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Grapevine
falling walls in L.A.
Word began circulating just days before the announcement: after eight years of sometimes-somnambulant stewardship, editor Shelby Coffey III was leaving the Los Angeles Times. Asked to check out the story, a business-side source reported back almost breathlessly: Yes, it was true. Shelby was out, to be replaced by Michael Parks, the managing editor. And there was more. He couldn't get the details, but "something big" was coming.
When the official word came, on October 9, Coffey's resignation was indeed overshadowed by sweeping organizational changes at the nation's second-largest metro daily, changes that shook journalistic sensibilities across the country. In particular, two senior vice presidents, one from consumer marketing and another from advertising, were assigned to work closely with Times editors "in the business planning," as a press release put it, of news sections and entertainment calendars, as well as of new features and sections.
The sudden changes bore the stamp of Times Mirror chairman, president, and c.e.o. Mark H. Willes, 56, who was previously known for laying people off at the Times and elsewhere in the chain, for bumping off New York Newsday, Gotham's excellent but not-quite-profitable third tabloid, and for presiding over the tripling of the value of Times Mirror stock. Willes, a former vice chairman at General Mills, declared last spring that he would "get out a bazooka" to "blow up" the traditional wall between advertising and editorial departments. Now he had taken over as publisher at the Times, displacing Richard T. Schlosberg III on October 1, and was putting his marketing ideas into practice.
As he did so, he set a breathtakingly ambitious goal for circulation - a 50 percent increase, a goal based in part on the paper's shallow penetration in the vast Southern California market. Willes plans to ride new sections and features - including new sections for women and Hispanics - to that goal.
That's where the collaboration between editors and business-side executives is intended to break ground. One player from the marketing side is Jeffrey S. Klein, 44, who was named general manager for news, a new title. Another, from the advertising side, is Janis Heaphy, 45, who is to be responsible for a new section aimed at women and will supervise "business planning" of weekly and Sunday Calendar sections.
Willes's sheer determination and optimism - his conviction that dramatic growth is a likelihood - have generated some genuine excitement inside the newspaper. Although Coffey, 50, presided over a thorough makeover of the paper's look and his own share of splashy new sections, he was also a cautious editor who avoided confrontation within the office and in the paper's news coverage. As one worried editor put it, "This paper has been starved for leadership" and, as a result, "Willes has gotten an incredibly warm reception."
Willes's ideas have engendered skepticism and alarm in some quarters, however. Edwin Guthman, a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, a former national editor at the Times and, before that, a Pulitzer-winning reporter at The Seattle Times, put it bluntly: "Having business people so closely tied in to news creates the appearance of a conflict of interest. And no matter how much they protest or claim that they are the most vigilant journalists in the universe, that appearance is not going to go away."
Neither Willes nor Parks, who is 53, responded to requests to be interviewed, but they did answer their critics on an October 13 L.A. talk-radio show. "We've been very careful to make it clear that the editorial side of the paper is completely independent," Willes told listeners. Should disputes arise, however, the lines of authority under the new Times structure seem less than distinct. "Well, it depends on the issue," Willes said over the air. "On editorial issues the editor is absolutely first and will make the decision, and if there's a very strong disagreement, they will simply take it up the editorial chain and get it resolved. Our hope and our expectation is that, while they come from very different points of view, they'll come to have a common understanding."
Parks, who joined the Times in 1980 as Beijing bureau chief and later won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting from South Africa, told the listeners he's not worried. "I don't think there should be any doubt about the independence and the integrity of the editorial department.
"We're going to do something that I think is quite exciting, quite adventurous," he added. "And we'll be urging our colleagues on the East Coast to kind of catch up."
Still, even Willes's supporters at the paper are wary of how a supposed common understanding between business and editorial will translate into decisions about what to publish. "More market penetration, listen more to readers, be more responsive - I think these are all good things," says an editor on the metro desk. "The fear is that the readers are just going to lose faith in the paper's willingness to be objective. As soon as the stories tend to be about trying to sell something rather than the truth, then you have a problem."
by Charles Rappleye
he held the line
This has been a good year for The Philadelphia Inquirer, at last, and so Maxwell E.P. King has decided it will be his last as editor. King, 53, starts a ten-month leave on January 1, to travel and to work in the fields of his suburban goat farm. He intends to return as an associate editor, writing editorials on regional issues, a job that should free him from the debilitating economic pressures that defined his tenure.
