The Deal from Hell (23 page)

Even though Baquet replaced him, Wolinsky readily admits that things got better the day that Baquet set foot in the
Times
newsroom:

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:

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.

Baquet knew he had inherited a great staff at a paper that lacked direction. Like Carroll, he saw the need for focus: “I thought the stories were too long.... It was cacophonous, not a cohesive, coherent paper.” Baquet later recalled.

Much has been made over the years of the failures of the Tribune–Times Mirror merger and of the conflicts spawned by the shotgun marriage of these two storied newspaper companies. Both parties made mistakes. But the complaints and recriminations overshadowed one thing: Initially, the deal worked. It not only worked, it worked well, particularly when it came to the reformation that took place at the
Los Angeles Times
under Puerner, Carroll, and Baquet, three people put in their jobs by the dreaded Tribune Company.

“Overall, I had more time in the newsroom than any editor I know,” Carroll recalled. “Puerner [a longtime
Tribune
veteran] supported my
request to spend nearly all of my time on journalism, not in business-side or corporate meetings. He covered my back so I didn't have [to be on] patrol. That extra time in the newsroom made possible whatever journalistic success I had.” To bolster the paper's features coverage, Carroll hired another
New York Times
veteran, John Montorio, an exceptionally talented editor who went to work upgrading the
Los Angeles Times
feature sections into some of the best in the country. To the consternation of many in Chicago, Fuller strongly supported the team he put in place in Los Angeles, despite carping from Chicago about the size of the
Los Angeles Times
staff, and the new editors and publisher delivered the results he wanted.

Tribune Company had figured the merger would generate $200 million in cost savings. By 2003, Puerner had cut the number of
Times
employees from 5,300 to 3,400. Although he shielded Carroll's newsroom from much of the carnage, he closed fourteen money-losing Our Times zoned editions, initiated $220 million in capital expenditures that boosted the
Times
color printing capacity, and built a new $50 million facility for preprinted ad inserts to offset the loss of classified advertising.

Tribune had rebounded from the damage inflicted by September 11, 2001, posting 2003 operating profits that were up by 70 percent. It used its online assets to take on
Monster.com
, an employment website juggernaut that had come out of nowhere to ravage the classified advertising business of the
Times
and other newspaper companies across the country. Capitalizing on its national scale, Tribune created
CareerBuilder.com
, an online jobs site that competed head on for classified job ads nationally with
Monster.com
. Hiller, the onetime head of Tribune's development arm who would become publisher in Chicago and later in Los Angeles, recalled:

Nowhere would the change be more dramatic than in the editorial department of the
Times
. Initially, Carroll and Baquet helped Puerner generate savings, slashing the paper's so-called news hole—the amount of space dedicated to content after advertising was in place. “When I got there, the
Los Angeles Times
probably had more news hole than any other paper in the country. It was huge,” Baquet recalled. “We had editions in Orange County, Ventura, the Valley, they all had staffs and huge news holes.” As the news holes shrunk, reporters and editors were either bought out or transferred to other sections of the paper, and the size of the staff started to fall, although it remained far larger than in Chicago. “We probably cut too much in Orange County and the Valley,” Baquet said. “About 70 percent of what we cut was about right. We probably went 30 percent too far.”

The managing editor at the
Times
had traditionally run page one meetings and didn't spend time ginning up stories with reporters. But Baquet changed that, switching Wolinsky's title to deputy managing editor and putting him in charge of page one so that Baquet could get his hands dirty working with stories and reporters. Carroll and Baquet refocused the
Times
to make it a national paper of the West, an alternative voice to the East Coast papers that dominate the news media, a strategy that made them vulnerable to charges that they shortchanged local news. Like Baquet, Carroll helped set a new tone at the
paper, revamping its editorial pages and, sometimes, personally editing big stories that were destined to be candidates for prize contests, such as the Pulitzers.

