|
<advertisement>
|
 |
 
|
|
media search: |
 |
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF TIMES MIRROR
BY DAVID LAVENTHOL
It's hard to like a corporation, let alone mourn one. But when the Tribune Company announced it was acquiring Times Mirror, I felt like a close friend had died.
I was associated with Times Mirror for thirty years and I remember what it was like to be on both sides of a newspaper acquisition. At Newsday in the spring of 1970, I was executive editor when owner Harry Guggenheim decided to sell the fiercely independent paper to Times Mirror. He kept discussions secret not only from the newsroom but also from the publisher, Bill Moyers, who learned about it the day it happened.
Several days later, Otis Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and a leading member of the owning family, arrived and we anxiously awaited learning our fate. As it turned out, Chandler may have learned more than we did. Twice during his talk to the staff he was interrupted by announcements that Newsday had won a Pulitzer Prize. That set a quality benchmark: we were in a league with the Los Angeles Times (which didn't win any that year). As the day wore on, Chandler conferred with business executives while Moyers hosted a champagne party in the newsroom. As the editor, I bounced back and forth, not really sure of which way to turn.
Bill Moyers went on to a unique, distinguished career in television, of course, and I stayed at Times Mirror as editor and then publisher at Newsday. In 1985, I was in charge of the eastern newspapers and I was one of those who went to Baltimore when we acquired the Sun. We walked into a news meeting where several editors knew me. I could see the expression on their faces change from curiosity to anxiety as they reasoned through what was happening: "I know these people . . . what are they doing here? . . . wait a minute . . . oh my God, they must be acquiring us."
As former Time editor Ray Cave said about the AOL/Time Warner merger, "This is the world we live in."
In a way, Times Mirror started it all. It was the first newspaper-based media company to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange, in 1964. Times Mirror had actually started in 1884, incorporating the Times Mirror Printing and Binding House and the Los Angeles Times, and later spawned the afternoon Mirror. But it only developed a national presence in the 1960s when Norman Chandler, Otis's father, decided that the company needed to diversify to protect the Times and its profitability from the vagaries of the business cycle.
In order to focus on expanding the company, Norman Chandler, with strong urging from his wife, Buff, named their thirty-year-old son Otis as publisher in 1960. Several of Norman's siblings (there were six) and their families were disappointed because they had expected that brother Philip, then general manager of the Times, would become publisher.
In the years that followed, Otis Chandler presided over the remarkable growth of the paper as a journalistic organization and as a business. He built it into a great newspaper, one of the best in the world. This was a source of great pride to Angelenos but many members of the Chandler family remained unenthusiastic, particularly when the paper adopted journalistic values of coverage and opinion so opposite from the family's conservative roots.
Norman Chandler retired in 1968 and Franklin Murphy, then chancellor of UCLA, succeeded him, the first non-family member to lead the company. Murphy was a quietly dynamic leader both at the company and in the community. He believed Los Angeles was growing into a great world city and that it needed a great newspaper like the Times.
Shortly after the Otis Chandler trip to Newsday, I had my first visit to company headquarters. It occupied only a small part of the complex of Los Angeles Times buildings at Times Mirror Square. (Will it become "Tribune Square?") I was directed to the sixth floor and on arrival for a moment thought I was in a museum. What I saw was a tranquil open space, cool stone floors, notable contemporary paintings on the walls, and greenery and sculpture strategically placed. The southern California sun was streaming through skylights into the atrium. The area had been designed by the architect William Pereira under the watchful guidance of Buff Chandler, who is memorialized by a gentle bubbling pool on one side of the atrium. This was clearly not a newsroom. But it expressed Times Mirror's pride and aspirations.
I was given a tour and an explanation of the glass-walled, twelve-foot-high-doored offices: one had been "Mr. Norman's," another was Dr. Murphy's. Otis's principal office was in the Times's part of the building. Corporate stayed separate from the paper. Later I became president of the company and worked in that setting. The funny thing was, you got used to it. .
