I have just spent three weeks in Los Angeles, home to a newspaper that is suffering from the familiar chronic problems engendered by the digital revolution’s continuing disruption.
The recent history of the Los Angeles Times has been marked by changes of ownership, changes of editorship and regular culls of editorial staff against a background of falling sales and decreasing advertising revenue.
This sad spiral of decline is hardly a new story, nor is it one confined to the United States. We in Britain are witnessing newspapers in similar disarray.
But the LA Times’s dramas provide us with a valuable case study, not simply of the western world’s newsprint newspaper crisis but also of the existential crisis for a journalism dedicated to holding power to account.
It is regarded as America’s fourth most influential paper (after the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal) and fifth largest (after that trio, plus USA Today) in terms of editorial staffing (about 430 people currently).
As a regular visitor to Los Angeles since the mid-1970s, I have often appreciated its content while being intensely frustrated by its editorial style. (Although we British journalists may be criticised for the inflexible use of an inverted pyramid construction of news stories, at least we get readers to the point right away).
The LA Times has broken stories of genuine public merit, often involving meticulous investigative reporting. It may not have garnered as many accolades as its eastern counterparts, but it has counted all the same by picking up its fair share of Pulitzers, the prizes that mean so much in US journalism.
There is the historical context. Now for the new reality, as portrayed in a 7,000-word article in the latest issue of the monthly Los Angeles Magazine, What’s the matter with the LA Times?
Its author, Ed Leibowitz, paints a picture of editorial turmoil and low morale in the iconic building that houses the Times. His piece details allegations of overly cautious, and sometimes maverick, editing decisions under what can only be described as its controversial ownership.
Let’s deal with that ownership first. The Chandler family ceded control in 2000 to the Tribune company, which was acquired in turn in 2007 by real estate billionaire Sam Zell. Within a year, he put Tribune into bankruptcy protection, where it stayed until 2012. The inevitable result: rounds of redundancies.
As so often, one tranche of staff cuts led to another. In November 2015, a series of redundancies saw the departure of six bureau chiefs, several key section editors and well-known columnists. It was described as “a watershed moment in the paper’s history.”
The following February, Tribune fell into the hands of a Chicago tech investor, Michael Ferro Jr, who named himself as chairman and bizarrely renamed the company as “tronc” (for Tribune Online Content).
Then, in what the Financial Times called “an unexpected twist”, he sold a 13% stake to health care billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, reputedly LA’s second-richest person, and gave him a seat on the board. The reasons remain unclear.
Now for the editorial leadership. At the end of 2011, the Trinidad-born Davan Maharaj was appointed as editor-in-chief. He had been with the paper since 1989, spending 15 years as a reporter and seven as a senior executive.
He was liked at the time. According to Leibowitz’s inside sources, however, his previous conviviality “was replaced by a grim determination to tighten his grip on power.”
That’s hardly unusual. The job of editorship has always been tough, and it has become tougher still in an environment of decline where commercial pressures continually intrude.
Indeed, those pressures became Maharaj’s responsibility in March last year when Ferro gave him the dual role of publisher and editor. That, writes Leibowitz, was “an unusual move that breaks with journalistic tradition [in the US].”
Leibowitz devotes a great deal of his article to Maharaj’s alleged editorial failings, particularly in relation to a single investigation into Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of America’s best-selling opiate drug, OxyContin.
I am not in a position to judge whether Leibowitz’s claims about Maharaj subjecting the publication of the resulting articles to “pointless delays” by making “ill defined and arbitrary” comments are correct.
But his detailed reportage of the delays, based on “multiple sources with knowledge of the situation”, certainly tends to support his argument.
The investigation was started in spring 2013 by one of the LA Times’s acknowledged star reporters, Scott Glover, and its veteran health care writer, Lisa Girion. Their three-part series, which revealed corporate complicity in a drug-dependency epidemic that had killed tens of thousands of Americans, was initially sent to Maharaj in spring 2014.
After months, and eventually years, of what Leibowiz calls “maddening obstacles”, the paper finally carried the first part of the investigation in May 2016, “You want a description of hell? OxyContin’s 12-hour problem”, which carried Glover and Girion’s bylines, plus that of Harriet Ryan.
By then, although the investigation was highly praised, two of the reporters had left the Times. Glover had joined CNN and Girion became an editor at Reuters. They had become frustrated at the delay in their work being published.
The second instalment, on Purdue Pharma’s efforts to suppress evidence of the OxyContin drug ring, then ran in mid-July, with a promise of a third part.
Leibowitz concedes that an editor of a major newspaper has many responsibilities, but he writes that his sources - among both current and former staffers - “attributed Maharaj’s inaction to a chronically short attention span and a preoccupation with trivialities.”
Maybe. Amid more unflattering comments about the editor, he does praise the paper and, by implication Maharaj, for publishing “a lot of great journalism”.
He cites two recent “huge stories”: one about California national guard veterans being forced to pay back enlistment bonuses granted to them in error, and another about suspect campaign donations allegedly funnelled to local politicians by a developer seeking waivers to build an apartment complex.
And in December 2015, the Times’s coverage of the murder of 14 people in an Isis-inspired attack in San Bernardino won a Pulitzer.
Leibowitz could not persuade Maharaj to talk. However, hours before his article was due to go to press, he received an email on the editor’s behalf. It stated:
“We are in very challenging times in the newspaper business. My job is to make sure we produce quality journalism for our readers. Yes, that means I have to make difficult decisions.
Running a newspaper isn’t a popularity contest. We and I should be judged by the quality of our work, and by that standard the Los Angeles Times has done very well in the past five years. Our journalism speaks for itself, and it speaks loudly.”
Then came another surprising development. In his article, Leibowitz reported that “sources” had told him that the third part of the Glover-Girion-Ryan investigation, into Purdue Pharma’s global OxyContin sales strategy, “will appear sometime soon.”
And, lo and behold, it did. Eleven days after Leibowitz’s article was published online, on 7 December, the LA Times finally ran the piece, “OxyContin goes global — ‘We’re only just getting started’” under the bylines of Ryan, Glover and Girion.
The delay between the original reporting and its publication has been extraordinary. It means that it appeared 15 months after Glover’s departure and 12 months after Girion’s departure. Is that some kind of record?
What it surely suggests is that the LA Times, for all its commercial problems, has quite separate editorial problems.
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