by Joan Didion
It was hard, that fall at the Times, to sort out exactly what was going on. A series of shoes had already been dropped. There had been in January 1989 the installation of a new editor, someone from outside, someone whose particular depths and shallows many people had trouble sounding, someone from the East (actually he was from Tennessee, but his basic training had been under Benjamin Bradlee at the Washington Post, and around the Times he continued to be referred to, tellingly, as an Easterner), Shelby Coffey III. There had been some months later the announcement of a new approach to what had become the Times’ Orange County problem, the problem being that a few miles to the south, in Orange County, the Times’ zoned edition had so far been unable to unseat the Orange County Register, the leading paper in a market so rich that the Register had a few years earlier become the one paper in the United States with more full-run advertising linage than the Times.
The new approach to this Orange County problem seemed straightforward enough (the editor of the Orange County edition, at that time Narda Zacchino, would get twenty-nine additional reporters, an expanded plant, virtual autonomy over what appeared in the Times in Orange County, and would report only to Shelby Coffey), although it did involve a new “president”, or business person, for Orange County, Lawrence M. Higby, whose particular skills—he was a marketing expert out of Taco Bell, Pepsi, and H. R. Haldeman’s office in the Nixon White House, where he had been known as Haldeman’s Haldeman—made some people uneasy. Narda Zacchino was liked and respected around the Times (she had more or less grown up on the paper, and was married to Robert Scheer), but Higby was an unknown quantity, and there were intimations that not everyone was entirely comfortable with these heightened stakes in Orange County. According to the Wall Street Journal, Tom Johnson, the publisher, said in an August 1989 talk to the Washington bureau that the decision to give Narda Zacchino and Lawrence Higby autonomy in Orange County had led to “blood all over the floor” in Los Angeles. He described the situation in Orange County as “a failure of mine”, an area in which “I should have done more sooner”.
Still, it was September 1989 before people outside the Times started noticing the blood, or even the dropped shoes, already on the floor. September was when it was announced, quite unexpectedly, that Tom Johnson, who had been Otis Chandler’s own choice as publisher and had in turn picked Shelby Coffey as editor, was moving upstairs to what were described as “broader responsibilities”, for example newsprint supply. The publisher’s office, it was explained, would now be occupied by David Laventhol, who had spent time at the New York Herald Tribune and the Washington Post, had moved next to Newsday (he was editor, then publisher), had been since 1987 the president of the parent Times Mirror Company, and had achieved, mainly because he was seen to have beat the New York Times in Queens with New York Newsday, a certain reputation for knowing how to run the kind of regional war the Los Angeles Times wanted to run in Orange County. David Laventhol, like Shelby Coffey, was referred to around the office as an Easterner.
Then, on October 11, 1989, there was the format change, to which many of the paper’s most vocal readers, a significant number of whom had been comparing the paper favorably every morning with the national edition of the New York Times, reacted negatively. It appeared that some readers of the Los Angeles Times did not want color photographs on its front page. Nor, it appeared, did these readers want News Highlights or news briefs or boxes summarizing the background of a story in three or four sentences without dependent clauses. A Laguna Niguel subscriber described himself in a letter to the editor as “heartsick”. A Temple City reader characterized the changes as “beyond my belief”. By the first of December even the student newspaper at Caltech, the California Tech, was having a little fun at the Times’ expense, calling itself the New, Faster Format Tech and declaring itself dedicated to “increasing the amount of information on the front page by replacing all stories with pictures”. In the lost-and-found classified section of the Times itself there appeared, sandwiched among pleas for lost Akitas (“Has Tattoo”) and lost Saudi Arabian Airlines ID cards and lost four-carat emerald-cut diamond rings set in platinum (“sentimental value”), this notice, apparently placed by a group of the Times’ own reporters: “LA TIMES: Last seen in a confused state disguised as USA Today. If found, please return to Times Mirror Square.”
The words “USA Today” were heard quite a bit during the first few months of the new, faster format, as were “New Coke” and “Michael Dukakis”. It was said that Shelby Coffey and David Laventhol had turned the paper over to its marketing people. It was said that the marketing people were bent on reducing the paper to its zoned editions, especially to its Orange County edition, and reducing the zoned editions to a collection of suburban shoppers. It was said that the paper was conducting a deliberate dumb-down, turning itself over to the interests and whims (less to read, more local service announcements) of the several thousand people who had taken part in the videotaped focus groups the marketing people and key editors had been running down in Orange County. A new format for a newspaper or magazine tends inevitably to suggest a perceived problem with the product, and the insistence with which this particular new format was promoted—the advertising stressed the superior disposability of the new Times, how easy it was, how cut down, how little time the reader need spend with it—convinced many people that the paper was determined to be less than it had been. “READ THIS,” Times rack cards now demanded. “QUICK.”
