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March 19, 2024

Newsonomics: The L.A. Times, California Collapse and Oregon's New Troubles

No, the saga of the Los Angeles Times isn’t the only story in the newspaper world. It’s just that in its breathtaking oddness, it consumed the beginning of our year. Let’s begin with one question about the future of the Times, but then move on to other early-in-the-year questions that may tell us lots more about the business-of-news year ahead.

 

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab on Feb. 15, 2018, as part of “Newsonomics: 11 questions the news business is trying to answer in 2018

Follow Newsonomics on Twitter @kdoctor

 

What’s at the top of PSS’s to-do list?

It’s been a week of almost eerie quiet in L.A., as the reality of new owner Patrick Soon-Shiong sinks in. The Guild’s elected its local leadership and the L.A. Times newsroom sees that it barely dodged the bullet of major Tronc reorganization.

Tronc announced Tuesday that it would concentrate all page makeup and design in Chicago, following the centralization models now becoming standard among chains, with GateHouse the national leader in that movement. That will be mean the elimination of more local jobs.

In addition, as reported by Chicago media critic Robert Feder, Tronc’s Tim Knight emphasized a salary review: “Over the next six weeks, while positions are being determined in line with our plan, we expect each local newsroom to review base compensation; where appropriate each newsroom will make pay increases reflecting either change in responsibility and/or adjusting to market.”

Why might that review be happening now? Count two big reasons: the reorganization and coming job cuts — and the unprecedentedly successful unionization of the L.A. Times in January. Tronc’s message to anyone thinking of leading a unionization charge at its other papers: “All pay changes for staffers not governed by collective bargaining will go into effect on April 1.”

While journalists in Baltimore, Chicago, Hartford, New York, and Orlando await the changes, in L.A., sources report “a palpable optimism.” And esteemed former Times publisher Tom Johnson weighed in with his hope on Facebook. (“My sense is that far better days may be ahead. I so hope so.”)

Who can blame them, after 20 years of Chicago-based rule and a decade of mismanagement and wavering strategies?

But no one has any idea what the new owner of the Times will do — most likely including the owner himself.

The brilliant biotech billionaire is but a novice in publishing. Consequently, who he hires to lead the business and the newsroom will tell us much about how much of that optimism may be maintained. Feelers to potential new editors have begun, as trusted Soon-Shiong advisers begin to explore the field, sources tell me.

In one sense, the Times can take a deep breath. Soon-Shiong’s deal with Tronc includes 18 months of shared transition services, I’m told. That would include the continuation of the Arc platform, licensed from The Washington Post. The paper launched it in late January.

If Shiong isn’t obsessed with quarterly financial returns, he can continue to reassure Times employees of a considered — and funded — transformation ahead. Will he offer the same kind of “runway” to the Times that Jeff Bezos offered his wary Washington Post troops five years ago? His initial letter set a good tone, but when will he pay an in-person visit?

Will he offer further reassuring steps, like embracing the paper’s Washington bureau? That team now looks like it could become part of the new Times, when it and its sibling the San Diego Union-Tribune, formally split from Tronc in either late March or early April.

Times seller Michael Ferro had been actively planning to close that bureau. Tronc had been in talks with both Axios and another significant D.C. news player, wanting to syndicate content and cut costs. That Axios/Tronc deal is no longer in the works, and it’s unlikely Ferro will find a high-profile partner.

It’s Ferro’s follow-on steps after the sale that Soon-Shiong may want to watch closely.

For instance, Tronc still owns, we believe, LA.com. And Ferro has recently talked about providing his newly rehabilitated Tribune Interactive CEO Ross Levinsohn with “hundreds” of content creators to make his new, if still hazy, syndication play real.

Could Ferro become a competitor to the L.A. Times?

Takeaway: It’s almost time to place your bets in the game of Billionaire Bingo, a diversion I first mentioned five years ago. Will L.A. get a Bezos, Taylor, or Henry, or an Adelson? Or some other new breed entirely?

Is it just the L.A. Times that’s in journalistic turmoil, or is it all of California?

While the Times hogged all the attention, the state’s other big publisher — Digital First Media — should be getting more national attention. Alden Global Capital, DFM’s owner, continues to cut to a number, a profit number, which it’s been able to maintain even as the newspaper business absorbed a brutal 2017.

In southern California, its eleven titles (including some meaningful and once-proud local papers like the Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Orange County Register) now will pay about 250 journalists, down from about 380 only last year.

In the Bay Area, the once nationally prominent Mercury News is — almost unbelievably — down to 41 in the newsroom. Another 65 are counted as “East Bay” employees, given DFM’s super-clustering of newsrooms. That means its Bay Area News Group has concentrated editing and design in one location, and lots of regional reporting is “shared.”

The net result: “That leaves BANG with no K-12 reporter, no higher education reporter, no health reporter, and no one covering Santa Clara County government. It also significantly limits coverage at San Jose’s City Hall and entirely eliminates coverage in some of the region’s smaller neighboring cities, including Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Campbell and San Jose’s Rose Garden, Almaden, Cambrian and Willow Glen neighborhoods.” You know, Cupertino, an incorporated city of 58,000, hometown of a little concern called Apple.

Takeaway: The Times drama has provided good copy, but the destruction of the Mercury News deserves a moment of attention, if not a moment of silence. The L.A. Times newsroom still houses more than 400 journalists — about 10 times the Merc, amazingly. As recently as 10 years ago, it was the Merc that paid about 400, while the Times, at its height, paid 1,100.

Not that long ago, the San Jose paper proclaimed itself “The Newspaper of Silicon Valley.” Silicon Valley has done quite well, becoming the global economic engine and driving great regional affluence. But the economically fecund region has become — in less than a decade — a news desert.

Is it California, or is it the whole West Coast?

Advance Publications’ Oregonian, the largest daily in Oregon, just reduced its staff by 11, bringing it to 80. “It’s with a very heavy heart that I bring you this news,” said Oregonian editor Mark Katches. “Today, the positions of 11 of our colleagues in the newsroom are being eliminated.” These cuts followones in 2015 and in 2013, when The Oregonian flipped its switch on less-than-daily full edition print publishing.

Katches, who served as a top editor for the nationally respected, Bay Area-based Center for Investigative Reporting before taking the Oregonian job in 2014, has managed to preserve a watchdog role for the paper, amid the cuts. Seven journalists make up the investigative team; three data visualization specialists support those projects. Projects include ones focusing on eldercare abuse and bad policing.

Two hours south of Portland, Oregon’s largest family-owned daily recently gave up the fight for independence. The Baker family, owners of the well-regarded-over-the-years Eugene Register-Guard, succumbed to a GateHouse offer. The family bought the paper — still a 46,000-circulation daily — in 1927, and I had the misfortune to compete against it when I launched a local alternative weekly in 1975. Its once-dominant local impact has dwindled along with its staff, but its passing marks another turning point for West Coast journalism.

Takeaway: National media still focuses on the big, odd stories like the L.A. Times, but the desolation of the local press continues to worsen across the country each month.

Kudos to ProPublica. I interviewed ProPublica president Dick Tofel in Miami at last week’s Digital Content Next conference, and he noted both ProPublica’s total of 85 national staffers and the 14 it employs at its recently launched Illinois state project. Most tellingly: the title of its just-published annual report: 2017: The Next Frontier Is Local.

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