So one of the things I think that people need to keep in mind is that reporters can do absolutely great work, like the people that did this fabulous series that got a Pulitzer Prize and did a lot of good for the community a couple of years ago about the conditions at the main public hospital in south central Los Angeles. But those stories didn’t have a significant impact on our circulation. So a journalist can do a great job, and not necessarily have a significant impact in any given week on the bottom line. And I think that’s something that people need to keep in mind — that reporters and editors can only do so much in terms of generating circulation and revenue, and that newspapers have to put more money into marketing themselves. This newspaper’s had its marketing budget cut back severely. And in addition, I think that this newspaper and others need to be more aggressive in telling the community in a variety of ways about the service that they perform for the community, be it as simple as ads on buses or having journalists go out into schools more or to community groups. I think one thing that we have not done nearly well enough, and I don’t think it’s just us, is to have a more public presence. Journalists are, I think, generally reluctant to sort of hawk themselves. We, at least out here in L.A., most of us rarely appear on television. It’s a different environment than Washington, where you have a lot of journalists on television. But I think we need to have a more public presence, and I think we need to work on that.

EBC: The Chancellor Award invitation cites your 1979 series on housing fraud in Los Angeles and your 1982 series exposing the city’s worst slumlord as among your most memorable work at the Times. How do you think aggressive, investigative journalism can win out in the current environment, as reporters and editors across the country face cost-cutting pressure from their papers’ owners?

HW: Well, the first thing is we have to keep doing it. I think the other thing is that some of that work that I did back in the old days, you can obviously still do and people are still doing stories like that. I think the stories can actually now have a broader reach because of the Internet. You can put up more details on the Internet. We now have the ability to do much better graphics that illustrate the sort of problems that I was writing about that would help make the stories more accessible. But in the end, newspaper owners have to understand, as I said before, that although we need to make a profit to keep operating, that is not the only goal of a newspaper. And if it becomes the sole goal of a newspaper, we will lose our reason for being. There’s an old statement from a prophet that I keep in mind — I actually quoted this in my bar mitzvah speech, as did probably many other people — but it’s a statement from the prophet Hillel, who said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself alone, of what good am I?” And I think that’s something that people in this industry have to keep in mind.

EBC: Among the top tier of American papers, the Times faces a unique balancing act in meeting its state, national and international ambitions while covering a densely populated yet diffuse and fractured metro area. So if you could, what are some additional ways you think the Times can attract new readers and grow in this new era without sacrificing its ambition?

HW: Well, we’re considering a lot of things now. As you said, it’s a very difficult thing. I mean, some counties in our circulation area are even bigger than states in this country. So it is an enormous challenge. We used to have many more reporters in regional editions than we do now. I wish we could get some of those people back, but there doesn’t seem to be any immediate prospect of that. We’re at the moment just fighting to keep our existing staff, no less add people. But I think two things. One is, and I’m not the expert on this, but I do think that we have to be more creative in how we use the Web, and I also think that we may have to figure out ways to utilize people in communities who perhaps can work with us to get some hyper-local news up on the Web. We’re having a lot of internal discussions about that now. I don’t think we’ve reached any definitive conclusions about that, but clearly we’ve got to give some more good thinking about that, and we’ve got to sort of institutionalize the sort of R&D that a lot of other companies and other industries have. I wish I had a good immediate answer for you — I don’t have a magic blueprint at the moment. But one thing I know for sure is that you need to have good, hard-working journalists that are plugged into their communities if you’re going to do this work at all.

• 1
• 2