The architects of the new, faster format became, predictably, defensive, even impatient. People with doubts were increasingly seen as balky, resistant to all change, sulky dogs in the manger of progress. “Just look at this,” Narda Zacchino, who as editor of the Orange County edition had been one of the central figures in the redesign, ordered me, brandishing first a copy of that morning’s USA Today and then one of that morning’s Times. “Do they look alike? No. They look nothing alike. I know there’s been a negative response from within the paper. ‘This is USA Today,’ you hear. Well, look at it. It’s not USA Today. But we’re a newspaper. We want people to read the newspaper. I’ve been struggling down there for seven years, trying to get people to read the paper. And, despite the in-house criticism, we’re not getting criticism from outside. Our response has been very, very good.”
Shelby Coffey mentioned the redesign that Walter Bernard had done in 1977 for Henry Anatole Grunwald at Time. “They got scorched,” he said. “They had thousands of letters, cancellations by the hundreds. I remember seeing it the first time and being jarred. In fact I thought they had lost their senses. They had gone to color. They had done the departments and the type in quite a different way. But it stood up over the years as one of the most successful, maybe the most successful, of the redesigns. I think you have to accept as a given that it’s going to take six months or a year before people get used to this.”
Around the paper, where it was understood that the format change had originally been developed in response to the needs of the Orange County edition, a certain paranoia had taken hold. People were exchanging rumors by computer mail. People were debating whether the Orange County edition should be encouraged to run announcements of local events in column one of page one (“Tonight: Tito Puente brings his Latin Jazz All-Stars to San Juan Capistrano. . . . Puente, a giant among salsa musicians, is a particular favorite at New York’s celebrated Blue Note nightclub. Time: 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 3 3157 Camino Capistrano. Tickets: $19.50. Information: (714) 496-8930”) and still call itself the Los Angeles Times. People were noticing that the Orange County edition was, as far as that went, not always calling itself the Los Angeles Times—that some of its subscription callers were urging telephone contacts to subscribe to “the Orange County Times”. People were tormenting one another with various forms of the verb “to drive”, as in “market-driven” and “customer-driven” and “a lot of people are calling this paper market-driven but it’s not, what driv
es this paper is editorial” and “this paper has different forces driving it than something like The Nation”. (The necessity for distinguishing the Los Angeles Times from The Nation was perhaps the most arresting but far from the only straw point made to me in the course of a few days at the Times.)
The mood was rendered no less febrile by what began to seem an unusual number of personnel changes. During the first few days of November 1989, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner folded, and a visible number of its columnists and its sports and arts and entertainment writers began appearing immediately in the Times. A week or so later, Dennis Britton, who had been, with Shelby Coffey and two other editors, a final contender for the editorship of the Times (the four candidates had been asked by Tom Johnson to submit written analyses of the content of the Times and of the areas in which it needed strengthening), bailed out as one of the Times’ deputy managing editors, accepting the editorship of the Chicago Sun-Times. A week after that, it was announced that Anthony Day, the editor of the Times editorial pages since 1971, would be replaced by Thomas Plate, who had directed the partially autonomous editorial and op-ed pages for New York Newsday and was expected to play a role in doing something similar for Orange County. In the fever of the moment it was easy for some people to believe that the changes were all of a piece, that, for example, Anthony Day’s leaving the editorial page had something to do with the new fast read, or with the fact that some people on the Times Mirror board had occasionally expressed dissatisfaction with the paper’s editorial direction on certain issues, particularly its strong anti-Administration stand on Central American policy. Anthony Day was told only, he reported, that it was “time for a change”, that he would be made a reporter and assigned a beat (“ideas and ideology in the modern world”), and that he would report directly to Shelby Coffey. “There was this strange, and strangely moving, party for Tony last Saturday at which Tom Johnson spoke,” a friend at the Times wrote me not long after Day was fired. “And they sang songs to Tony—among them a version of ‘Yesterday’ in which the words were changed to ‘Tony-day’. (‘Why he had to go, we don’t know, they wouldn’t say’).”
Part of the problem, as some people at the Times saw it, was that neither Shelby Coffey nor David Laventhol shared much history with anybody at the Times. Shelby Coffey was viewed by many people at the Times as virtually unfathomable. He seemed to place mysterious demands upon himself. His manner, which was essentially border Southern, was unfamiliar in Los Angeles. His wife, Mary Lee, was for many people at the Times equally hard to place, a delicate Southerner who looked like a lifetime Maid of Cotton but was in fact a doctor, not even a gynecologist or a pediatrician but a trauma specialist, working the emergency room at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. “You know the golden rule of the emergency room,” Mary Lee Coffey drawled the first time I met her, not long after her arrival in Los Angeles. She was wearing a white angora sweater. “Keep ‘em alive till eight-oh-five.”