The seventies and eighties were largely good years for Times Mirror, under Murphy's stewardship and that of Robert Erburu, who had been a lawyer for the company since the 1960s. (After stepping down as publisher of the Times in 1980, Otis Chandler became corporate chairman for a time but was increasingly inactive as the 1980s moved on.) At its peak, under Erburu's leadership, the company owned seven other newspapers (including fledgling New York Newsday), a large cable system, television stations, consumer magazines and books, a newsprint company, and a number of professional information companies. Even with this diversification, the soul of the company remained in newspapers. The corporation had the primary goal of increasing shareholder wealth, of course, but expanding the importance and influence of Los Angeles was just as motivating to its leadership. And for the newspapers, starting at the Times, the paradigm was highest quality journalism and highest quality business leadership, an accomplishment widely recognized by media peers.
Things changed in the nineties. The end of the cold war decimated the defense industry-based southern California economy. New technology was driving media businesses to look at the future differently. Diversification seemed to work only on a large scale as megacompanies gobbled up smaller businesses and sometimes each other. Meanwhile, the trend the Chandlers had started by going public now resulted in public ownership of more than three-quarters of American daily newspapers. They had become less distinctive institutions, less connected to their communities, more homogenized, often led by people whose only instinct seemed to be to increase shareholder wealth. Journalistic and community achievements seemed secondary.
In 1994, at sixty-five, Robert Erburu retired as chief executive officer. He was replaced by Mark Willes, an executive from General Mills with an academic and financial as well as marketing background, but with no experience whatsoever in running newspapers.
One of Willes's first decisions was his choice of office: he took one in the corner of the floor, away from the glassed-in rooms in the atrium. There were no windows looking out on the atrium. And you couldn't see in. He said he preferred it because it had windows looking outside the building rather than inside, a reminder that we ought to be thinking about our customers first. Symbolic? Maybe, but not necessarily in the way he intended.
A much more substantive early decision was what to do about money-losing New York Newsday. Willes, Newsday publisher Raymond Jansen, and I took a helicopter ride from Manhattan across Long Island the day before the meeting on the subject. We viewed the sea of houses in that prototypical suburban region. But as Willes noted when we landed, we saw only one construction site on the fifty-mile trip. And that was the new New York Times printing plant in Queens.
I still believed that he would understand the strategy and agree to keep going. But I was too close to the situation to see where he was heading, having started New York Newsday and lived for ten years with its progress and problems. Willes saw closing New York Newsday as a key to improving a sagging stock price -- and it was. The next day, after a limited conversation among a dozen executives, he shut it down. Jansen had had a plan that he believed would make New York Newsday work financially. But he never got a chance to fully present it. As we got up to leave, I began to cry, the only time I ever cried at a public meeting. I guess I really was close to it. (Ironically, the officials of the Tribune Company, which owned the New York Daily News until 1991, are now saying a newspaper in New York City is important to their strategy.)
Unfettered by history or experience, Willes launched several initiatives as he sought to redefine newspaper companies, including selling off most non-newspaper assets and developing growth strategies for the papers keyed to increasing circulation and breaking down the walls between editorial and business. When the Times's publisher left, he named himself to the position. Later he gave up the post to name a successor who also had no newspaper experience. This leadership wore thin on a number of executives who quickly departed. Meanwhile, members of the Chandler family trust (Otis Chandler had retired as a trustee a couple of years before), which had voting control of the company, saw little but problems ahead and sought ways to maximize their investment. Many had never cared for the paper since the days of "Uncle Philip." If there was any lingering doubt, the Staples Center furor last fall erased it.
And so one day in late February, Mark Willes received a visit from family trust chairman Warren Williamson and the trust's lawyer, William Stinehart. They told him that they intended to sell the company to Tribune and that they wanted him to expedite it. A colleague who saw Willes shortly afterwards said he was "white as a sheet" and that Willes told him "I just had the worst hour of my life."
Tribune chairman John Madigan explained the arrangement to Tribune employees when the deal was completed and announced on March 13. The name of the company would be the "Tribune" Company. Corporate offices would be in Chicago. Madigan would be the chief executive officer. Few vestiges would remain in Los Angeles. Times Mirror, in fact, would cease to exist.
This is the world we live in. *
David Laventhol is publisher and editorial director of the Columbia Journalism Review.
