by James O'Shea
The headline in the New York Times of September 15, 2006, said it all: “Los Angeles Times Editor Openly Defies Owner’s Call for Job Cuts.” The day before, Baquet had gone public with his opposition to more budget cuts in a Los Angeles Times story, and his publisher, Jeff Johnson, had backed him up. “Newspapers,” Johnson said in a quote that infuriated Smith and FitzSimons,“can’t cut their way to the future.” Gambling that the Tribune Company wouldn’t fire him, Baquet reiterated that he was not opposed to cuts. “But you can go too far,” he said, “and I don’t plan to do that.” The simmering tensions between Tribune and its largest paper had reached a tipping point. I called Baquet to voice support but also to warn him that taking the controversy public placed him in uncharted waters. Smith and FitzSimons summoned Johnson to Chicago, berated him for his comments, and offered him an opportunity to back down. Johnson declined the offer and headed back to Los Angeles. He had, in the words of the Times columnist Steve Lopez, “drunk Baquet’s Kool-Aid.”
A week later as the Tribune board met to hear about FitzSimons’ compromise plan to deal with the Chandlers, the New York Times ran a September 21, 2006, story entitled: “At Los Angeles Times, a Civil Executive Rebellion.” With that headline, the Los Angeles Times newspaper and boardroom became a national stage in a fight between editors and owners of newspapers: “Would Mr. FitzSimons fire Mr. Johnson and Mr. Baquet and risk a full-scale revolt at Tribune’s largest property?” the Times story asked. “Or will he try to smooth things over and thereby risk undermining his authority with other Tribune editors and publishers?” The fight was on.
A group of twenty Los Angeles civic leaders had written a letter to the Tribune voicing concerns about budget cuts and calling on the beleaguered company to invest more money in the paper or sell it to someone who would. Baquet clearly wanted to rally support for the paper during a time of intense pressures, not only in Los Angeles but across the country. The Washington Post, the New York Times, papers in Dallas and Akron, Ohio, all had announced layoffs and buyouts as they struggled with the demands of Wall Street investors and the changing habits of readers and advertisers on Main Street. As prospective buyers like Broad and Geffen circled the Times, the newsroom circulated petitions voicing solid support for Baquet. Most of the editorial department signed them. The staff commissioned Baquet T-shirts, and rumors emerged of a “suicide pact” between Baquet’s top three aides, managing editor Doug Frantz, features editor John Montorio, and managing editor for readership and production Leo Wolinsky, all of whom had reputedly agreed to resign if Baquet were replaced.
On November 9, 2006, the New York Times ran yet another story, one that carried ominous implications for Wolinsky: “David Geffen spends more time schmoozing with an elite cadre of journalists than just about any other mogul in Hollywood,” the Times article read. “The billionaire often invites them to his sprawling estate in the heart of Beverly Hills, where De Koonings and Pollocks hang on the walls. In September, his guest was Leo Wolinsky, a managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, and they approached the delicate question of whether Mr. Geffen might try to buy the struggling newspaper.”
FitzSimons had already expressed his disregard for Wolinsky. When he’d arrived, Baquet had wanted Frantz to be his managing editor for news and had moved Wolinsky aside, putting him in charge of the things that Baquet didn’t have time for or didn’t like to do—the mechanics of producing the paper. He had asked Wolinsky to investigate the papers’ slide in readership and what it would take to reverse it. Having someone in place to tackle readership issues pleased FitzSimons, and he told Wolinsky to call Kern to have him line up several readership experts to interview. “I didn’t need Gerry Kern to make phone calls for me. I could do that myself,” Wolinsky recalled. “I actually called every one of the people that Dennis mentioned, but when he asked Kern if I had called him, Kern said no.” In point of fact, Wolinsky did a thorough report on the Times readership and circulation problems, which he presented in writing. And he organized a one-day off-site meeting for top Times editors at his house to discuss the issue. But no one made FitzSimons aware of the effort. He thought Wolinsky had ignored him—something akin to mortal sin. “That’s when I got on his bad side,” Wolinsky recalled. The New York Times article simply hardened FitzSimons’ views about the Los Angeles Times and Wolinsky.
In October, I wandered into the Tribune on the early side and sat down as usual in Lipinski’s office to discuss the morning paper and any potential problems looming on the horizon. “They’re going to ask you to go to LA,” she said abruptly. I told her there was no way I would do that, and she responded that it was up to one of the two of us to go. Lipinski said there were two big papers in the company and each of us would have to run one of them. Hiller had asked her to go to LA, but she felt that would create change and stress in both newsrooms. “I suggested it was better to let me continue on in Chicago while you went to LA,” she said. The situation in LA was considered impossible in many newsrooms across the country because of the public nature and intensity of the dispute between Baquet and Johnson and their bosses back in Chicago. I remember thinking, nothing is impossible, and felt a stirring inside me that responded to daunting challenges. But the situation was complicated. Dean Baquet was a friend of Ann Marie’s and mine and neither of us wanted to do anything to undermine him. When Lipinski asked if I would just have breakfast with Hiller, then publisher of the Chicago Tribune, I agreed but only to discuss the situation (not my possible transfer) and give him my opinion about what was happening in LA.
