The Deal from Hell (3 page)

But the main reason for the dismissive treatment of the
Tribune
had to do with status and power. Although editors and reporters pay lip service to the quality of their journalism, the traditional pecking order measured big metro papers by the size of their staffs, the clout of their Washington operations, the reach of their foreign staffs, and the number of staff-written stories that filled their pages (as opposed to those filed by wire services, such as the Associated Press, the newspaper cooperative that services all member papers).

As an editor, I often used wires for routine pieces, freeing
Tribune
staff writers to craft stories I couldn't get on the wires or to bring enterprise and spark to the big stories of the day, a practice that benefited readers but denigrated the paper in the eyes of journalists who felt that every story should be staff written. Reporters appearing regularly on
the network news talk shows and National Public Radio boosted a paper's status, too, but
Tribune
journalists, as stewards of the Midwest, were interviewed less frequently than their counterparts on the East and West coasts. When media critics wrote about news organizations that covered foreign and national news, many failed to mention the
Chicago Tribune
, even though the paper maintained two dozen prize-winning news bureaus throughout the United States and the world. I hoped that the
Tribune
, by acquiring the
Los Angeles Times
, would gain the power and stature necessary to give voice to the Midwest and create a platform to showcase our outstanding journalism.

After Willes and Madigan met, both returned to their respective headquarters. Months would pass before their paths would cross again. Willes forgot about the proposal, but Madigan didn't. A backstabbing billion-dollar drama would play out in the city where drama is literally made.

No one has ever told the story of the biggest merger in the history of American journalism and its long-lasting implications. Embedded in the failure of the marriage of the Tribune Company with the Times Mirror Company is a far broader story of monumental egos, fallible souls, larger-than-life characters, and cultural clashes about the collapse of newspapers—the institutions that write the first, crucial draft of history and the only industry America's forefathers considered important enough to single out in the U.S. Constitution. The conventional wisdom is that newspapers—and by that I mean the credible, edited information they deliver, and not just the paper and ink—fell into a death spiral because of forces unleashed by declining circulations and the migration of readers to the Internet. But the Internet and declining circulations didn't kill newspapers, any more than long stories, skimpy attention spans, or arrogant journalists did. What is killing a system that brings reliably edited news and information to readers' doorsteps every morning for less than the cost of a cup of coffee is the way that the people who run the industry have
reacted
to those forces. The lack
of investment, the greed, incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy, and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public's are responsible for the state of the newspaper industry today. I saw it, both as a longtime reporter and as an editor at the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Los Angeles Times
.

In the fall of 2006,
Tribune
executives asked me to leave my job as managing editor running the
Chicago Tribune
newsroom to become editor of the
Los Angeles Times
. In normal circumstances, being named editor of a storied paper would have been a capstone to a successful career. But these were not normal times. If I took the job, I would become the paper's third editor in just over two years, preceded by editors who left after nasty, public fights with their financially pressed bosses back in Chicago over continual demands for budget cuts. The
Los Angeles Times
newsroom had become ground zero in a saga that pitted editors of newspapers against their owners and Wall Street patrons.

Each day, I had walked into the newsroom where I was determined to fight for the integrity of the news, no matter what. My passion for journalism and the interests of my staff had earned me respect in Chicago. But in Los Angeles, my long-standing ties to the Tribune Company would overshadow any of my accomplishments as an editor and journalist. “I don't care what you do here,” one longtime friend and member of the
Times
staff told me. “You will always be viewed as a hatchet man from Chicago in this newsroom.”

Many friends and acquaintances urged me to turn down the opportunity. The odds that I would fail were high, particularly given the mistrust and resentment in Los Angeles of anyone from Chicago. The Chandler family had lost faith in Tribune Company and created a poisoned atmosphere in the city and in the boardroom. A new editor would be greeted by attacks from readers angry about cuts in staff and space that the city fathers blamed on Chicago. A number of friends at the
Chicago Tribune
couldn't understand why I would go to rescue journalists who had treated us so disrespectfully. “Remember,” one close friend said, “these are the people who refused to wear lanyards [securing
their 2004 Democratic National Convention credentials around their necks] because they had the name
Tribune
on them.” The prevailing view was that I would walk into an impossible situation.

But I had always followed my guts in a business where instincts rarely failed me, and my guts argued otherwise. As the son of an electrician and a housewife who had never finished high school, I had watched my parents overcome incredible obstacles. When I was a teenager, my dad died after a heroic battle with throat cancer. At age thirteen, I literally fought and conned my way into my first job, selling peanuts and hot dogs at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. I had survived military school, the notoriously tough Christian Brothers, the U.S. Army, and a grandmother whose husband called her the “War Department.” I responded to challenges like Pavlov's dogs to a bell. I rejected the conventional wisdom, too. I would not be walking into an impossible situation.

Of course, I had doubts about entering such a poisonous atmosphere charged with raw emotions, wounded pride, and barely concealed contempt for anyone from Chicago. But my grandfather, a born storyteller nicknamed “Sawdust,” had taught me early on the power of a good narrative to overcome adversity. I had a good story. I was first and foremost a journalist, someone who had represented other journalists well and who was not afraid to challenge authority. I was a newsman who would try to solve the huge problems that the
Times
faced without diminishing the quality or integrity of a great newspaper. I could not pass up the honor and challenge of being editor of the
Los Angeles Times
. So I took the job, hopelessly entwining my story and my fate with the narrative of a mega-merger that would go bad, one that would play a signature role in the collapse of an entire industry. For better or worse, I became eyewitness and participant in “the deal from hell.”

