The Deal from Hell (20 page)

On March 13, Hiller stood before the glass-walled offices of Sidley Austin, looking at the grubby streets of downtown Los Angeles below. Madigan was on the phone with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, personally briefing him on the merger. His picture would soon grace the cover of
Business Week
magazine, and stories about Madigan and Fuller would fill pages of the
Wall Street Journal
, all because of an idea that Hiller had proposed the year before. Times Mirror stock had jumped 75 percent that day, rising almost $38 per share to close near $95 per share. Michael Costa, Tribune's investment banker at Merrill Lynch, walked over to Hiller, warily eyeing the minute-to-minute trading stock on his BlackBerry. “He looked up at me and said the market is having a little difficulty with our deal,” Hiller later recalled. Tribune stock, which once had been valued at over $60 per share, had plunged to $27.75. As Hiller watched cars snake by on the streets below, Madigan approached and took in the underwhelming view. Glancing at Hiller, he looked at him and, without missing a beat, deadpanned, “Should we jump?”

I
n early 1999, not long before David Hiller advised John Madigan to buy Times Mirror, an extraordinary series called “Trial and Error” ran on page one of the
Chicago Tribune
. The series blazed a trail of national coverage that would have historic consequences, even though it was news out of Chicago.

In 1997, just after I had been named deputy managing editor for news, which gave me responsibility for the
Tribune
's newsroom, legal affairs reporter Ken Armstrong stopped me as I strolled through the fourth floor of the Tower. He needed access to a LexisNexis database to research every death penalty case that had been appealed in the United States since 1963, and in Illinois since 1977. Database access would cost $18,000, a hefty price tag, given that Armstrong couldn't guarantee the outlay would lead to a story. But his sources in the legal community had told him that many capital cases had been overturned because of prosecutors' misconduct, and LexisNexis was the only way he could authoritatively document whether the tip was true. After a long discussion, I asked Armstrong to write me a memo outlining the proposed story, how he could take the coverage where no other paper
had gone, why the
Tribune
should do it, and how the public and our readers would benefit from the coverage. Then I visited Joe Leonard, a high-powered
Tribune
editor, who controlled the newsroom budget with an iron fist, and got Armstrong the $18,000, which amounted to 30 percent of his salary that year.

Over the next eighteen months, Armstrong plowed through a mountain of data. One search produced 11,000 court opinions. He read every one, poring over the data to extract leads and sources. Robert Blau, the paper's projects editor, monitored Armstrong's progress and soon recruited Maurice Possley, a
Tribune
criminal justice reporter, to help. When their research hit journalistic pay dirt, Armstrong and Possley hit the road, spending hours in courthouses, jails, prisons, bars, and kitchens. They interviewed lawyers, judges, professors, police, con men, crooks, the condemned, and grieving relatives. Every two to three weeks, Blau, a demanding and exacting editor, summoned them to his office for progress reports. Finally, after two years of exhaustive research, “Trial and Error” ran in the paper, carefully documenting how appellate courts had reversed 381 homicide convictions because prosecutors withheld evidence favorable to defendants, allowed witnesses to lie, and engaged in deception designed to win their cases at any cost, even if it meant a death sentence for an impoverished, innocent person with a lousy lawyer.

Eight months later, Armstrong, Possley, and police reporter Steve Mills followed up “Trial and Error” with a series that mined the treasure trove of information generated by the data search. In four riveting parts, they published “The Failure of the Death Penalty in Illinois” and changed the parameters of the debate over capital punishment in America. Newly elected Illinois governor George Ryan put a moratorium on the death penalty in the state two months after the
Tribune
series ran. “A lot of people are like me. The death penalty was a fact of life,” he explained to a
Chicago Tribune
reporter. “But as people become more and more aware of the unfairness, they become less enthusiastic. I question the entire system and the people connected with it.”

The following year, Possley and Mills produced “Cops and Confessions,” a series that exposed how Chicago police used forced,
fabricated, and otherwise problematic confessions, often extracted through torture, to convict 247 people of murder in Cook County between 1991 and 2001. Not all readers appreciated the coverage. Some believed the freed defendants were guilty. But most readers expressed shock that the city's police department could operate with such impunity and disregard for the law they had pledged to enforce.

As an editor, I got the kind of rewards for the coverage that sends a tingle up your spine. On February 1, 2000, in Rome, Italy, the lights in the Coliseum burned for forty-eight hours to memorialize the death penalty moratorium Governor Ryan had imposed. Three years later, in January 2003, late on the day he was released from prison, Aaron Patterson, a thirty-eight-year-old black man who had spent seventeen years on death row for murder because of a coerced confession, walked into the newsroom of the
Chicago Tribune
to thank Mills for a story that had saved his life. Years later in a farewell message to her staff, Lipinski would cite that moment as one of the proudest in her years as the gifted and principled editor of the
Chicago Tribune
. “I will not forget him telling Steve, ‘You're a real life saver, man.'”

By the time Tribune Company pulled the
Los Angeles Times
into its fold, the
Chicago Tribune
regularly produced groundbreaking journalism, the kind that generated a competition between the two papers that would become both healthy and troublesome. Even in the best of times, the
Tribune
never had a staff the size of its new sibling in Los Angeles. Brumback had infused into Tribune Company a phobia for seeking more staff. In my tenure as an editor, the
Tribune
editorial staff peaked at just over 700. When the company acquired the
Los Angeles Times
, its newsroom totaled nearly 1,200, a number that would become a highly divisive symbol of the tension that would flare between Chicago and Los Angeles.