Much had been made over Carroll's zealous pursuit of Pulitzers. David Simon, a former
Baltimore Sun
reporter who went on to create the HBO hit series
The Wire
, purportedly modeled the ethically challenged, Pulitzer-obsessed editor in the show after Carroll, who had been Simon's editor at the
Sun
. There is nothing wrong with an editor coveting a Pulitzer Prize. At heart, that's just what the prize is for—stimulating, promoting, and recognizing outstanding journalism that serves the public good. The top editors of all the Times Mirror and Tribune papers pursued Pulitzers before they were owned by the same stockholders; the deal merely enhanced the competition and made managing editors like Baquet and myself more determined than ever to show each other up with great journalism, the best of which often didn't win Pulitzer prizes. Did our competitive instincts and zest for a better story spawn duplication and inefficiencies that would have made Brumback's skin crawl? Sure.

But so what if some nickel-and-dime corporate apparatchik could find instances of two reporters from Tribune family papers in the same town covering the same story. In reality, the duplication wasn't that extensive or expensive. And the superior journalism promoted intangible benefits to the bottom line. Readers respect newspapers that take on powerful interests, expose abuses of power, and illuminate the dark corners of privilege where secrecy thrives. Good, solid, spirited journalism provides an invaluable, credible public marketplace of ideas and debate for readers and advertisers alike.

Like the
Chicago Tribune
's best coverage, the
Los Angeles Times
journalism had impact. Willman's Pulitzer-winning coverage of Rezulin spawned three or four federal investigations of the FDA's policies. Few other papers had the drive, resources, and guts to take on Walmart as
Los Angeles Times
reporters did in a 2004 series that exposed how the low prices touted by the Arkansas chain came at the expense of the workers in exploited factories far from the American
public's eye. In 2005, I was on the committee of journalists named to select finalists for the Pulitzer. Included in the three stories we selected as finalists was one that made me ache with envy and admiration for Baquet and his staff: a series of stories that documented how Martin Luther King, Jr./Drew Medical Center, a 233-bed hospital just south of the impoverished Watts neighborhood in South Los Angeles, had a long history of harming and, in the worst cases, killing the community members it was meant to serve.

In 2005, the
Los Angeles Times
won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service for its King Drew hospital coverage, but more importantly, the paper focused attention on deadly medical problems and racial injustice at a major public health institution. Carroll was proud of the paper's work. So was Baquet. But there was one man in Chicago who thought journalists like Carroll and Baquet were more interested in pursuing Pulitzers than in winning readers and making profits. He was the first CEO of Tribune ever to come from the broadcasting side of the company and he didn't share the journalists' values.

I
n July 1982, a tall, athletic young man known for his crisp shirts and competitive streak had walked into Tribune Tower to start selling advertising for the company's Chicago broadcasting flagship, WGN-TV. Dennis Joseph FitzSimons had been recruited by Jim Dowdle, a burly white-haired ex-Marine who had started his career as an ad salesman for the
Chicago Tribune
but had left the paper in the 1950s to explore broadcast sales, where he'd worked himself ever upward through the ranks. Thirty years later, in 1981, Tribune rehired Dowdle, this time as president and CEO of Tribune Broadcasting. Tribune Broadcasting's main asset, WGN, had begun broadcasting via satellite, and had become a national superstation—picked up by many fledgling cable stations across the country.

In FitzSimons, Dowdle recognized what he needed to energize the underperforming ad operations at WGN. FitzSimons didn't have the midwestern pedigree common to many Tribune executives—he was a native of Jackson Heights, Queens. But he possessed the up-from-the-bootstraps, free-market mentality that the corporate brass
at the Tower championed. And he had the drive and determination needed to build a national broadcasting powerhouse.

Despite his New York roots, FitzSimons belonged in Chicago. Like Dowdle, he was Irish Catholic; he'd been educated by the Jesuits—first at Fordham Prep high school and later at Fordham University in the Bronx, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in political science. The youngest of four sons of a beer delivery driver and stay-at-home mom, FitzSimons initially considered pursuing law but concluded after a tour in the army reserves that he needed a job more than another degree. He took a low-level job at a stock transfer company until he was laid off in a recession during the early 1970s, and then landed another job as a lowly assistant buyer at Grey Advertising in New York. When he learned that you made more money selling airtime than buying it, he jumped the fence to sales.