by James O'Shea
I will never forget Lipinski’s reaction when I showed her the story. I thought she was going have a heart attack. As I stood there reassuring Lipinski that the section hadn’t been added to the paper, an editor called to tell me I’d been misinformed. The paper was still at the Freedom Center printing plant, but the section had been stuffed into more than 600,000 copies of the Tribune.
Horrified at the predicament, Lipinski and I decided to organize a group of journalists and go to the paper’s printing plant. Working from around four in the afternoon until well past midnight, we removed some 600,000 sections of Woman News from the next day’s paper. Included in the paper was a note from the editors apologizing for the absence of the section. When I asked Brown what he had been thinking when he authorized the piece, he told me he had merely been pushing the envelope.
At the Tribune, we were fortunate not to have many scandals involving inappropriate personal conduct. Even minor transgressions involving little-known journalists will draw the same kind of publicity that newspapers devote to public officials. When a problem involves a popular and well-known columnist, the journalistic justice can be harsh.
Under Fuller and Tyner, Tribune Company had established a strong ethics policy that prohibited journalists from capitalizing on their positions to win favors of any sort. In the fall of 2002, I had just become managing editor of the Tribune when we got an anonymous complaint about Bob Greene, a popular, award-winning columnist at the paper. The complaint was registered by a woman who claimed that she and Greene had had an inappropriate personal relationship after she had visited the paper on a high school field trip and attended a talk by Greene. If the woman’s allegations were true, Greene could have been fired. Over the next two days, Greene admitted to having had a relationship with the young woman, whom Lipinski and I tracked down and interviewed. Her complaint surfaced fourteen years after the relationship had occurred, but the incident had profoundly affected the woman’s subsequent feelings about men. When I told Greene that he was suspended pending the outcome of the investigation, he replied that similar complaints against him would flood into the paper if the situation became known. We accepted Greene’s resignation the next week.
Like any other profession, journalists are vulnerable to the temptations that come with celebrity. When the gaffes occur, journalists get a taste of their own medicine—a straightforward formula that always seemed just to me.
10
A Changing Landscape
Several weeks after Tribune Company took over at Second and Spring Street, Leo Wolinsky drove down the Avenue of the Stars, past the complex of law offices, strip malls, high-end hotels, and liquor stores that comprise Century City—the midzone between downtown Los Angeles and sunny Santa Monica—and paid a visit to his lawyer, Larry Feldman. He was increasingly worried about his future at the paper. It hadn’t taken Tribune Publishing president Jack Fuller long to replace editor Michael Parks with John S. Carroll, a tall, fair-haired journalist and former editor of the Baltimore Sun. Fuller defended his replacement as a matter of course—a person from a Times Mirror paper would be a better fit than a Chicago journalist—but that did little to quell the unease of people like Wolinsky. Under Parks, Wolinsky was made executive editor, the highest position under the paper’s full editor. But Carroll, after he arrived, stayed to himself and made little contact with editors on the floor—including Wolinsky. When Wolinsky confided to his lawyer a message that Carroll had conveyed to the staff—that no one would be fired—Feldman reassured him that he could make a legal case to keep his job. Driving away from Century City, Wolinsky felt, if not relieved, a modicum of security from Feldman’s counsel.
When outside forces descend on a storied local institution to impose a new order, it’s not unusual for the collective pulse to rise by a beat or two. Tribune Company had not just picked off a huge paper reeling from the tumultuous reign of Willes and Downing; it had acquired a big paper with national ambitions. As editor of the Baltimore Sun, Carroll had traveled to Times Mirror headquarters for meetings, but he didn’t know many Los Angeles journalists well nor they him. The conventional wisdom was that Tribune had acquired a paper in the throes of a crisis, but Carroll, who spent the first few days at his new post poring over the pages of the paper, found something quite different. “People were saying it had gone to hell. I think I had a more objective point of view than people who had been caught up in the storm. I felt it was an underedited paper. The people were very bright, but they didn’t assert themselves to the degree I thought they should. It was just not part of the culture. I felt it needed more assertive editing,” he said. In other words, it needed leadership.
