Los Angeles Times Editor Fires Parting Shot at Tribune Company

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Editor Fires Parting Shot at His Chain
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: January 22, 2008

The ousted editor of The Los Angeles Times on Monday offered a scathing critique of the newspaper industry and specifically his longtime employer, the Tribune Company, arguing that cost cuts, a lack of investment and an aversion to serious news was damaging the business.

The editor, James E. O’Shea, left after he refused to carry out another in a series of newsroom budget cuts sought by the publisher in Los Angeles, David D. Hiller — 15 months after Mr. Hiller fired the previous editor over the same kind of dispute. The current showdown and Mr. O’Shea’s parting comments made for a remarkable statement by an editor who was seen as a Tribune loyalist and was sent to Los Angeles to calm a rebellious staff. “I disagree completely with the way that this company allocates resources to its newsrooms, not just here but at Tribune newspapers all around the country,” Mr. O’Shea wrote in a memo to the newspaper’s staff, echoing farewell remarks he made Monday morning in the newsroom....

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Mr. O’Shea argued in the memo that The Times had shown several times — in revising its Sunday magazine, in adding fashion coverage — that it could generate more revenue and higher profit by offering more, not less. “Even in hard times, wise investment — not retraction — is the long-term answer to the industry’s troubles,“ he wrote, while suggesting that Tribune executives have been unable to see the logic of anything but budget cuts. “Journalists and not accountants should seize responsibility for the financial health of our newspapers,” he wrote, “so journalists can make decisions about the size of our staffs and how much news remains in our papers and Web sites.”...

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Tribune took over the Times Mirror Company, the parent company of The Times in 2000, and with executives in Chicago repeatedly seeking a smaller newsroom, relations with Los Angeles have been rocky ever since. The Times has a news staff of about 870 people, down from more than 1,100 a few years ago, but still larger than the roughly 600 of the flagship paper, The Chicago Tribune....John S. Carroll, the first editor installed by Tribune, quit in 2005 rather than make more newsroom budget cuts. The next year, his successor, Dean P. Baquet, and the publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson — who, like Mr. O’Shea, was a longtime Tribune employee — were fired when they refused to do more cutting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/business/media/22paper.html