King became editor in 1990 in the shadow of a giant. The legendary Gene Roberts had stepped down just before a recession, rising newsprint prices, and declining circulation set in. King inherited cutbacks and buyouts to meet the dictate for higher profit margins from parent corporation Knight-Ridder. While Roberts oversaw an expansion of newsroom resources, King presided over an era of belt-tightening; profit margins more than doubled to 16 percent while the editorial staff was slashed by the equivalent of 60 positions, to 560. Numbers alone only hint at the cost: four top editors were among those who accepted buyouts in late 1995, some newsroom stars left for other papers, and many were heartbroken as a paper that once offered them horizons limited only by their imaginations struggled to retain a measure of what it used to be.
Since then, newsroom morale has rebounded. New reporters have been hired and a high-tech but still-funky newsroom replaced the lovable but seedy old one. Last year the Inquirer ended a seven-year-drought by winning a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. Even the circulation slide was stanched, at least temporarily, in September. The Inky reported modest gains, the first in years, for an average of 428,000 daily and 878,000 Sundays.
King says his legacy is that he maintained a culture of investigate reporting, splashy projects, and a network of national and foreign bureaus in an era of retrenchment.
His successor will not be named for at least several weeks. Publisher Robert J. Hall says the search will go outside the Inquirer and Knight-Ridder, as well as within. Hall insists the final decision will be made in Philadelphia, not Miami. Journalists at the paper are betting that with profits up and circulation holding its own, Knight-Ridder will choose someone who values the paper's traditions rather than a numbers cruncher. Insider candidates being mentioned are Robert Rosenthal, the executive editor; Butch Ward, the managing editor; Jane Eisner, the editorial page editor; and Phil Dixon, the associate managing editor for metro news.
by Carol Morello
the new New Republic
Why was Michael Kelly, 40, fired as editor of The New Republic after only ten months on the job? Kelly, who made his reputation partly at the expense of the Clintons, seemed intent on pursuing Vice President Al Gore's role in the White House fundraising affair. Kelly's fans say that Gore was a favorite pupil of editor-in-chief Martin Peretz from Harvard days, and they contend that Peretz, a man who changes editors the way Henry VIII changed wives, could not stand seeing his old friend attacked.
The Peretz camp's argument: Michael Kelly, a man hired for the intellectual depth of his writing, turned out to be obsessive in his choice of subject and mean, really mean, in his choice of tone. "He was very good at ridicule - that was his m?tier," says Peretz, 58. The magazine under its new editor, Charles Lane, 35, a New Republic veteran and a former Newsweek Berlin chief, is expected to be a bit kinder. It's too early to make a call, because insiders say a lot of what's been published in Lane's first issues - he took over with the September 29 edition - has been inventory. Kelly, meanwhile, will be writing a weekly syndicated column for The Washington Post and another weekly column for The National Journal.
ARRIVALS
the british are coming
With a license to spend 100 million pounds sterling - about $160 million - on international development, the Financial Times is aiming to raise its daily circulation in the former Colonies from 37,000 to 100,000 in three years. So editor Richard Lambert, 53, is spending the next twelve months in New York, repackaging the paper for a North American audience. While some stories will be changed, the broadsheet will retain its identity and appearance, including its famous "pink" (actually light orange) paper. Says Richard Waters, the paper's New York bureau chief: "We want to keep a single global newspaper, unlike The Wall Street Journal, which has three very different papers [Asia, Europe, U.S.]." Six more journalists have been hired in America, bringing the total to 18, and the popular Lex column of investment analysis has added a writer based in New York to add some items to the British column.
labor of love
There aren't too many pro-union magazines these days, but the new WorkingUSA carries sympathetic essays and photos of people carrying picket signs. The bimonthly ($36 per year) is looking for articles "that will provide fresh new insights on labor and work," says an editor's note. Editor Don Stillman has the chops: the United Mine Workers Journal won the National Magazine Award in 1976 while he was editor. Of special interest is a piece in the July/August issue: "Voices of the Detroit Newspaper Strike."
aiming for the middle
There are a lot of personal finance magazines out there, but Charley Blaine, editor of the new Better Homes & Gardens' Family Money, claims his target readers don't read any of the others. The quarterly magazine is aimed at folks with a couple of kids and $50-60K of household in- come, well below the median for Money, SmartMoney, or Kiplinger's Personal Finance. It's produced in Des Moines, and how can you get more Middle American than that?
