Veteran Los Angeles Times reporter Henry Weinstein will receive the 2006 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism Tuesday night for a body of work that “is a monument to the importance of journalism in a free society, and the need for journalists who have the persistence and skill to dig into complex issues and lay them bare for the public.” Weinstein, 62, has served as a legal affairs writer, labor writer, and investigative reporter at the Times since 1978, sharing in two Pulitzer Prizes. CJR Daily spoke with Weinstein last Thursday.

Edward B. Colby: Was it inevitable that Dean Baquet would be forced to leave once he took his stand on staff cuts?

Henry Weinstein: Well, I don’t know that I can say for sure, but I guess in hindsight it looks like it was probably inevitable. I guess he has a different vision of what the paper should be than the current owners. I think that’s regrettable. The thing that I find particularly disheartening about this is it’s not like he was forced out because the paper wasn’t doing good work, it’s not like he was forced out because he had committed some ethical transgression. Far from it. Dean and John Carroll came in the aftermath of an ethical scandal here, from the Staples controversy in 1999, and the paper has done very good work — in the past half-dozen years, I think, we’ve won 13 Pulitzer Prizes. I mean, the fact [is] this paper has lost circulation as have virtually all newspapers around the country, almost every newspaper. So we are confronted with some significant structural problems, this paper like the rest of the industry. And it just seems to me that forcing out an editor, a very good editor, is not a solution to those problems.

EBC: Times reporters told the Washington Post that the atmosphere at the paper was “dismal” and “rock bottom.” How does the mood now compare to that in the newsroom during the 1999 Staples Center scandal?

HW: Oh, I think this is very different. During the Staples scandal we were outraged over an ethical transgression when the top executives of the newspaper got in bed, figuratively, with an advertiser. That was a problem that through journalism — it being reported on — and an uprising in the newsroom we were able to take care of. I mean, the paper conducted its own internal investigation, printed a very, very long story by our then-great media writer, David Shaw, about what had happened, and we instituted new procedures for the relationships with advertisers — clarified procedures and instituted some new procedures.

What’s going on now is a broader sort of problem dealing with sweeping changes in the industry, and I think that we are confronted with a very big challenge, because as you can see every day you read stories about this or that newspaper that’s having to make cuts because of declining circulation or other problems — as I say, as a result in some measure of the Internet, and shifting reader tastes.

The mood in the newsroom, certainly on the day that it was clear that Dean had been forced out, was very gloomy. People are definitely very concerned about the future of the newspaper. On the other hand, we’re still turning out a very good newspaper every day — be it about election coverage or a lot of aggressive investigative stories we’ve been doing about problems with transplants and a host of other subjects that I could name. So people are carrying on, but they are certainly concerned about what the future holds.

EBC: Beyond the initial negativity in the newsroom following his exit, does it permanently damage the paper for the public to see it lose its top editor in this way?

HW: Well, I certainly don’t think it’s good for the image of the paper. The Tribune is sending in as an editor their current managing editor, Jim O’Shea, who has a very good reputation as a journalist for many years — local correspondent, national correspondent, foreign correspondent, author of a fine book on the savings and loan scandal. But he’s obviously coming into a newsroom that has a lot of people that are very upset, and it will be a very significant management challenge for him. As to how that translates, and how it plays out, I think it’s just too early to tell. He’s arriving on Monday.

The other thing is you made a reference to the bottom line [earlier]. I just wanted to say one thing about that. This newspaper is a broadsheet, it’s not a tabloid. Our daily circulation, although some days are bigger than others — obviously Sunday’s bigger than Monday — but on any given day of the week, from week to week, the circulation does not vary the way the circulation say does of a tabloid with some exciting blaring headline. I mean, there are obviously exceptions, like [when] we have the outbreak of the Iraq war or verdict in the Simpson trial, or something like that. But for the most part circulation is pretty much the same on the same days of the week.

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