristof, who went to work at the Times as a college intern and would become one if its star financial columnists. “You were just not taken that seriously.” Kristof said the zones were considered somewhat of a backwater at the Times. “They were fully staffed but they used to publish only three times a week. You could get your pants kicked off because you could write a story and it might not appear until three days later.” Wolinsky was transferred from the South Bay to Orange County, which was considered another “zonie” bureau, but opportunity struck when the Times needed someone to help cover the sprawling Los Angeles County beat.
A highly regarded and respected Los Angeles journalist, Bill Boyarsky, who ran the City County Bureau, was everything that Wolinsky wanted to be. He recalled, “I met him at a journalism conference before I got to the LA Times in 1977. He was a smart writer, urbane and sophisticated, someone who had written books and won journalism prizes. He was my hero and my mentor.” The Times had hired Boyarsky off an AP picket line, and his solid journalistic practices soon made him one of Otis’ newsroom confidants, someone who appreciated and understood that the values Otis had embedded in the newsroom were not something to be taken for granted, but a legacy to be embraced and passed on to younger journalists who would listen to him. “Bill said if things worked out at the City County Bureau, I might be able to stay,” remembered Wolinsky. So, in 1983 he started covering the board of supervisors for Los Angeles County.
The City County desk also represented a near-death experience for Wolinsky.
There were a lot of people on vacation, so [they asked me to help edit] an investigative project by two reporters, one in LA and one in Sacramento. It was a story about . . . a lawyer who had used his connections with the administration of [former California Governor] Pat Brown to get some zoning changes for some property in which he had an interest. We worked on the story for a long time, and finally it ran on page one in the left-hand corner. I was so proud. And then I walked into the newsroom and saw one of the reporters in his editor’s office. He looked ashen. I knew something was wrong.
As it turned out, many of the details in the 1985 story and the picture that ran in the paper were of the wrong person.
Parts of the story confused a law professor of the highest standing, who had the same name, with the craven wheeler-dealer. “I figured my career was over,” said Wolinsky. “We did a page one correction the same size of the story. It was incredible. I don’t think anyone ever saw anything like it. I think they paid him a settlement, too. All of the bigwigs went over the story. There were a lot of similarities; they had the same name; they were both lawyers; one worked for Pat Brown, the other for Jerry Brown; one reporter was in Sacramento and the other in LA; they never got together when writing it.” Rather than fire him, the Times kept Wolinsky on, reckoning that his was an honest mistake, one any reporter could have made. This was, after all, Otis’ paper—a deeply paternalistic operation that stood by its staff even when the waters were rough.
To make it to the top of a newspaper, you need more than talent and political skills. Timing is often everything, and Wolinsky had good timing. Soon after he was promoted to city editor in 1991, an amateur videographer filmed Los Angeles policemen beating Rodney King. Once television stations aired the footage, riots broke out throughout the city. At the Los Angeles Times, the newly minted city editor swung into action. He had to. His boss was on a cruise, and everyone else was on vacation. “It was just me there, and I had to react,” Wolinsky recalled. “It was quite a moment for me. We won a Pulitzer for our coverage. But it also marked the start of five years of just incredible stories. There were riots, floods, the Michael Jackson pedophilia case. It ended with O.J. Simpson. It was just incredible.”
Wolinsky attributed the success he would enjoy to being in the right place. The right place happened to be about eight miles west of Bleakwood Avenue, in a Los Angeles Times office with a picture on the wall of Otis Chandler.
4
Twilight
In 1984, Americans awoke to “Morning in America,” the flag-waving advertising spectacle created to celebrate Ronald Reagan’s successful drive for a second term as the nation’s fortieth president. For the U.S. newspaper industry, though, it was twilight. Americans purchased 63.3 million newspapers in 1984, slightly over 1 percent higher than 1983 and a peak that would never again be achieved. Newspapers, the backbone of an industry that brought news to America’s doorsteps for fifty to seventy-five cents, faced an erosion of circulation that major publishers would cover up until it turned into a landslide twenty years later.
On the surface, the nation’s economy overshadowed potential problems. A boom triggered by President Reagan’s tax cuts and massive budget deficits had begun: The economy was literally yanked from the depths of a recession that had driven the nation’s unemployment rate to just under 10 percent. Anyone reading a newspaper or watching television wouldn’t suspect any problems with the currency of news: Programs and articles were still rife with ads. In 1984, I was happily employed at the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau.
In 1982, Jim Squires, the Tribune’s editor, had strolled over to my desk in Chicago as I put the finishing touches on a series of stories I had written about the impact of the recession and a rising debt burden on the Illinois economy. “You know,” Squires said in his signature southern drawl, “we need some goddamn investigative reporting in Washington. Go see [Doug] Kneeland and tell him you’re going to replace de Lama.” (De Lama was leaving Washington to become a Tribune foreign correspondent.) And that was that.
The exchange was vintage Squires, a forty-three-year-old Tennessee native known for his huge ego, tough talk, and impulsive style. A former Tribune Washington bureau chief, Squires had been named editor of the paper in 1981, when he immediately started the Squires shuffle—reassigning editors and reporters to different jobs in a staff shake-up that made everyone feel as if they’d been tossed into a blender. He once walked into the men’s room and, while urinating, decided to reassign the reporter using a urinal next to him to the technology beat.
Squires’ tenure didn’t work out well for everyone; his ascension eclipsed Jones’ career. But Squires put me right where I wanted to be: in the thick of the big stories of the day. Critics of American journalism like to pin the decline of U.S. newspaper circulation on content, particularly page one content. The indictment of editorial judgment cuts a wide swath: Papers don’t publish enough good news; newspapers are biased; readers want sizzling, sensational stories on page one, not long, depressing accounts of starvation in Sudan; journalists edit their papers for other journalists, not real readers; blood and guts drive newspaper sales, not sober, serious news about the important issues of the day. Obviously, newspaper content affects sales, but most evidence suggests the impact is marginal. In the dozens of studies in which newspapers ask readers why they quit subscribing to a paper, anger over content pales in comparison to issues about paper delivery mishaps or missed papers. Indeed,
what lies at the heart of the decline of newspaper journalism is not that simple.
As the “Morning in America” spectacle reached across the nation, newspapers were struggling with unprecedented social changes that would revolutionize media consumption habits, just as the great newspaper families began disintegrating and selling off their lucrative properties to corporations that subordinated journalism to that most natural instinct of capitalism: the desire to make cash machines out of cash registers. In the face of dwindling circulations and mounting debt, many newspaper owners began to focus more on making a profit and less on the civic duty and the moral imperative to cover the news on which their organizations were founded.
Sweeping demographic changes in the workplace triggered the jarring transition. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, a troubled economy prompted American women to get jobs in record numbers. Between 1970 and 1985, the number of women in the workforce jumped by 25 percent as inflation drove up living costs, and job growth stagnated, particularly during the recession that hit the economy in 1981. As U.S. families struggled to cope with sluggish wage growth, rising unemployment, and inflation, the number of homes with a working husband and wife soared 22 percent. By the mid-1980s, American men and women worked more and had less time to read the newspaper, particularly in the evenings when they returned from work. In the 1960s and early 1970s, television stations, eager to snatch ad dollars from newspapers, had started flexing their journalistic muscles, aggressively expanding their evening newscasts to half-hour segments. The result? Americans who came home from a hard day’s work could luxuriate in a newscaster’s summary of the day’s stories, rather than plow through the newspaper.
