by James Risser
James Risser directs the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford University. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at the Des Moines Register.

See Also: The Wall: A Long History and Chronology of a Crisis

"Money is always the first thing we talk about. The readers are always the last thing we talk about."

-- Leo Wolinsky, managing editor, Los Angeles Times.

That sad confession, reported by Times media critic David Shaw in his astonishing pre-Christmas opus on the newspaper's Staples Center scandal, seemed to succinctly dramatize the changes that have swept through the Times in the Mark Willes era.

And not just at the Times. In the old days, newspaper reporters wrote the news, editors massaged the stories and put them in the paper, and the business-side people figured out how to sell the advertising and subscriptions.

Today, they're all in it together. Cooperation is the watchword at many papers. Editors serve on strategy committees with the ad and circulation and marketing people. Projects and entire sections are undertaken because they're what the readers -- often dwindling in number but more economically upscale -- are presumed to want and that advertisers will back with their cash.

Editors here and there grumble. So do some older reporters. But few are truly horrified by the new realities.

At the Times, Shaw found in a six-week investigation of his own institution and the Staples affair, "so many in the newsroom had become so inured to intrusions by business-side considerations in the editorial process that they were desensitized and demoralized."

That "gradual, insidious change in the climate at the paper" helped explain for Shaw why the staff was slow to take umbrage when it learned, first from a business journal and an alternative paper and then from the mainstream press, that the Times had completely crossed the ethical line by sharing with the Staples Center the money it made on a Sunday magazine issue devoted to the new sports arena.

But once the beast roused itself, it truly roared. A full-scale newsroom revolt produced petitions and angry confrontations with top brass. Later came ex-publisher Otis Chandler's own public blast at his successors' lapses, Shaw's probe published as a fourteen-page special section, a front-page apology by the editor and the publisher, and the promulgation of new "principles" and "guidelines" to govern the paper's future conduct.

The reverberations will go on for a long time, like the aftershocks from one of Southern California's occasional earthquakes. And they'll be felt far beyond the L.A. basin, affecting newspapers all over the nation.

What can others learn from the Los Angeles disaster? A lot. First: there always was and still is a good reason for the traditional "wall" between the editorial side and the business side of a newspaper. Not that the wall has been totally impervious at most papers. But to show that the wall sometimes has been breached is not to disprove its value as a powerful barrier to ethical misdeeds and corruption.

Even short of something as clearly offbase as giving money to the subject of a newspaper's coverage, the wall has provided a kind of insulation so that reporters and editors are not told when an advertiser is trying to get a puff story published or is threatening to cancel his advertising if an unfavorable story is not suppressed. Or if they do get wind of the pressure, they're told to ignore it and just do their job.

Long after the Des Moines Register had published my mid-1970s investigations of corruption in the grain-exporting trade, I heard that the big grain interests had complained to the paper's editorial and business executives. The Register made a lot of money from grain and other agriculture-related advertising, but no one ever told me about the complaints or suggested that I ease up.

Most papers, the Times no doubt included, would assert that they still resist such direct advertiser pressure. What's hard to measure is how many potentially tough and useful stories never get done, or are softened, because they might offend an advertiser. From there, it's only a small step to devoting time to devising stories and sections that actually will please the subjects and rake in ad money.

Mark Willes came to Times Mirror as c.e.o. in 1995 from a cereal company. Determined to brighten the Times's troubled financial picture, he boldly announced his plan to knock down the wall -- with "a bazooka, if necessary." It seems clear from Shaw's exhaustive study that the Staples Center fiasco is one of the results of the wall's demise. Those who had warned that Willes's plan was fraught with danger now see the chickens coming home to roost.

The Shaw report, long and complex, stars a huge cast of characters, many of whom share some of the blame for what occurred. Ultimately Willes, on his own or responding to pressures, will have to determine the fate of publisher Kathryn Downing and editor Michael Parks, both of whom come out looking very bad in Shaw's study -- Downing, a lawyer who arrived at the Times three years ago from the world of legal publishing, for backing the revenue-sharing deal and not seeing its ethical bankruptcy, and Parks, for not stopping the magazine's distribution or at least making some kind of disclosure/apology once he learned of it.