As the editor in charge of the
Tribune
's foreign and national news, I was accustomed to being outgunned by the bigger papers with more reporters and had adopted an editorial mission to align my ambitions to serve readers with the size of my staff. I saw a paper like the
New York Times
, which had a foreign and national news staff twice the size
of mine, as a journalistic floodlight that illuminated the news landscape with expansive coverage. I used the
Tribune
's smaller foreign and national news staff of forty correspondents as a spotlight that focused on issues in the news, deploying my correspondents to write in-depth, enterprising stories that broke new ground or made sense of the day's events. Bringing the staff along on that mission wasn't easy. Journalists are highly competitive; they want their bylines on the big stories. But the strategy eventually sunk in, particularly after George de Lama, an excellent journalist, became my deputy and pushed me to bring enterprise to the news of the day, too. Eventually, the strategy evolved into a special brand of journalism.

I had formed an alliance with Lipinski when Fuller tapped her to run the metro desk, the heart of the newspaper where seasoned journalists break news and newcomers break in. Lipinski had hundreds of journalists on her staff, and she used them to flood the zone on a local story, overwhelming the competition by tossing more and better resources at a story than anyone else. She was a tough, aggressive, and smart editor who zealously protected her newsroom against outside interference or influence.

A newspaper has a range of editors that do a wide variety of jobs. But the overall responsibility is to sift through the vast array of stories and reports about events from throughout the world and pare them down to those that should go into the newspaper every day. On a slow news day, a story about the mayor in Chicago could be the page one headline. A day later, the same story might not even make it in the newspaper because a crush of significant news from elsewhere in the world could simply overwhelm it. The editor and managing editor oversee the process and also set the level of excellence the paper demands from its staff. Lipinski set the bar high:

As the editor in charge of foreign and national news, I supervised the “A” section and the coveted space on page one and had far more travel money than anyone else. So Lipinski and I had formed a partnership: When I needed an extra reporter to cover a big story or when I wanted to hire someone, she would lend me a reporter or consider my job applicant for a spot on metro, where there were always far more job openings. When she needed travel money to send one of her reporters on a trip for a story, I'd free up some dollars from my budget and make space in the “A” section for the story, even if it meant holding a story written by one of the correspondents on the national or foreign staff. The deals led to a partnership of mutual trust and respect that would survive the incredible ordeals we would face as leaders in an industry in upheaval.

Luckily for us, in early 2000, the
Tribune
had as much financial as journalistic muscle. Thanks to revenues gushing in from its papers and broadcast properties, Tribune Company had ample resources when it acquired Times Mirror and remained in fairly good financial shape. The Chicago paper had always guarded its local markets from
penetration from competitors, too, and had built a strong stream of non-newspaper revenues. Tribune Company made $650 million in profit on revenues of $5.3 billion the first year after the deal, a margin of only 12.3 percent, primarily because the adverse effects of September 11, 2001, hurt the bottom line. By 2002, Tribune Company resumed posting the 20 percent plus margins it had delivered every year since 1996. The
Los Angeles Times
, meanwhile, posted margins of 14 or 15 percent.

In the newsroom, we put that money to good work bringing
Tribune
readers signature coverage they couldn't get elsewhere from reporters like John Crewdson, who convinced Lipinski and me to let him investigate how more people die of illness on planes than in crashes. When we reacted skeptically to his pitch, Crewdson fought back, arguing that sketchy statistics from the airline industry and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) purposely diminished the problem; airlines didn't want anyone to know their planes lacked basic emergency medical equipment or that their staffs didn't have proper emergency medical training. The airlines, including Chicagobased United, were loath to even discuss the situation, a stance that made Crewdson more determined to unearth the story.

Once we gave the project a green light, Crewdson, a bear of a man and a brilliant reporter, traveled the country to report and write “Code Blue.” He filed Freedom of Information Act requests that generated documents exposing widespread discrepancies between FAA records involving in-flight illness reports and those on the airlines' own computers or in FAA records on emergency landings. He scrutinized coroner reports from counties in which airports were located to show how airlines avoided reporting an in-flight death by getting the body off the plane so the medical examiner would pronounce the passenger dead in the airport or on the jet bridge.

Readers of means and advertisers occasionally pressured us to back off a story or remove a journalist they found overly aggressive. But we absorbed that pressure. Crewdson later proposed we investigate child charities, the kind that ask you to send a small amount of money to
sponsor some doe-faced child in an impoverished country where a dollar is a dowry. He might as well have proposed a hit job on Bambi. Organizations like Save the Children Federation helped kids. They were considered good guys. Their boards were loaded with influential folks who wouldn't hesitate to use their muscle against some nosy reporter. But the organizations that Crewdson singled out had collected $850 million in donations over the prior four years, and Crewdson questioned whether the money really got to the kids or did any good. So we recruited Lisa Anderson, who had become a national correspondent, Michael Tackett, from the Washington Bureau, and several other
Tribune
reporters to sponsor twelve kids with four charities—Save the Children, Childreach, the Christian Children's Fund, and Children International. The reporters used their own names as sponsors and sent in contributions, usually about $20 a month, for two years, sponsoring kids in some of the world's most remote places. The charities sent our reporter-donors heart-tugging pictures of their children with feel-good narratives spelling out how so little out of their pockets did so much good.