The Los Angeles Times that Carroll inherited employed a number of excellent journalists who practiced world-class journalism despite the buyouts and layoffs ordered by his predecessors. About three weeks before Tribune announced its deal, the Times broke a story on page one detailing how the physician most closely involved with the government’s approval of the controversial diabetes pill Rezulin had urged its withdrawal from the U.S. market because of mounting injuries and deaths attributed to the pill, which had generated $1.8 billion in sales for Warner-Lambert, the New Jersey–based manufacturer. David Willman, a quiet but determined investigative reporter in the Times Washington bureau and a native of Pasadena, had unearthed the story from records and sources at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), one of numerous federal regulatory agencies that remained virtually uncovered by other major papers in the nation’s capital.
A prize-winning, tenacious journalist, Willman had been sniffing around the FDA for a couple of years reporting on its permissive atmosphere, after Congress, under political pressure over the demand for AIDS drugs, told the FDA to work more closely with pharmaceutical firms to get new medicines to the market. The Los Angeles Times gave Willman’s stories good play because he was an excellent reporter, not because an editor had decided that an obscure but important federal agency needed scrutiny.
“I told myself that it would take six months to a year to get people off the ceiling. The first week I was there I found myself feeling unexpectedly at home in the newsroom,” Carroll later recalled. Before the Sun, Carroll had been editor of the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader and had worked at several others. He well knew that each newsroom had a peculiar brand of politics: “The Times newsroom was collegial; there were no games. Saturday night of the first week, someone asked me to go to the paper’s book festival. I thought it would be half-dozen teachers in a basement. It turned out to be like the Academy Awards. We had drinks on a patio on one of those gorgeous, cool Los Angeles nights on the campus of UCLA. Here I was drinking wonderful wine with interesting people and I thought, ‘I’m glad I took this job.’”
Fuller had phoned Carroll at the Baltimore Sun the morning that Tribune had announced its deal. At the time, Carroll was considering an offer from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University to run the foundation’s fellowship program for mid-career journalists. He had all but decided to go to Harvard when Fuller reached him: “Jack and I had been on the Pulitzer board together and we’d been friendly. I’d been at the Sun for nine years and eleven and a half at Lexington. I was getting bored. I was tinkering with a book and negotiating over the curator’s job at Nieman. They had told me I would get an offer, and Jack urged me not to sign anything. I assumed he was talking about the Los Angeles Times editorship. It was the only logical thing from my point of view. Then he asked me to meet with John Puerner,” whom Fuller had just named publisher of the Tribune’s new Los Angeles property.
Carroll hit it off with Puerner when the two men met at the Willard Hotel in Washington, but Carroll’s mind was made up. Or so he thought. He later recalled returning to his home in Baltimore and going out for a walk. “Just for the hell of it I started thinking about LA and what I would have done on the first day as editor, on my second day. Then I noticed I was walking with a lot more spirit in my step,” he said. Back at his house, Carroll called Fu
ller to talk more about Los Angeles and made some calls about Tribune Company and its reputation for its single-minded devotion to the bottom line: “I knew there were risks. I talked with some people. Tribune had a reputation different than Times Mirror or Knight Ridder. I talked to Jack. I got no guarantees. But he said we’d be crazy to do something bad with that paper. This is the Los Angeles Times; we’d be crazy to screw it up.” He decided to take the job.
Otis Chandler’s larger-than-life personality had instilled in the Los Angeles Times staff an almost ravenous desire for a strong newsroom leader. All eyes fell upon the tall, lanky, unflappable southerner when Carroll wandered onto the third floor in the spring of 2000. Carroll soon heard the same song that anyone who occupied the editor’s office in Los Angeles would hear from his editors: “I went in and spoke to each department head. One thing I kept hearing is that the newsroom was woefully understaffed. At that time, the head count was 1,163 people. That was triple what I had at the Sun.” Willes and Downing had established a bifurcated staff with a huge stable of experienced veterans like Willman, and a smaller yet significant cadre of less experienced, lower-paid reporters to man “Our Times” editions, intensely local sections designed to serve readers and lure ad dollars from affluent neighborhoods like Santa Monica. “They had confused, to some extent, the identity of the paper,” Carroll recalled. “It was like reading two papers: a small local weekly with certain editing standards that are necessary in papers of that size and then also a very sophisticated, big metro daily. The two clashed.”
