The LA Times: “Rightsizing” the Public Trust

The mood among my friends at the LA Times is bleak and growing bleaker. Some buyout/firing notices went out Monday. More will go out today. Still more tomorrow.

Over the weekend, the rumors that had swirled for days grew white hot. Then gossip turned to fact on Monday morning when LA Times publisher David Hiller flew to Chicago where he was promptly ankled (to use the grand old Daily Variety euphemism) by the Tribune Zellots on the same day that the Chicago Tribune’s editor of seven years duration, Ann Marie Lipinski, resigned.

“Your new owners should have their own editor, compatible with their style and goals,” Lipinski wrote as she fled ahead of 80 newsroom cuts at the Trib, adding her exit memo to a stack of such epistolary offerings that is now thick enough to be bound as a novel.

Yet it is not just the firings that are so troubling.

Industries all over America have downsized and outsourced, often wrecking lives in the process. Moreover, the wrecking ball usually hits professions in which workers have far less room for resilience than news folks generally do. Plus most newspapers, including the Washington Post, are going through rounds of cutbacks as they struggle to reinvent themselves in response to the rapidly and radically transforming nature of the medium.

But, for the papers stuck in the purgatory that is Zell/Tribune World, the changes dictated from the top seem to have less to do with the hard realities of the news business, and more to do with the arrogance of a man who already believed he knew better than everyone else even before he decided to start disemboweling media outlets, but who now—as a result of a leveraged purchase that may or may not have been wise—has a big ass debt to service.

Those two elements make for a toxic combo-burger. Because Sam Zell and his psycho-memo-writing cronies are not pulling the wings and legs off of just any company. They are doing it to a major newspaper—our hometown paper, thank you very much.

(Yes, I realize I just succumbed to an unattractively feverish bout of metaphor mixing. Deal with it.)

Selling newspapers, as USC Annenberg’s Marty Kaplan points out in yesterday’s Huffington Post, is not the same as selling….say…donuts. Selling donuts is an honorable profession. But donuts are a snack food. Newspapers are a public trust.

As to whether Zell and his crime ….uh…business partners at the Tribune Co have even a marginal understanding of what the phrase” public trust” means, the question was likely answered when, according to the AP, Chief Operating Officer Randy Michaels told lenders on a conference call last month that the company can save a lot of money by trimming staff and “rightsizing” its newspapers. Michaels said Tribune executives were evaluating the productivity of individual journalists with an eye toward cutbacks.

Okay, if we follow Michaels’ logic, “rightsizing” newspapers is akin to correctly staffing a manufacturing production line. It’s all about “productivity”—speed and volume.

Of course, using that metric anybody who’s won a Pulitzer or another big award, should likely be the first journalistic neck on the block since, while one might wish it to be otherwise, good reporting and writing takes hard work and….well…..time.

Here’s how Kaplan put it:

To Sam Zell, however, running the Times, as well the other papers he bought when he acquired the Tribune Co., isn’t a public trust, and its stewardship doesn’t include serving the public interest, no more than would running a bagel joint. Like the asset-stripping private equity buccaneers of the Blackstone Group, Zell’s business is capitalism, plain and simple. Having saddled Tribune with more than $8 billion in highly leveraged debt (he invested only $315 million of his own money in order to take Tribune private), now he has to sell assets and cut costs at a furious pace in order to keep his debt service from eating up his profit.

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If Zell’s editorially pared down, graphically tarted up and otherwise reinvented Orlando Sentinel is a sign of what’s to come, our local paper will soon be a cross between My Weekly Reader and a ransom note.

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I’m not claiming that print journalism is a swell business to be in right now, but I am contending that Zell’s ocean of red ink is more a consequence of his own debt-ridden acquisition strategy than of declining advertising sales and circulation, and that he’s punishing the city’s civic IQ to make up for his piratical swagger.

So what is to be done? Write letters? Sign petitions? Cancel subscriptions? Make bomb threats? (Kidding.)

I wish I had an answer but I don’t.

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By the way, all in all, this seems like a bigger deal than whether the New Yorker did or did not show good or bad taste with this week’s cover.

(For the record, I think the New Yorker blew it.)