Together, Shelby Coffey and David Laventhol, a demonstrated corporate player, suggested a new mood at the Times, a little leaner and maybe a little meaner, a little more market-oriented. “Since 1881, the Los Angeles Times has led the way with award-winning journalism,” a Times help-wanted advertisement read around that time. “As we progress into our second century, we’re positioned as one of America’s largest newspapers. To help us maintain our leadership position, we’re currently seeking a Promotion Writer.” Some people in the newsroom began referring to the two as the First Street Gangster Crips (the Gangster Crips were a prominent Los Angeles gang, and the Times building was on First Street), and to their changes as drive-bys. They were repeatedly referred to as “guys whose ties are all in Washington or New York”, as “people with Eastern ideas of what Los Angeles wants or deserves”. Shelby Coffey’s new editors were called “the Stepford Wives”, and Shelby Coffey himself was called, to his face, “the Dan Quayle of journalism”. (That this was said by a reporter who continued to be employed by the Times suggested not only the essentially tolerant nature of the paper but the extent to which Coffey appeared dedicated to the accommodation of dissent.) During the 1989 Christmas season, a blowup of his photograph, with a red hat pinned above it, appeared in one of the departments at the Times. “He Knows When You Are Sleeping,” the legend read. “And With Whom.”
This question of Coffey and Laventhol being “Easterners” was never far below the surface. “Easterner”, as the word is used in Los Angeles, remains somewhat harder to translate than First Street Gangster Crip. It carries both an arrogance and a defensiveness, and has to do not exactly with geography (people who themselves came from the East will quite often dismiss other people as “Easterners”) but with a virtually uncrackable complex of attitudes. An Easterner, in the local view, believes that Los Angeles begins and ends on the West Side and is about the movie business. Easterners, moreover, do not understand even the movie business: they come out in January and get taken to dinner at Spago and complain that the view is obscured by billboards, by advertisements for motion pictures, missing the point that advertisements for motion pictures are the most comforting possible view for those people who regularly get window tables at Spago. Easterners refer to Los Angeles as El Lay, as La La Land, as the Left Coast. “I suppose you’re glad to be here,” Easterners say to Californians when they run into them in New York. “I suppose you can always read the Times here,” Easterners say on their January visits to Los Angeles, meaning the New York Times.
Easterners see the Los Angeles Times only rarely, and complain, when they do see it, about the length of its pieces. “They can only improve it,” an editor of the New York Times said to me when I mentioned that the Los Angeles Times had undertaken some changes. He said that the paper had been in the past “unreadable”. It was, he said, “all gray”. I asked what he meant. “It’s these stories that cover whole pages,” he said. “And then the story breaks to the next page and keeps going.” This was said on a day when, of eight stories on the front page of the New York Times, seven broke to other sections. “Who back east cares?” I was asked by someone at the Los Angeles Times when I said that I was writing about the changes at the paper. “If this were happening to the New York Times, you’d have the Washington Post all over it.”
When people in Los Angeles talked about what was happening at the Times, they were talking about something harder to define, in the end, than any real or perceived or feared changes in the paper itself, which in fact was looking good. Day for day, not much about the Times had actually changed. There sometimes seemed fewer of the analytic national pieces that used to appear in column one. There seemed to be some increase in syndicated soft features, picked up with the columnists and arts reviewers when the Herald Examiner folded. But the “new, faster-format Los Angeles Times” (or, as early advertisements called it, the “new, fast-read Los Angeles Times’”) still carried more words every day than appear in the New Testament. It still carried in the average week more columns of news than the New York Times or the Washington Post. It still ran pieces at a length few other papers would countenance—David Shaw’s January 1990 series on the coverage of the McMartin child-abuse case, for example, ran 17,000 words. The paper’s editorials were just as strong under Thomas Plate as they had been under Anthony Day. Its reporters were still filing stories full of details that did not appear in other papers, for example the fact (this was from Kenneth Freed in Panama, January 1, 1990) that nearly 125 journalists, after spending less than twelve hours in Panama without leaving Howard Air Force Base, where they were advised that there was shooting on the streets of Panama City (“It is war out there,” the briefing officer told them), had accepted the Southern Command’s offer of a charter flight back to Miami.
The Times had begun, moreover, to do aggressive local coverage, not historically the paper’s strong point, and also to do frequent “special reports”, eight-to-fourteen-page sections, with no advertising, offering wrap-up newsmagaz
ine coverage of, say, China, or Eastern Europe, or the October 1989 Northern California earthquake, or the state of the environment in Southern California. A week or so before Christmas 1989, Shelby Coffey initiated a daily “Moscow Edition”, a six-to-eight-page selection of stories from that day’s Los Angeles Times. This Moscow Edition, which was prepared in Los Angeles, faxed to the Times bureau in Moscow, and delivered by hand to some 125 Soviet officials, turned out to be sufficiently popular that the Moscow bureau received a call from the Soviet Foreign Ministry requesting that the Times extend its publication to weekends and even to Christmas Day.
“Shelby may be fighting more of a fight against the dumbing-down of the newspaper than we know or he can say,” one Times editor, who had himself been wary of the changes under way but had come to believe that there had been among some members of the staff an unjustified rush to judgment, said to me. “That the Times is still essentially the same paper seems to me so plainly the case as to refute the word ‘new’ in ‘the new, faster-format Los Angeles Times’. What small novelty there is would have received very little promotion had it begun as a routine editorial modification. But it didn’t originate in editorial discussion. It originated in market research, which was why it got promoted so heavily. The Times needed a way to declare Orange County a new ball game, and this was it. But you can’t change the paper anywhere without changing it everywhere. And once the Times throws the switch, a colossal amount of current seems to flow through the whole system.”