Wolinsky started to see a cadre of new faces walking the halls of Times Mirror:A lot of Tribune people started to show up here. People had mixed feelings. There was a lot of anger and frustration about Mark and Staples. One faction said well maybe this is a good thing because Tribune had a reputation as a solid company and maybe that’s what we need. Another faction was concerned. The LA Times had always been the number-one top dog in the company. . . . I had a lot of trepidation because the Chandlers were selling out. I know they were not always the best for us, but they did protect us and let us try to be the best paper in the country.
In the business offices of the Times, Puerner shook things up immediately. CFO Skip Zimbalist remembered:It became clear that Tribune wanted to install their people and their operating systems into Times Mirror and they were not interested in hearing about why we did things the way we did. I don’t think anyone was thrilled about getting a lot of money. Some longtime employees had accumulated a lot of options and never had dreamed that they would get $95 a share. But the senior management group had plans to take the company to the next level. They were saddened to see the company broken up. On the editorial side, there was a lot of respect for Fuller. There was some elation. Otis was happy about the change. On [the] business side, there was less enthusiasm once it became clear that Tribune ran things from the top. A few people at the top . . . told everyone what to do. I had good relations with the Tribune people. They asked me if I wanted to move to Chicago for a role with the company. I wished them well. I was familiar with the Los Angeles market.... We were operating at 14 to 18 percent margins and they were at 25. They wanted to apply the same techniques to LA as Chicago, and I didn’t see it. I grew up in LA and knew the competitive landscape. It was a very complicated market and dominating it with one newspaper was a tough thing to do. The idea that you could get a lot more efficiency quickly and easily; I didn’t see it.
In editorial, Wolinsky’s fears accelerated when the quality of the workplace started, slowly but surely, to show signs of change: Employees’ reserved parking spots, formerly denoted with their names, were replaced with parking space numbers; vending machines that had once dispensed aspirin for free were now coin-operated; a full-medical staff that had served the paper’s employees was eliminated. Perhaps worst of all was the unshakable sense of resentment by Tribune staff for the perks that had become standard fare for their Los Angeles counterparts. Change was decidedly afoot.
Wolinsky felt the immediate threat of the new management when Carroll emerged from his office to convene a series of lunches and dinners with senior editors and reporters. Carroll thought he needed new editors to instill more discipline into the newsroom. “I wanted to hire them from the West,” Carroll explained. “After looking around, I hired some people from the East. They had some excellent people on the staff, people like Rick Meyer, who was absolutely first-rate. But there was no discipline on story length. I felt kind of a bloatedness about everything. Story dopings [summaries] were too long. I ordered one-paragraph summaries of stories. I restricted the news meeting to a half hour. I had three managing editors and a slot for a fourth. I wanted one person.” Carroll soon set his sights on a charismatic African American editor in his forties at the New York Times who had just turned down a job offer to become the editor of the Miami Herald.
