The Deal from Hell (46 page)

We were not talking about a lot of money. The difference between my reading of the contract and the company's was at most around $50,000. I didn't leave Tribune with a huge bonus and stock holdings, either. Journalists at Tribune Company were not paid nearly as much as those on the corporate side, and few walked away with bonuses and stock holdings anywhere near the levels of FitzSimons and his allies. I was happy about my choices; I'd made more money as a journalist than I ever dreamed I would, and was able to provide for my family. But I didn't have enough to live off the income from my savings. And there was no way I would sign a “non-disparagement” clause, and voluntarily give up a right that people literally died for. My lawyer
assured me he thought all of the financial issues in the dispute could be settled by giving up just a little, but that the company felt strongly about the muzzle clause. “When I tell them you won't sign it, they get real cool and say that's a real problem,” Cohn explained. “The guy I'm dealing with over there says this is way above him and someone at the very top is calling the shots.” There was only one man at the top at Tribune now—Zell.

I soon learned that Zell had demanded that the Tribune human relations department give him my contract. Zell had also started the company road show that Randy Michaels had advocated in his memo and, as one colleague at the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “he's trashing you.” In a question-and-answer session at the
Times
, Zell told his audience I had “pissed all over” the company where I had worked for nearly thirty years, “shit all over the place,” embarrassing the company and him. I didn't see things that way, and, profanities aside, I thought he was saying some of the same things I had said—that the company needed to worry much more about revenues, still had a lot of cash, and had great assets, a message that contrasted sharply with propaganda perpetuated by bloggers who liked to portray the
Los Angeles Times
as broke and Tribune Company as a failed operation. In 2007, the
Times
generated nearly $200 million in cash flow, off a troubling amount from the $240 million the year before, but hardly the results of a paper that was “broke.”

It was hard to set aside Zell's profanities, given his frequent use of sexual metaphors and foul language on his road show. In Los Angeles, Zell compared the
Times
, which had survived for 126 years, to an old man in need of Viagra who now had to “get it up.” He peppered his public remarks with “fuck this” and “fuck that” and told employees he didn't care if they watched porn at their desks, as long as they produced, adding, “let me know if you find any good sites.” He defended his decision to allow strip-club ads in the
Times
with the quip that it was “un-American not to like pussy,” and admitted to one group of employees that perhaps he needed to “go to language class to de-fuck my language,” but that he was too old.

The whole exercise seemed like a scene out of a juvenile locker room until Zell got to Florida, where he tacked a very public “fuck you” onto his response to a young Latina photographer who had challenged his views about public service journalism. His meeting with the staff of the
Orlando Sentinel
had been videotaped and posted on YouTube for the world to see. More significantly, Zell, who had encouraged people to challenge the status quo, displayed thin skin when he himself was challenged and abruptly rejected suggestions from journalists, whom he pointedly and repeatedly characterized as arrogant elitists.

By the time Zell and Michaels showed up at the Tribune's Washington bureau, media reporters were chronicling the tour, and the resulting leaks and publicity were ugly. He zeroed in on a story that had run in the
Los Angeles Times
during my tenure as editor as an example of the arrogance of the paper. The piece involved a controversy about Zell's attempt to jack up rents at a California trailer park owned by one of the companies in his fold. He told Doyle McManus, the
Times
bureau chief, that one of the reporters who challenged him was an “asshole” who should be gone by midnight and that the bureau should be downsized since the paper doesn't contribute as much money to the company as the
Chicago Tribune
. By the time the tour was done, it was clear that Zell's views of the future mirrored Michaels'.

Theatrics aside, Zell's performance revealed his fundamental misunderstanding of the business he now controlled. At a
Los Angeles Times
printing plant, Zell said newspapers were like any other business. “I am not a newspaper guy,” he said. “I am a businessman and I know that all that matters is the bottom line because if we have a bottom line, we have a newspaper.” While he's right to be concerned about a healthy bottom line, newspaper executives also must take into account their status as a public service business. Readers who care and remain loyal don't judge newspaper executives on profits alone. They look at integrity of the work, the quality of a news report, the journalists' ability to rise above the rabble of daily life and deliver facts in a credible,
nonjudgmental format. Newspapers are also in the business of exposing the fallibility of others, so you had better be ready to place your own conduct under a microscope.

Zell's crude comments, his denunciation of journalists and journalism, and the stupidity of the industry's leadership got wide exposure in the media. In the lingo of the ad markets, he trashed “his brand” and came off as an uncouth clown. He destroyed whatever credibility he and the company had accrued in the months leading to the close of the deal. Roderick at
LA Observed
was understandably thrilled with Zell; he was a headline machine. But many others recoiled at a billionaire with a potty mouth and a megaphone. For my part, I was truly saddened by Zell. In his other business ventures, he had never encountered the obligations shouldered by those who lived by virtue of the First Amendment and the special role of journalism in society. In my dealings with Pate and Larsen, I felt they understood the unique nature of the businesses they had acquired. But Zell's conduct shattered the credibility of his entire organization.

I didn't have much time or inclination to dwell on Zell's antics. I still didn't know from one paycheck to the next when the company might sever my only source of income. My expense payments finally got approved, but the company stonewalled any inquiries about the terms of my contract. I contacted Larry Feldman, Wolinsky's lawyer in Los Angeles, who was itching to sue Tribune Company because he thought its layoff and buyout policies were blatantly ageist. Even he advised me to sign the non-disparagement agreement. “I've read your contract, and there's no question you would win in court,” Feldman admitted. “But your legal fees in litigating this would probably exceed what they owe you.” Even with this counsel, my gut refused. I wouldn't, couldn't, sign it.