The next day, a cloudy October morning, we sat down together at Chicago’s Intercontinental Hotel. We got right down to business. Hiller told me the Tribune planned to replace both Johnson and Baquet and that he would soon be leaving to become publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Everyone, he said, including FitzSimons agreed that I should replace Baquet. He then asked if I would agree to be an “acting editor” of the Times. I let him know in no uncertain terms that I would not talk about Baquet’s job behind his back—he needed to deal with Baquet, not me. And second, if he and Smith were looking for someone to go out to Los Angeles to cut the staff, they should get someone else, because I would not do it.
Hiller then asked me if I would consider joining him if he and Baquet couldn’t work out their problems. I reiterated that I would consider it only after he dealt with Baquet. I agreed to meet with Smith on Monday and give him my perspective and to provide Hiller with an objective, written critique of the strengths and weaknesses of the Los Angeles Times from a journalistic perspective, regardless of who was the paper’s editor. Before the breakfast ended, Hiller gave me his word that he would try to work with Baquet if I would agree to consider the job should the two men fail to see eye to eye about the paper’s future.
On Monday, I advised Smith to back off on plans to fire Johnson and Baquet. I thought it would be a public relations disaster. I offered to go to Los Angeles and iron out a compromise plan to smooth things over. “Do they both have to go?” I asked. Smith replied: “Jeff has to go. Dean doesn’t, but Jeff for sure.” He and FitzSimons felt that Johnson’s refusal to issue a statement rescinding his hostile position sealed his fate. But it was clear to me that Smith was thinking of replacing Baquet. Referring to a tolerance for budget cuts, Smith said, “We all reach our limits.” When that happens, Smith firmly believed that a change in leadership was needed. He told me the company needed someone with strong journalistic credentials to settle down a rebellious newsroom. He allowed that Kern had suggested he become the editor, but Smith had told him he would be “toxic” in the Los Angeles Times newsroom. “We’re depending on you to do this, Jim,” Smith said. But in the next breath, he said he would give Hiller a shot at working with Baquet.
I left the meeting and called Baquet, who asked if I had any intelligence on what was going on in Chicago. I put my cards on the table: “Something’s going on, my friend. They just offered me your job, and I’m going to tell you what I told them. I told th
em I wouldn’t talk about your job behind your back. Jeff is out. Hiller is going to replace him. I think you should work with them because your paper is not going to be better off if you leave.” Baquet, rather generously, said he would support my appointment as editor in Los Angeles if that’s what it came to, but that he would try to work with Hiller in the meantime, even though he doubted it would work out. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d get my beach shorts ready.”
Hiller had already left for Los Angeles to attend a black-tie celebration of the Times’ 125th anniversary. The next day, he replaced highly regarded Johnson as publisher, just as Johnson learned that his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Hiller and Baquet met for breakfast. When the waitress asked them what they wanted to drink, Baquet jokingly said Hiller would have some Kool-Aid. Both men laughed. Back in Chicago, FitzSimons summoned me to his office and pulled out the lengthy critique of the Times that I had written for Hiller. Again, I said that I wouldn’t talk about Baquet’s job behind his back, but it was clear that he was interviewing me for the editor’s job. “Tell me,” he asked, “what do you think of Leo Wolinsky?”
15
Up Against a Saint and a Dead Man
Baquet stood before the audience of editors at the Associated Press Managing Editors convention in New Orleans in 2006. He had just pushed back when his budget-cutting bosses in Chicago said “cut,” and he’d survived to fight another day. FitzSimons and Smith may have fired Johnson for his intemperate remarks about cuts, but Hiller had lived up to his word and tried to work with Baquet. Although Baquet didn’t cover any new ground in his New Orleans speech, this time he spoke not simply as an editor, but as a newspaper industry hero. His battle cry for other editors to stand up and fight produced rousing, rebellious cheers (and headlines) from a largely sympathetic and admiring audience. In Los Angeles, Hiller was far from pleased.
I took a call from Hiller at my home just after the first story about Baquet’s speech got traction. I knew that any agreements between Baquet and Hiller were tenuous, but I hoped they could work through their differences. Even though the impossible challenge in Los Angeles had stirred the Don Quixote in me, I refused to undermine a friend for a mere opportunity. And for personal reasons, I was eager to stay in Chicago: I wanted to convince Lipinski that a roving correspondent’s job based in Rome would be a fitting reward for my service to the paper.
