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Thu, Mar

CityWatch Today: The LA Times, Once a Print-Media Tragedy, is Rising from the Near-Dead

WORLD WATCH

 

GUEST WORDS--Having survived a foul-mouthed owner, “frat boys,” and new-media loopiness, LA’s paper of record is now journalism happy-news, with a passel of prestige hires and a billionaire running it “like a family project.” But not everything is rosy in El Segundo.

Of all the once-mighty media organizations that have been brought to their knees, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more tragic saga than that of the Los Angeles Times. The 138-year-old broadsheet was decimated by the same market pressures that have turned newspapers all over America into sad shells of their former selves. Print advertising? Off a cliff. Newsroom headcount? Down by hundreds. Foreign bureaus? Poof.

But the story of the Los Angeles Times over the past 15 years is far more Shakespearean than most. The latter-day management of the Tribune Company, and all of its subsequent corporate permutations, resulted in a well-documented series of scandals, disasters, and embarrassments for the Times and its then-sister titles (the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun,etc.). There was the profanity-laced reign of Sam Zell, who landed Tribune in bankruptcy and famously remarked to a journalist during a meeting in one of the company’s newsrooms, “Fuck you.” There was the downfall of various top Tribune executives, who were exposed for running the company like a boys’ locker room, as opposed to a respected institution bearing the legacy of LA’s legendary Chandler family.

More recently, the “Tronc” era, under Chicago businessman Michael Ferro, was a combination of ludicrous digital jargon (“harness the power of our local journalism, feed it into a funnel, and then optimize it”), head-scratching strategy dictums (remember when the L.A. Times was supposed to go global with bureaus in Hong Kong, Seoul, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Lagos, Moscow, and Mexico City?), and, of course, more bad behavior. NPR revealed two sexual harassment lawsuits and accusations of inappropriate conduct involving newly installed L.A. Times publisher Ross Levinsohn (he denied the charges, was cleared by an internal probe, and moved to a different job within Tronc). Additionally, two women accused Ferro of sexual harassment and inappropriate advances, and to top it off, as NPR also reported, there was a dinner with a group of company executives to whom Ferro allegedly complained that Los Angeles was run by a “Jewish cabal.” (Ferro denied the allegations.)

In the midst of it all, the Times newsroom was on the verge of insurrection last year over an ill-fated leadership shake-up, the unexplained suspension of a popular business editor, and an apparent effort to build a shadow newsroom while the existing staff was unionizing. “They just had an unbelievable string of assholes running the place,” one former L.A. Times journalist told me. (Read the rest.

-cw