Weeks after I'd been fired, Hiller finally named Stanton to succeed me. I had lunch with Stanton shortly thereafter and gave him some advice. He was confident they couldn't fire him but told me they had inserted something during the negotiations over his contract that he called “the O'Shea clause”—a non-disparagement agreement. He
had signed it, and I wished him the best. He graciously attended a farewell party Kathy Kristof, by now a friend and one of the paper's top financial columnists, gave for me at her home, and, as I prepared to leave Manhattan Beach, Stanton and the
Times
, unintentionally I'm sure, did me a huge favor.

The paper ran an investigative story in March disclosing new information supporting rapper Tupak Shakur's claims that he had been assaulted by associates of music executive Sean Diddy Combs in a 1994 incident in New York. The new information in the story was a police report that was soon exposed as a fake by a blogger who had done a little journalistic legwork. Critics eviscerated the
Times
, which had to retract the story. I called Cohn and said we should call the Tribune lawyers and ask them if they really wanted the former editor of the
Los Angeles Times
filing a lawsuit against them at a time like this. Shortly thereafter, Tribune lawyers called Cohen and indicated they might be interested in settling our differences. The company didn't pay me all that I was owed, but I never signed the non-disparagement agreement. Soon I heard that Hiller and Stanton ordered cuts that would take newsroom staffing levels from around 920 journalists to the mid-600 range. Within weeks, rebels in the
Times
newsroom covertly unfurled a huge three-story banner on the side of the paper's downtown Los Angeles headquarters. In big, thick, red-and-black capital letters it read: “ZELL'S HELL.”

Journalists in Los Angeles might have had it bad, but at least they were 1,000 miles away from Tribune Tower. As I returned to Chicago, I encountered editors and journalists who had Zell and Michaels breathing down their necks. Lipinski had honed her skills as a reporter in City Hall and developed the ability to instinctually pick up on subtle signs that something might be amiss. In April 2007, shortly after the company had agreed to the Zell deal, Lipinski's first doubts about Zell surfaced during her lunch with him in the small, private dining room
in his real estate office across town. Initially, the lunch involved a good conversation about journalists and how they think. Zell proudly told Lipinski how many people he'd made millionaires, and she advised him to focus on more than wealth when talking to the newsroom: “I told him you need to know that's not enough. Ideally, we all want to make money and have great journalism, but making money without great journalism won't go well.”

Midway through the lunch, the conversation turned sharply when Zell brought up the profile that Greg Burns had written about him for the
Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine
in 2004. “He remembered everything about it,” Lipinski recalled, and his complaints about the story elevated into a screed against journalists, sentiments that would be expressed with increasing frequency over time.

Not long after the deal closed, Lipinski suffered one of the first casualties caused by the new owners—George de Lama, my good friend and longtime deputy who had succeeded me in running the newsroom at the
Tribune
. Proud of his heritage as a Latino and loyal to the
Chicago Tribune
, de Lama decided to leave the paper in May 2008. He didn't like the way the new owners disparaged a journalistic heritage of which he was proud, but an incident on Zell's road trip convinced him to give notice.

While at the
South Florida Sun Sentinel
in Fort Lauderdale, Zell made remarks that stuck in de Lama's craw: “I remember what he said. He said, ‘You know we own this baseball team and we've got this mother-fucking schmuck that makes $25 million a year to play outfield and he can't even speak English.'” Zell was referring to Alfonso Soriano of the Chicago Cubs, a Latino. Coming on the heels of his crude put-down of a Latina photographer in Orlando, de Lama thought the remark displayed a remarkably callous and ignorant view of the heritage of one of the
Tribune
's largest pool of potential readers. “I could almost hear my dad saying to me, are you going to take that?” de Lama remembered. As he saw it, Zell and his henchmen had greatly disrespected a company for which he had risked his life as a correspondent. He resigned without another job.

In New York, de Lama's cousin, Louie Sito, got a break when the judge overseeing the sentencing of Sito and eight others involved in the
Newsday
circulation scandal decided not to send any of them to jail, leveling fines and forfeitures of $115,000 for Sito to $15,000 for Garcia, who had ordered that
Hoy
circulation numbers be inflated.

Banar's probe had taken on all of the trappings of an investigation that no one really wanted—long delays in sentencing, turnover of the staff in the trenches, and a U.S. Attorney who wanted to be a federal judge, not exactly a good posture from which to attack the local newspaper. The investigation started when Roslynn Mauskopf was U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, but she was appointed a federal judge in late 2007. By the time Sito and the others had been sentenced nine months later, Banar and most of her team had also moved on to other jobs outside of the government.

“I remain dubious [that the higher-ups at Tribune Company] didn't know what was going on,” Judge Weinstein, who had presided over the
Newsday
case, told me. “I thought it would be unfair to give jail time to [lower-ranking employees].” He sentenced Sito and the others to probation and community service in addition to the fines. When asked what in the papers and records of the case made him think the prosecution didn't go far enough, he smiled and said: “Eighty-seven years of life in New York City, working on the docks, being on the bench for 40 years. You know, you gain a certain amount of moxie.”