Ken Auletta’s profile of the Los Angeles Times in this week’s New Yorker offers some insight into what went wrong after the Tribune Company bought the Times five years ago from the Chandler family (unfortunately, the piece is not available online).
The challenge this purchase presented was, as John Carroll, the star editor brought in by the Tribune Company, put it, “whether a newspaper chain can produce a first-rate newspaper?”
Carroll answers his own question — remember, he left this summer, and his bosses weren’t sorry to see him go — thusly: “It may be that it is simply structurally impossible.”
We have to agree. The picture Auletta paints is one of a newsroom annoyed by the incessant demands of its owners to meet projected profit margins, encouraged to try every new “management fad” under the sun. And, on the other side, an owner frustrated that the Times‘ editors were worrying more about how to win Pulitzers than about how to cut costs.
Summing up the friction, Auletta writes: “Clearly, the news side saw itself at war with people who had minimal interest in ambitious journalism, and the ‘suits’ saw themselves in conflict with sanctimonious and unrealistic idealists.”
Auletta also tells the full story of how Carroll finally folded. The deteriorating economic situation of the paper (which we wrote about yesterday) prompted the Tribune Company to snip and slash away at Carroll’s newsroom budget year after year. When, this spring, the suits proposed new cuts that would “be based on a formula that pegged the newsroom budget to a fixed percentage of revenue; if revenue rose, the cuts went down,” it was apparently too much for Carroll.
Upon Carroll’s resignation, and after some tense negotiations, Tribune Company appointed his deputy, the well-liked Dean Baquet, to take over. The storm seems to have settled for now, but we get the sense that this is a tension that has no easy resolution. The CEO of the Tribune Company, Dennis Fitzsimmons, is still saying that “Publishing a paper that just we like maybe isn’t enough in this environment. We have to be more open to what consumers want.”
That’s a far cry from the credo of Baquet, who says in the piece’s final paragraphs that immediate gratification for his readers is not his top priority. “It’s not always our job to give readers what they want,” Baquet told Auletta. “What if they don’t want war coverage or foreign coverage or to see poverty in their communities? Southern newspapers are still hanging their heads because generations ago they gave readers what they wanted — no coverage of segregation and the civil rights movement.” Baquet closes with this thought: If newspapers aren’t there to help readers understand the world, “who will?”
Harper’s magazine this month has an angry screed by Ben Marcus, a self-proclaimed experimentalist, who goes to town on novelists who claim to have a monopoly on how reality can be depicted. His main target is Jonathen Franzen, reluctant darling of the literary world. He deconstructs Franzen’s pieces from the last few years, with a special focus on a review of the oeuvre of William Gaddis, a postmodernist heavyweight, titled “Mr. Difficult.” Marcus runs readability test on both Franzen’s and Gaddis’ prose and finds Franzen scoring higher in difficulty.
“In other words, the sixth-grader who can understand Gaddis must become, at the very least, six years smarter in order to understand Franzen’s novel. And although she cannot yet decipher a Franzen essay damning Gaddis for impenetrability she can understand writing by Mr. Difficult himself, an inversion that Gaddis might have appreciated.”
Marcus spends at least five thousand enraged words trying to rip Franzen to shreds, a mode of attack that doesn’t help what is otherwise an interesting argument. In his less angry moments, Marcus posits the interesting argument that “realist” should be “a title you’d have to work for, and not just one you inherited because you favored a certain compositional style.”
“If literary titles were about artistic merit and not the rules of convention, about achievement and not safety, the term ‘realism’ would be an honorary one, conferred only on writing that actually builds unsentimentalized reality on the page, matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language. It would be assigned no matter stylistic or linguistic method, no matter the form. This, alas, would exclude many writers who believe themselves to be realists, most notably those who seem to equate writing with operating a massive karaoke machine.”
–Gal Beckerman
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.