During the afternoon, as the copy begins to filter in, Wolinsky gets brief summaries of all the stories for tomorrow’s paper (and beyond). Editors stop by to informally pitch the stories that they’ll be making cases for in the afternoon meeting. While he generally hasn’t seen the finished version of most of the pieces up for page one consideration, Wolinsky says he goes in to the afternoon meeting with an idea of what to put on the page but “it’s not in cement. I can be talked out of it pretty easily, sometimes — sometimes not.” National Editor Scott Kraft, who handles the DC bureau as well as the national staff based in Los Angeles and elsewhere around the country, describes the LA Times’ culture as a place where “passion for your stories is encouraged,” and says Wolinsky is someone who is “open to argument” and “wants to hear discussion.”


The 3:30 meeting: This is where the decisions are made. Wolinsky says that the meetings “remind me of a sitcom. You have the setup, and you have to resolve it within half an hour.”


At the appointed time, the editors pile in to the conference room just off the newsroom to discuss what should be on the front page. Unlike the morning meeting, this one is packed, with major section editors or their deputies seated around the table, Wolinksy at the head, and night deputy managing editor John Arthur seated across from Wolinsky at the far end of the table. Baquet sits to Wolinky’s left, and the chair to Baquet’s left, normally occupied by Carroll, remains empty. Lining the walls of the room are another twenty or so staff members, including the obituary and calendar editors, and a number of staff concerned with graphics, page count, the web site, and others who need to know what is going to be featured.


Wolinksy opens the meeting by calling on Roxanne Arnold, one of the editors of the paper’s front page “Column one” feature, who tells the group about the piece on the Stanford Prison Experiment. She is followed by Janet Clayton, the paper’s assistant managing editor for state and local, then national editor Scott Kraft, deputy foreign editor Mary Braswell, and so on down the line. As at the morning meeting, Wolinsky and Baquet poke holes in the editor’s stories, asking questions, emphasizing details to include. The group then pulls the blinds and dims the lights, and Alan Hagman, one of the paper’s photography editors, shows twenty or so potential page one pictures to the staff, projecting them onto the wall at the far end of the room.


After the lights come back on, the real decision-making process begins. Wolinsky asks national editor Kraft and deputy foreign editor Braswell, “What’s the best story today?” The consensus is that the procedural defeat of the gay marriage amendment deserves to be the paper’s lead story tomorrow.


From there, Wolinsky ticks off two others he wants on the front page: the story about PR firm Fleishman-Hillard’s alleged overbilling of the city, and an article about Riggs Bank funneling payments to associates of the leader of Equatorial Guinea. Next, he brings up three stories — a piece on Lord Butler’s findings about pre-Iraq war British intelligence, a story about the Butler report supporting the White House’s pre-war claims about Iraq’s attempts to acquire uranium from Africa, and a piece detailing information from a Senate report about Colin Powell’s February 2003 speech to the U.N. The last two, he says “are interesting because one tends to knock down claims of the administration, and one tends to support them.” He concludes, “I think we have room for one of those.”


Wolinsky says that Powell and the uranium story are “an interesting package”; Baquet adds that “if you do uranium, you could say … see page 9” for the larger story on the Butler report. Foreign editor Braswell says she likes the uranium story, essentially signing off on that.


Baquet then begins to question his own thinking. “Wouldn’t it look odd to reach into the [Butler report] and grab the one thing that makes Bush look good?” and put it one page one, he asks. Kraft adds that putting the uranium story on the front page is “kind of a fairness issue” because the paper had treated former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s allegations about what the administration knew with such credence. Baquet replies, “I wasn’t overly reading for fairness” and that the Butler report itself, rather than the specific evidence about the uranium claim, is the bigger news story. Kraft, thinking about it, agrees that on those grounds the uranium story could go inside.


Wolinksy asks the room how they feel about putting the Powell piece on the front page and the uranium story inside. Baquet agrees, arguing that Powell’s speech was a milestone in the administration’s case for war; Melissa McCoy, assistant managing editor for the paper’s copy desks, adds that the uranium claim wasn’t as important as the Powell speech, and Wolinsky says putting the uranium piece on page one would be giving it more emphasis than the administration itself had.


Wolinsky then begins poking holes in his own logic, asking whether the Powell story is similar to the uranium story, in that both are reaching into larger reports to highlight one particular piece of evidence. Kraft disagrees: “The Powell thing’s better than you described.”


John Arthur makes a small pitch for the uranium story: “I like it because it’s counterintuitive.” Baquet disagrees: “It would seem odd” to put the Powell story inside. Wolinsky agrees, saying that the Powell story is stronger. He also slots in the Butler report article for page one, bumping the uranium piece inside.