G
ene Raffensperger swung around in the chair in front of the city desk and looked at his new reporter. I had shown up for my first day as a journalist on a daily newspaper wearing a wafer-thin, butter-colored safari jacket, tennis shoes, and bell-bottoms, which would have been fine were I in, say, Dallas. But I was in Des Moines, Iowa, a good two feet of snow covered the ground, the wind howled, the temperature hovered in the single digits, and the snow continued to fall. Scanning me skeptically from head to toe, Raffensperger, known in the newsroom simply as “Raff” finally asked, “You O'Shea?”

“Yes,” I replied, somewhat sheepishly, wondering whether I should say anything about my clearly out-of-sync wardrobe. In my own defense, I had
planned
to buy a good winter coat in Columbia, Missouri—en route to Des Moines. It was in Columbia, at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, that I'd just earned my master's degree. But I was in my twenties, a carefree time of life when I opted for parties, pot, and pretty girls over a decent winter coat. “O'Shea,” Raff said, scanning my face. “ We've got one hell of a story on our hands.” He
explained that five high school kids on the east side of Des Moines had gone to a drive-in movie the previous night. They'd kept their car running to stay warm, but snow had fallen so hard it had blocked the car's tailpipe. Exhaust had seeped into the car, and all five kids had been asphyxiated. Raff 's order to “go over there and talk to the parents,” seemed unreal. I had never imagined that my first day as a reporter on a metro daily would involve talking to parents about their dead kids. “Get pictures from the high school yearbooks, ages, quotes, everything,” Raff barked. “We want everything,
everything
.”

A tough editor in his forties who spit out questions like a Gatling gun, Raff wore horn-rimmed glasses and smoked a pipe. He could be funny at times and gruff at others, particularly when he was working with a rookie like me. Before I headed out the door on that cold winter day on my first assignment for the
Des Moines Register
, Raff rubbed his head and eyeballed me quizzically. “You ever done anything like this before?” he asked, his voice pitched with excitement. When I told him no, I hadn't, he sat me down at a nearby desk and stared straight into my eyes. His voice softened. “You probably think these parents are going to think, ‘This guy's got a lot of nerve showing up here at a time like this,' right?” I didn't have to answer. “Look, O'Shea, just go there and you tell them, ‘We know this is a bad time and you're in grief, but we want to get everything in the paper right. You may be upset at my coming here, but we know you would
really
be upset if we got something wrong.' Got that?” Raff demanded. I nodded and out the door I went, slipping and sliding in my old green Ford Maverick through the snowy, unfamiliar streets of east Des Moines, a working-class neighborhood.

Despite Raff 's pep talk, I would rather have spent a night in jail than show up at the front door of a house full of mourning parents. When I finally found the house where they were assembled, I approached the front door, knocked, and watched with dread as it swung open and I looked at the stricken faces of grieving family members staring at an intruder with the unfathomable sadness of parents who had lost their children. I took a deep breath and, before I thought twice
about it, gave my pitch. Raff was right; the families wanted to talk, and talk, and talk. Late that evening, I left with
everything
I could imagine that Raff would want. Now I had to write the story. After my first day as a daily newspaper reporter, the next morning's
Register
had a six-column banner headline story on page one, “By James O'Shea.” Only the pros at the paper could spot the deft touch of an editor like Raff, who could write about tragedy as easily as most people could write a check.

I wish I could say that my first day in the newsroom of the
Des Moines Register
represented the culmination of a classic newspaper apprenticeship that started with a paper route, evolved to the editor's chair at the high school newspaper, and ended in a real newsroom. But my journey took a different path. I grew up in a working-class north St. Louis neighborhood so pronouncedly Catholic and Democrat that I felt sorry for the kid down the street whose dad was a banker and Republican. I had a paper route, but not for any dream of headlines and press passes. Guys in my neighborhood hustled newspapers to pick up spare change, but in my neck of the woods, the
real
reason they coveted a paper delivery job was because Fuzzy, the man who recruited us, would show us photographs of naked women once we'd signed on.

In St. Louis, I attended a military high school run by the Christian Brothers where the only thing I really learned was how to take a punch. I graduated third-lowest in my class, only because I rallied academically in my senior year. My older sister says she knew I was destined to be a newspaperman when, at the age of nine, I sold her diary to her boyfriend for five bucks.

By the time I got to the University of Missouri, most of my family expected I would be quickly tossed out, including my dad, who had told my mom that sending me to college was a waste of time. Thanks to my mom, the only person who believed in me at the time, I prevailed against all odds and graduated with a degree in English and philosophy, a Hemingway/Spinoza spin-off with zero idea what I was going to do with my life.

I got into the newspaper business in the army during the buildup to the Vietnam War. Instead of a tour in the steamy jungles of Southeast Asia, I ended up with an emergency assignment to Korea after some North Koreans shot at a bunch of GIs clearing brush in the demilitarized zone. The Pentagon, fearing an attack by a hostile North Korea, sent me and hundreds more to Korea during a frigid January so the North Koreans would be forced to stop and kill us before going south. We had rifles but no ammo. Bluffing North Koreans by running around with empty guns wasn't my idea of gallantry, so I started looking around for another opportunity and secured a spot on the 7th Infantry Division newspaper,
The Bayonet
. Long story short, I got into the newspaper business to get out of the infantry, not exactly an altruistic motive, but one that led me back to graduate school after the army and to the newsroom of the
Des Moines Register
.