The Deal from Hell (9 page)

Even though most journalists native to Los Angeles coveted jobs at the
Times
, some balked at taking a job in a bureau such as the South Bay, one of several where reporters were referred to derisively as “zonies” by those lucky enough to hold jobs at the big newsroom on Second and Spring Streets. “The editors downtown were a little snooty about taking stories from the bureaus,” said Kristof, who went to work at the
Times
as a college intern and would become one if its star financial columnists. “You were just not taken that seriously.” Kristof said the zones were considered somewhat of a backwater at the
Times
. “They were fully staffed but they used to publish only three times a week. You could get your pants kicked off because you could write a story and it might not appear until three days later.” Wolinsky was transferred from
the South Bay to Orange County, which was considered another “zonie” bureau, but opportunity struck when the
Times
needed someone to help cover the sprawling Los Angeles County beat.

A highly regarded and respected Los Angeles journalist, Bill Boyarsky, who ran the City County Bureau, was everything that Wolinsky wanted to be. He recalled, “I met him at a journalism conference before I got to the
LA Times
in 1977. He was a smart writer, urbane and sophisticated, someone who had written books and won journalism prizes. He was my hero and my mentor.” The
Times
had hired Boyarsky off an AP picket line, and his solid journalistic practices soon made him one of Otis' newsroom confidants, someone who appreciated and understood that the values Otis had embedded in the newsroom were not something to be taken for granted, but a legacy to be embraced and passed on to younger journalists who would listen to him. “Bill said if things worked out at the City County Bureau, I might be able to stay,” remembered Wolinsky. So, in 1983 he started covering the board of supervisors for Los Angeles County.

The City County desk also represented a near-death experience for Wolinsky.

As it turned out, many of the details in the 1985 story and the picture that ran in the paper were of the wrong person.

Parts of the story confused a law professor of the highest standing, who had the same name, with the craven wheeler-dealer. “I figured my career was over,” said Wolinsky. “We did a page one correction the same size of the story. It was incredible. I don't think anyone ever saw anything like it. I think they paid him a settlement, too. All of the bigwigs went over the story. There were a lot of similarities; they had the same name; they were both lawyers; one worked for Pat Brown, the other for Jerry Brown; one reporter was in Sacramento and the other in LA; they never got together when writing it.” Rather than fire him, the
Times
kept Wolinsky on, reckoning that his was an honest mistake, one any reporter could have made. This was, after all, Otis' paper—a deeply paternalistic operation that stood by its staff even when the waters were rough.

To make it to the top of a newspaper, you need more than talent and political skills. Timing is often everything, and Wolinsky had good timing. Soon after he was promoted to city editor in 1991, an amateur videographer filmed Los Angeles policemen beating Rodney King. Once television stations aired the footage, riots broke out throughout the city. At the
Los Angeles Times
, the newly minted city editor swung into action. He had to. His boss was on a cruise, and everyone else was on vacation. “It was just me there, and I had to react,” Wolinsky recalled. “It was quite a moment for me. We won a Pulitzer for our coverage. But it also marked the start of five years of just incredible stories. There were riots, floods, the Michael Jackson pedophilia case. It ended with O.J. Simpson. It was just incredible.”

Wolinsky attributed the success he would enjoy to being in the right place. The right place happened to be about eight miles west of Bleakwood Avenue, in a
Los Angeles Times
office with a picture on the wall of Otis Chandler.

I
n 1984, Americans awoke to “Morning in America,” the flag-waving advertising spectacle created to celebrate Ronald Reagan's successful drive for a second term as the nation's fortieth president. For the U.S. newspaper industry, though, it was twilight. Americans purchased 63.3 million newspapers in 1984, slightly over 1 percent higher than 1983 and a peak that would never again be achieved. Newspapers, the backbone of an industry that brought news to America's doorsteps for fifty to seventy-five cents, faced an erosion of circulation that major publishers would cover up until it turned into a landslide twenty years later.

On the surface, the nation's economy overshadowed potential problems. A boom triggered by President Reagan's tax cuts and massive budget deficits had begun: The economy was literally yanked from the depths of a recession that had driven the nation's unemployment rate to just under 10 percent. Anyone reading a newspaper or watching television wouldn't suspect any problems with the currency of news: Programs and articles were still rife with ads. In 1984, I was happily employed at the
Chicago Tribune
's Washington bureau.

In 1982, Jim Squires, the
Tribune
's editor, had strolled over to my desk in Chicago as I put the finishing touches on a series of stories I had written about the impact of the recession and a rising debt burden on the Illinois economy. “You know,” Squires said in his signature southern drawl, “we need some goddamn investigative reporting in Washington. Go see [Doug] Kneeland and tell him you're going to replace de Lama.” (De Lama was leaving Washington to become a
Tribune
foreign correspondent.) And that was that.

The exchange was vintage Squires, a forty-three-year-old Tennessee native known for his huge ego, tough talk, and impulsive style. A former
Tribune
Washington bureau chief, Squires had been named editor of the paper in 1981, when he immediately started the Squires shuffle—reassigning editors and reporters to different jobs in a staff shake-up that made everyone feel as if they'd been tossed into a blender. He once walked into the men's room and, while urinating, decided to reassign the reporter using a urinal next to him to the technology beat.

