Why Willes is Wrong

On a recent Friday in Los Angles, the Times arrived at my hotel room door. The paper was fat, and at 25 cents (the new, lowered price) and 168 pages, it was a terrific bargain. There were nine pieces on page one, each with a Times byline. The headlines were modest, as were the four photographs and the single graphic. The closest thing to soft news was an article about how public opinion was turning against a mother whose two children were killed by a train while she slept.

The entire front section contained thirty-one stories, in addition to a lot of briefs and summaries. It was all hard, serious news, and it also was a marketer's nightmare, one that you would hide from any focus group. I cannot imagine that the redesigned Los Angeles Times will resemble it when it appears some time in 1998. Publisher Mark Willes talks about a new look that will feature bigger headlines, bigger pictures, and more graphics -- a look that, as he has been saying, "grabs the readers and pulls them in."

The paper I read that Friday reflected a view of news very different from the one that seems inherent in Willes's idea of the Times to come. That view holds that people are inherently curious and that there are many serious issues that men and women not only need to know about but will want to know about; that the newspaper's job is to report and present these issues, intelligently and clearly, and that if this job is done well people will come into the paper. This view rejects the assumption that the front page should act as a nightclub shill, hustling customers off the sidewalk.

Jeffrey S. Klein, a senior vice-president who now is also general manager, news, and the new editor, Michael Parks, both argue that the integrity of the people at the Times stand as a guarantee against any manipulation of news for business considerations. Klein made that point on a National Public Radio program called On the Media. As it happened, I was also on that show and I tried to say that while good people are crucial, Klein's argument is beside the point. No one is impugning the integrity of the executives at the Times. Parks has had a distinguished reporting career and may well develop into a great editor. Klein's record on free press issues -- he is a former First Amendment lawyer -- appears impeccable. Willes brings to his job an impressive background in academia, the Federal Reserve system, and business.

 But the question is not whether the people running the Times have honorable intentions. The question is whether the system Willes has installed is good for the paper and whether it should be a model for other papers.

Already a Times advertising-side employee has asked a business reporter, Debora Vrana, if a press release could run on a certain page. The employee was later rebuked and the incident dismissed as "human error." Why am I not reassured?

Would this "error" have occurred under the old system? I doubt it. The new structure, which at least at the top centralizes business and editorial functions, inevitably increases the possibility for "human error." If people assume that no walls means no walls, they will take their values, culture, assumptions, and problems across the divide that once existed to prevent such traffic. What about situations that lack the clarity of this howling impropriety, when the disagreements are a matter of competing judgments and resolutions involve compromise? Anyone would be naive to assume that when the institutional environment is turbid, as it may become at the Times, news judgments can be insulated from non-news considerations.

Obviously, the separations between news and business result in operational traffic jams, and these can be troublesome in an era when competitive circumstances reward those who move swiftly. But although quickness off the mark is admirable, a system that slows the action down may not be entirely a bad thing. For it is not quickness off the mark that ultimately counts for the most; it is where you end up. Knowing where to go often takes some thinking time, as well as freedom from back-seat driving.

The leaders at the Times also make the point that what has happened there is scarcely revolutionary. They are right. Editorial and business sides all over the place have been cohabiting with varying degrees of intimacy for years. It also is no news that editors are soldiering through marketing wars. As in the unisex military, the training throws them together with new associates -- in this case, business executives.

 What is different now is that the organization being integrated is the Los Angeles Times, the paper that gives its readers a nine-story front, without grabbers, and that has still managed to grow its circulation up to 1,068,812 on weekdays and 1,361,988 on Sundays. What is different is that the Times is among the handful of papers that not only consistently produces superior journalism but also has stood as a redoubt for the embattled principle that while, yes, editors and business executives need to cooperate on matters of importance to the paper, an organizational firebreak must be maintained to keep news judgments and decisions as free as possible from considerations of commerce.

The journalist's ethic reflected in that Friday front page is incompatible with the priorities of the marketer. If you lose faith that this ethic is essential both to a newspaper's survival and prosperity, then you have lost faith in an assumption that is quite fundamental to journalism: that there resides in the public a curiosity driven by intelligence and buttressed by the knowledge that the more one understands, even about things whose connections to the moment may be invisible, the better equipped one is to make the informed judgments of free men and women.

I think that what Willes is doing is a bad idea. Even so, journalism will go on. We have had bad ideas before in our business but the old ideals still survive -- fierce independence and dedicated public service and the determined protection of news values not only from enemies but also from friends who would subordinate them, dilute them, transform them into something more contemporary -- and cramped, as well. Into something aimed at nothing more capacious than filling a niche in the lives of readers. It is always a fight to sustain these ideals. I only wish the Times had not made that struggle even more difficult.

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