Downing's initial obtuseness is a sobering lesson about qualifications for leading a newspaper. We now see more clearly why top business executives ideally ought to come from a newspaper background, and even more ideally, should have served at least some time on the editorial side and absorbed the culture.

One of the most unfortunate modern developments in newspapers is their increasing ownership by publicly held corporations, their need to please shareholders, their profit targets of 20-plus percent. Pining for the days of the dedicated independent newspaper proprietor is more than engaging in nostalgia because the best of them really did run their papers in a different way. Shaw found that "many in the Times's newsroom see the Staples affair as the very visible and ugly tip of an ethical iceberg of ominous proportions -- a boost-the-profits, drive-the-stock-price imperative that threatens to undermine the paper's journalistic quality, integrity and reputation." The lesson here may be the time has come for publicly held companies to put editorial quality, credibility, and independence into their mantra, and to tell Wall Street that editorial protections are part of the cost of doing business just like newsprint and printing presses.

Publishers need to remind themselves of that, too, since there appears to be an newsroom-executive office gap. After the Times's problem came to light, Editor & Publisher magazine surveyed 165 editors and publishers and found that 51 percent of the publishers thought the Times/Staples deal was acceptable. Only 19 per cent of editors agreed.

While editors are looking to improve credibility, publishers are "partnering" with arenas, buying sports teams, and engaging in other activities that complicate the news side's efforts to prove it can do straightforward news coverage in cases where the paper has a financial interest. Editors sometimes have a voice in the planning, but often are outgunned by the business-side people. Downing's own Times management team numbers seven business executives, the company lawyer, and editor Parks, according to a New York Times story.

That would seem to have put Parks under an enormous handicap in trying to hold high the paper's journalistic principles whenever a conflict arose. In any case, Shaw found Parks as having been either "insufficiently vigilant" against business-side excesses or simply "worn down."

A refreshing aspect of the Staples Center affair was the hero-on-a-white-horse role played by former publisher Chandler, who showed that the old and experienced sometimes possess wisdom not available to the young and eager.

In a bombshell letter read to the staff in the newsroom, the revered Chandler told it like it was, referring to the "unbelievably stupid handling of this Staples Center special section."

The staff loved it, but Downing at first didn't understand why and responded by calling the demi-god Chandler "angry and bitter" and "doing a great disservice to this paper." The next day, Shaw reported, three editors tried to explain to Willes and Downing why Chandler was held in such high esteem and "why a journalist's primary loyalty is not to his editor or his publisher or his c.e.o. or even to his newspaper, but rather to the bedrock principles of the profession." The meeting ended with the editors "feeling that, ultimately, neither Willes nor Downing truly understood what they were trying to say."

Sad. But things looked up some after that. As Shaw prepared to publish his story, Downing and Parks wrote a front-page "To our Readers" piece that called the Staples Center deal "a mistake." They also announced a new set of Times "principles," which said all the right things about truth and editorial integrity.

Distributed to staffers was a further set of "guidelines" that seemed to partly reconstruct the wall. In the future, one of the guidelines promises, the publisher will "fully and promptly disclose" to the editor any "joint ventures, partnerships or sponsorships" with organizations. This time, of course, it required an aroused newsroom and an indignant Chandler to speak out. And finally the paper itself found its voice through the Shaw investigations and its new principles and guidelines. All of this illustrates the importance of speaking out -- and the consequences of not doing so.

The Times, one of the country's fine papers both before and after the painful Staples Center episode, could be on the way to healing itself, though there are clearly lots of details to work through and lots of bruised feelings and damaged reputations to sort out.

It's time now for the rest of the country's newspapers, which watched and wrote about the Times's travails with fascination and horror, to stop clucking over what happened there and take a good look at themselves.

How many newspapers would stand up to the scrutiny that they and David Shaw gave the Times? Even if they've never gone the route of sharing profits with those they write about, how far have they gone in letting the earnings quest divert them from their journalistic mission? They'd better find out, if they're to have a hope of commanding that public trust that they all talk about so much.

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