Squires' tenure didn't work out well for everyone; his ascension eclipsed Jones' career. But Squires put me right where I wanted to be: in the thick of the big stories of the day. Critics of American journalism like to pin the decline of U.S. newspaper circulation on content, particularly page one content. The indictment of editorial judgment cuts a wide swath: Papers don't publish enough
good
news; newspapers are
biased
; readers want sizzling, sensational stories on page one, not long, depressing accounts of starvation in Sudan; journalists edit their papers for other journalists, not
real
readers; blood and guts drive newspaper sales, not sober, serious news about the important issues of the day. Obviously, newspaper content affects sales, but most evidence suggests the impact is marginal. In the dozens of studies in which newspapers ask readers why they quit subscribing to a paper, anger over content pales in comparison to issues about paper delivery mishaps or missed papers. Indeed, what lies at the heart of the decline of newspaper journalism is not that simple.

As the “Morning in America” spectacle reached across the nation, newspapers were struggling with unprecedented social changes that
would revolutionize media consumption habits, just as the great newspaper families began disintegrating and selling off their lucrative properties to corporations that subordinated journalism to that most natural instinct of capitalism: the desire to make cash machines out of cash registers. In the face of dwindling circulations and mounting debt, many newspaper owners began to focus more on making a profit and less on the civic duty and the moral imperative to cover the news on which their organizations were founded.

Sweeping demographic changes in the workplace triggered the jarring transition. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, a troubled economy prompted American women to get jobs in record numbers. Between 1970 and 1985, the number of women in the workforce jumped by 25 percent as inflation drove up living costs, and job growth stagnated, particularly during the recession that hit the economy in 1981. As U.S. families struggled to cope with sluggish wage growth, rising unemployment, and inflation, the number of homes with a working husband and wife soared 22 percent. By the mid-1980s, American men and women worked more and had less time to read the newspaper, particularly in the evenings when they returned from work. In the 1960s and early 1970s, television stations, eager to snatch ad dollars from newspapers, had started flexing their journalistic muscles, aggressively expanding their evening newscasts to half-hour segments. The result? Americans who came home from a hard day's work could luxuriate in a newscaster's summary of the day's stories, rather than plow through the newspaper.

The new workforce dynamic first hit the then-dominant form of newspaper—editions delivered in the afternoon that were typically read at dinnertime. In 1971, America had 1,425 evening newspapers like the
Des Moines Tribune
, and publishers sold some 36 million copies compared to only 338 morning papers like the
Des Moines Register
. Morning papers reported a total circulation of 26 million. Over the next three decades, Americans abandoned the evening paper in droves; by 2008, America had just 546 evening papers with a total circulation of only 5.8 million. One of those to die was the
Des Moines Tribune
,
which published its last edition on Saturday, September 25, 1982, with the headline: “So Long, It's Been Good to Know You.” The descendants of the Cowles family who owned the
Des Moines Register
reacted to the changing workforce as many publishers did; they folded the evening paper into the morning edition, consolidated staffs, and made the surviving paper stronger, essentially repeating a process that had periodically roiled the industry since its founding.

Between 1971, the year that I started at the
Register
, and 2003, the number of morning newspapers more than doubled to 787 titles with a combined circulation of 46.9 million, an increase of about 80 percent. Though the morning editions grew, they gained far less circulation than the afternoon papers lost. Between 1971 and 2003, morning papers sold 20.7 million more papers, but evening editions lost 27.9 million in circulation, a deficit of 7.2 million copies, just as overall morning circulation peaked. Moreover, the losses occurred as America's population grew substantially; by 2003, America had more than 80 million additional citizens, but they were not buying as many newspapers as their predecessors had. Nevertheless, Americans had come to rely on newspapers as a prime source of information on City Hall, the Congress, the workplace, school, even church. They formed a vital link to the kind of information citizens need to make democracy work and wrote the first draft of history—one that other media streams relied on. America didn't become more ignorant as the number of papers declined. Television news actually increased news literacy in America because viewers who turned on their TV sets around 5 or 6 p.m. had no choice but to watch the news.

For much of the 1960s and 1970s, only three networks manned the airwaves, and all of them simultaneously aired the evening news, partly because the broadcast licenses handed out by the federal government required some public service content, and partly out of pride. Broadcasters considered newscasts prestigious and wanted to have a better report than their competitors. The networks' news shows had a leveling effect. “The spread of [network] television across the country,” noted Markus Prior, a Princeton professor of public affairs
and expert on the media's impact on politics, “lowered the knowledge gap between the more and less educated segments of the population by increasing knowledge among the less educated while leaving it unchanged among the more educated.”

With only three networks, one watched Walter Cronkite, Frank Reynolds, or Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Once cable television emerged, things changed—dramatically. Suddenly, viewers could watch
I Love Lucy
reruns instead of tuning in to Cronkite. Between 1960 and 1984, cable subscribers soared from 650,000 Americans to 29 million, setting the cable industry on a path that would peak in the new millennium at around 65 million subscribers. As more Americans signed up for cable, newspaper circulation began to decline, and network news audiences plummeted by 50 percent from the peak in the 1980s.

The impact of these developments went way beyond the newspaper and network bottom lines. Prior's research suggests that American audiences fragmented according to their tastes and interests, a development that spawned the kind of political polarization now prevalent and one that carried ominous implications for America's collective intelligence. News literacy declined sharply among less educated Americans as they opted for the
I Love Lucy
reruns, while the educated class watched even more news as cable news shows proliferated. “Even if the level of political involvement in the population does not appear to drop,” Prior suggested, “the growing inequality of this involvement, which is a direct consequence of greater media choice, poses serious problems for post-broadcast democracies.” The arrival of cable television simultaneously increased the threats publishers faced. Educated readers were the prime audience for newspapers, and the time they spent watching news on cable ate into how much time they could devote to reading the daily newspaper, which typically carried more in-depth, objective news reports.