behind the news

What’s Really Up in Los Angeles?

October 3, 2005

Times have been tough for newspapers lately. We wrote recently about personnel and budget cuts at some pretty prominent papers: The New York Times Company is cutting 500 jobs, 45 of them in the newsroom; the Philadelphia Inquirer is axing 75 reporters and editors; the San Francisco Chronicle wants to let 120 employees go.

But of all the papers suffering economic troubles, the Los Angeles Times has been the target of more gloomy predictions, more sad speculation, than almost any. And the fear for the paper’s future is not entirely overblown. In the five years since it was purchased by Tribune Co., it has suffered large circulation and advertising losses. Daily circulation has dropped by 18 percent. At the time of the sale, in 2000, the Times was the largest metro daily in the U.S., with 1.1 million circulation; over the past five years, even as the area has grown, the paper’s circulation has fallen to 908,000.

These stats are from a piece today in the Wall Street Journal with the foreboding headline, “Los Angeles Paper Bets on Softer News, Shorter Stories.”

The Journal assesses the source of the Times’ problems as follows: “Many people in Los Angeles and its surrounding area are conversant in technology, comfortable with getting information online and are voracious consumers of Hollywood and video productions. At the same time, the Times must grapple with large, non-English speaking populations; distribute papers to far-flung communities across deserts and mountains and fend off tough competition from suburban papers.”

All valid points. One can’t dispute that the Times, which, despite this drop in circulation, won 15 Pulitzers in the last five years, has suffered disproportionately. Where overall circulation among American dailies dropped 1.9 percent during the six-month period ending March 31, the Times’ plummeted 6.5 percent. And the reasons given by the Journal seem plausible.

But then the Journal piece gets murky. Though it’s safe to speculate about the reasons for the problem, how the Times is going to solve it is not something one can predict with too much confidence. Yet the Journal does anyway.

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In addition to a management reshuffle and a plan to lure readers to the daily paper through its Sunday edition, the Journal says that the heart of the Times’ revitalization plan is to “push into more coverage of celebrities and the city’s hometown industry, Hollywood.”

But before one laments the tabloidization of a fallen journalistic giant, it’s worth looking at what this forecast is based on. Mostly, it’s a paraphrase of new Times editor Dean Baquet’s suggestion — after saying that he’s committed to hard-hitting reporting and sticking aggressively to the developing story in Iraq — that he’s “considering re-establishing a gossip column.”

Gasp.

Baquet also says he thinks some of the extraordinarily windy pieces that the Times has a penchant for “are too long. I want to encourage shorter stories,” he says. For a newspaper whose critics have long complained that it is edited with a shovel, this might not be a terrible idea, low circulation numbers or not.

But that’s it — Baquet wants certain stories to be tighter and shorter, and he may gin up a gossip column — as far as evidence for the premise that the Times is going trashy. Other than that, the paper is doing all the things any paper does when it needs to tighten its belt and compete: cutting some jobs, doing more local stories to go up against the regional press, shuffling the suits in the executive offices.

None of which stopped the paper from producing a doozy of an investigative piece last week, clocking in at 5,367 words. (So much for shorter stories.) The Times hung the illustrious Getty Museum out to dry with the institution’s own documents in a matter-of-fact piece demonstrating that half the antiquities in the museum were knowingly purchased from dubious sources who had apparently stolen them. The paper followed up today with an article about the unsavory activities of the museum’s antiquities curator, Marion True — she bought a $400,000 house on a Greek island with an illegal loan — which forced her to resign immediately.

So if the Times is changing its tone to fizzier and bubblier, we haven’t quite seen it yet. Us, we’re more worried about articles like the Journal‘s which jump to unwarranted conclusions based on a few straws in the wind.

–Gal Beckerman

Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.