Hiller, who seemed stunned at Baquet’s remarks, asked me what I made of them. I told him he had to consider them in the context of the moment and of the news industry writ large, but Baquet’s stance had clearly rattled Hiller. He said he didn’t know if he could work with Baquet and said that I should make sure “my boots were ready.” Once Baquet returned to Los Angeles, he and Hiller had dinner and agreed that theirs was not a match made in Hollywood. Hiller said they should “sleep on it,” but the next day he notified Baquet that he wanted a new editor. For better or worse, I was LA bound.
The honor that accompanies the editor title at a famous newspaper evaded me during the next few days. With Baquet’s support, I accepted the job in Los Angeles and said my goodbyes in Chicago to a newsroom that I had helped build over the past fifteen years. I also had to deal with a surge of news coverage about the change of command. Every editor and journalist should become the focus of a hot news story. I was shocked at the sloppy and shabby reporting, particularly on the Internet, where reporters and bloggers picked up stories on me and repeated them without bothering to phone or verify the facts. Of the hundreds of stories written by fellow journalists, only a handful of reporters—from Tribune papers; the New York Times; and one blogger, the notorious Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood—bothered to call and confirm details in reports riddled with errors. Many of my friends thought I was crazy for agreeing to go to Los Angeles, and one asked how I could go help “those people” after the way the journalists in Los Angeles had disparaged colleagues in Chicago.
But I had made up my mind to accept the job if Hiller and Baquet couldn’t work things out. And I actually felt that I could make a contribution. I left my newsroom for another one 1,000 miles west, determined to stay in Los Angeles as long it took to help a newsroom in turmoil and a company that had been good to me. Once I arrived in Los Angeles, the impact of what had happened hit me as I was driving out of LAX and Wolinsky called to ask me how I wanted my name to appear on the masthead.
I pulled my car over and just sat there absorbing the moment. “Just use James O’Shea,” I told Wolinsky, “no middle initial.” I was alone in a rental car with no one to help celebrate a battlefield promotion. (My wife had wisely decided to remain in her job at the Field Museum in Chicago.) After thirty-five years in the newspaper business, my name would appear on the November 13, 2006, edition of the Los Angeles Times as editor of one of journalism’s crown jewels, the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in the county and a major force in news around the globe. As I maneuvered onto the freeway and headed for my hotel in downtown Los Angeles, I started to think about the one thing greater than the esteem that accompanied the title: the challenge I faced as a newly minted editor in the eye of a journalistic storm that was shaking the news business to its core.
I had barely checked into my hotel when Hiller called and suggested we have dinner. He seemed thrilled to see me. His first few weeks on the job had been rough, addressing a hostile newsroom after engineering the exit of two popular leaders. Unhappy newsrooms were nothing new. But entering the Times at that moment was a little like being tossed into a pot of boiling oil: Most of the newsroom hated the paper’s new publisher. Hiller admitted to me that he’d never experienced anything like the hostility he encountered with Baquet’s departure. He hadn’t helped himself when he wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times about his racquetball games with Donald Rumsfeld, the infamous Republican Defense Secretary who had just stepped down after maneuvering the United States into an unpopular war.
The next day I walked into the Times’ historic Globe Lobby as editor for the first time. Three floors above, the staff had plastered the newsroom with pictures of Baquet and Otis Chandler. The building pass I had received from the security guard in the lobby said it all: It was good for one day. I was the paper’s third editor in two years. Entering the newsroom and taking in the images of Baquet and the beloved, late Chandler legacy, I thought: “Okay, I’m up against a saint and a dead man.” The situation was decidedly tense, but it was also thrilling. Across the nation, anyone interested in the future of journalism had their eyes glued to the situation in Los Angeles. Journalists lived for great stories, and I had a doozy. “No matter what you do,” Doug Frantz, the paper’s managing editor, told me, “you will always be viewed as a hatchet man from Chicago in this newsroom.”
Most of the paper’s journalists sat on the second and third floors of the Times’ sprawling six-story, art deco building. The news department on the third floor was a seedy affair with a threadbare green carpet, yellowish lighting that made everyone look pallid, and crowded, grimy cubicles. The remodeled features department on the floor below created a reverse upstairs-downstairs effect. In contrast to many newsrooms with large, open city rooms, the Los Angeles Times’ resembled a maze with reporters and editors crammed into small, crowded spaces surrounded by the traditional newsroom flotsam: discarded zoning commission binders; books and once vital notebooks, outdated City Council agendas; Jimmy Carter political campaign credentials; and long-forgotten, discarded personal effects.
Some of the journalists I would meet in the coming days—who well knew that the newsroom was often its own worst enemy—told me about colleagues who had perfected the art of laziness and had limited their output to one measly story a year. Most of the staff had blithely read about the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs in California’s airline and defense industries but treated a relative handful of job cuts in the Times newsroom as a threat to the First Amendment. Journalists across America were in denial, but nowhere was that more glaring and public than at th
e Los Angeles Times.
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.