Dean P. Baquet was an unconventional choice for someone as grounded in the clubby world of establishment journalism as Carroll, who was a card-carrying member of organizations such as the American Society of News Editors. You wouldn’t find Baquet roaming the corridors of the American Society of Newspaper Editors or the Black Journalists Association conventions trolling for a job. A native of New Orleans, Baquet grew up in a working-class neighborhood where he helped clean his parents’ Creole restaurant, Eddie’s, one of those places with red-checkered tablecloths on the first floor and white linen on the second. The son of a mail carrier-turned restaurant owner, Baquet lived in the rear of Eddie’s with his parents and four brothers, until he left New Orleans in the 1970s to study English at Columbia University. But he dropped out of Columbia two years later, homesick for his native turf. During a summer internship at the New Orleans States-Item, he fell hard for journalism and returned as a reporter covering police, the courts, and city hall. He wrote hard-hitting stories for the paper, including one Times-Picayune article that prompted a local black political group to boycott Eddie’s. One of his fondest New Orleans journalistic memories was of covering Governor Edwin Edwards, the infamous Louisiana politician who once told Baquet, “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m found in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”
Baquet left New Orleans in 1984 when a former New Orleans colleague, Jack Davis, hired him to work at the Chicago Tribune. It was there, in 1988, that he would share a Pulitzer Prize with Ann Marie Lipinski for exposing the extent of corruption at the Chicago City Council. Two years later, he parlayed his success at the Tribune into a job as an investigative reporter at the New York Times. In 1995, he was tapped to be national editor, the job he held when he got a call “out of the blue” from Carroll. “I didn’t know John and the conversation was a little vague, although I figured I knew what he was calling about,” he said. “He’d already been named editor in Los Angeles. He said he was going to be in New York and wanted to know if we could have dinner.”
Surrounded by lush green plants, dark wood, and nude paintings at the Café des Artistes just off Central Park, Carroll told Baquet he was looking for a managing editor. A week after their lunch, Carroll called Baquet to see if he’d like to come out to spend a little time with him and Puerner. After thinking it over, Baquet accepted. Upon his return to New York, Carroll offered him the job. “I thought this was a really strong paper, a great paper, that had just been bought by a company I had a lot of respect for. I knew Tribune,” said Baquet. He also felt he could have a bigger impact in Los Angeles than he could in New York, so he, too, headed west.
Even though Baquet replaced him, Wolinsky readily admits that things got better the day that Baquet set foot in the Times newsroom:I felt like we had just been taken over by an occupying force with all of these nasty comments. . . .John [Carroll] felt cold. He can be great at times, but he could also be kind of aloof. . . . He would sometimes just get up and walk out of a meeting if the subject didn’t interest him. . . . We got a little whiff of what might happen when Fuller came out and met with the masthead [editors]. It was a very unsatisf
ying meeting. He didn’t talk about stories, or our journalism or anything. He just said, “You guys better get a hold of your budgets because if you don’t, bad things will happen.” We thought we had a hold of our budgets.... But Dean [Baquet] was different.
Wolinsky said that he didn’t resent that Baquet had replaced him as managing editor, a position that made Baquet the next likely editor of the paper:I always felt that to be the editor of the Los Angeles Times, you had to be distinguished. I wasn’t distinguished. But Dean Baquet was.... He had an immediate impact. I called Dean as soon as I found out he got the job. He was very good, and we talked about stories, and he reassured me. Once he got here, he started meeting with people left and right. He started to talk stories. He had a very positive attitude and viewpoint, and we all started to feel reassured, like we were back on track, like we wanted to be a great newspaper again. I started to feel more secure, too. I became part of his inner circle really fast.
Los Angeles has always been a great news town. Earthquakes, mudslides, urban wildfires, and riots routinely graced the headlines of the Los Angeles Times in the so-called “biblical times” of the 1990s. The Times owned those stories, flooding them with more and better reporters than anyone. When two heavily armed gunmen wearing body armor wounded ten LA police officers during a North Hollywood bank robbery on March 1, 1997, the Los Angeles Times threw a dozen reporters and just as many editors and photographers on the story, covering every angle, from the fissures it exposed in national gun-control policies to the neighbors who cowered in fear as a shooting spree broke out in the neighborhoods surrounding the Bank of America office on Laurel Canyon and Victory boulevards. The next day, Times readers got eight stories on the shooting. The following year, Chuck Philips and Michael Hiltzik exposed corruption in the entertainment industry, including a charity scam sponsored by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, illegal detoxification for wealthy celebrities, and a resurgence of radio industry payola. As a newspaper, the Times had an impressive breadth and range, far greater, in fact, than the Chicago Tribune. It also had an editorial staff large enough to achieve those lofty ambitions.
