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Posted on 09/27/2006 5:08:45 AM PDT by abb
On Sept. 21, Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet turned 50 years old. When he stepped out into the newsroom that afternoon, following the daily page-one meeting, he was greeted with a birthday cake and a prolonged, loud ovation.
The crowd numbered more than a hundred. Two hundred? It sprawled uncountably out of view, around an angle of the newsroom: columnists and top editors and copy editors all mingling, upbeat and merry. The L.A. Times celebrates birthdays, but not like this; at the edges, it was impossible to hear Mr. Baquet’s remarks, let alone hope for a piece of cake.
“It was sort of a cream-filled cake with my picture on it, which was very nice,” Mr. Baquet said.
The crowd sang “Happy Birthday” with gusto. “It was a very moving scene,” Mr. Baquet said. “I felt very close to my newsroom.”
Did he make a wish? “I made a wish,” he said, “and I’m not going to tell you what it is.”
One week before the party, Mr. Baquet had startled the newsroom—and his bosses at the Tribune Company, and the entire newspaper industry—by expressing his wishes. He told Times reporter James Rainey, for a Sept. 14 story, that he had a “difference of opinion” with Tribune about whether the paper should keep cutting costs. In late August, Tribune had asked for a list of more cuts, and Mr. Baquet had said no, first privately and then out in the open, on the record, in the pages of his own newspaper.
Even more startling was the fact that Times publisher Jeffrey Johnson, a Tribune-bred executive, was siding with Mr. Baquet. Mr. Johnson told Mr. Rainey that “newspapers can’t cut their way into the future.”
Since then, Mr. Baquet has declined to repeat or amplify his comments. (The L.A. Times account remains the definitive one.) But they have reverberated, and loudly, rattling the Tribune chain to its foundations.
“At some point,” Mr. Baquet told The Observer in August of 2005, after his appointment as editor had been announced, “newspaper companies are going to have to debate what the right profit targets are.”
Now the debate is on. On Sept. 18, Rinker Buck, a page-one writer at the Tribune-owned Hartford Courant, posted a 3,000-word open letter to his publisher on the Romenesko media-news site, taking Mr. Baquet’s refusal as a starting point and listing specific financial failings of Tribune, totaling $1.2 billion in waste. Mr. Buck demanded to know his own paper’s operating margins. “How much cash are we shipping, on a monthly and yearly basis, to Chicago?” he wrote.
Some 400 Los Angeles Times staffers signed a petition to Tribune management backing Mr. Baquet and Mr. Johnson.
“I think that the Tribune, like a lot of companies that own newspapers, has to ask itself the question: Does it really want to own newspapers?” said Times reporter Joe Mathews. “I suspect at some level, the answer is no.”
On Sept. 26, Tribune C.E.O. Dennis FitzSimons faced an angry Baltimore Sun staff at a company town-hall meeting at Baltimore’s Center Stage. Afterward, The Sun’s Newspaper Guild chapter gave Mr. FitzSimons a letter of protest signed by 100 members, saying they “stand with our colleagues at the Los Angeles Times.”
In The Chicago Tribune’s own coverage, veiled financial figures were suddenly out in the open: The Los Angeles Times was cited as making a 20 percent annual profit.
Who will collect that margin in years to come? In the middle of all the debate, Tribune announced that it was looking for ways to restructure the company. There are nearly as many possible outcomes as there are analysts to hypothesize about them: Tribune could keep its papers and spin off its broadcast properties; it could spin off its smaller papers and keep the big-city ones, it could go private; it could suffer a leveraged buyout. It could rebuild around its malcontent West Coast trophy property or sell it off to a private owner—one of the local billionaires who’ve come courting Tribune. (Employees, one Times staffer said, are going back to an unflattering biography of David Geffen and “underlining all the parts that make him look human.”)
“Once the company’s in play, a lot of different things can happen,” said John Carroll, Mr. Baquet’s predecessor as editor.
Mr. Carroll’s resignation in 2005—his own act of rebellion against the cost-cutting—may have strengthened Mr. Baquet’s hand.
“If Dean and Jeff left,” Mr. Carroll said, “it could raise the question of whether there’s going to have to be a new editor and publisher annually at the L.A. Times.”
And Mr. Baquet has the leverage that comes with his own talents. He came to the Times in 2000 because there was more room for advancement there than at The New York Times, where he was trapped below the Howell Raines administration, in the layer of might-have-a-future-someday editors. Had Arthur Sulzberger Jr. made a few different decisions—better decisions, by some lights—along the way, Mr. Baquet might be running The New York Times even now.
Where The New York Times relies on institutional preeminence, the Los Angeles Times is as good as its best people. Mr. Baquet raises that mark—as long as he can hold out.
Since the news went public, Mr. Baquet has seemed publicly serene. Mr. Carroll said he talks to Mr. Baquet about three times a week.
“In some ways, it’s better to know where you stand,” Mr. Carroll said, “even if it’s a hard stance to take, than to be cutting and cutting and not knowing precisely how far you’re willing to go.”
“Dean obviously has clarity in his own mind,” Mr. Carroll said, “and that’s a good thing to have.”
Ping
OTOH, I suspect the big problem for the Times is that it most of its stories are found by a huge number of its circulation area as dull, dishonest or insulting, and that Banquet and his staff are oblivious to this.
At least it's that way with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Ha!
Heheh---nice photoshopping.
Left wing mediots are so pitiful, when they whine and write bs like this.
None of them has any concept of a business needing to make a profit to keep its doors open.
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