THE STORY OF OUR TIMES-A bright, young and innocent LA Times reporter called me last week to get the money quote she needed to follow up on Kevin James’ embarrassing attack on Controller Ron Galperin’s highly critical audit of the performance and management of the city Department of Street Services which the former right-wing radio show host oversees as the $140,000 chair of the Public Works Commission.
I don’t begrudge the guy earning a living. We all got to do what we got to do but there are limits of personal integrity that one should not cross if honor still has any meaning at all.
Once I warmed up, I couldn’t stop the flow of my rant trying to explain the history and context of the story, of why it was so distressing to see someone I like a lot, someone I spoke in support of at community meetings, someone I voted for in the mayoral election, turn into an apologist for the do-nothing, know-nothing administration of Eric Garcetti and the abject failure of city bureaucrats to do the jobs they are so well paid to do.
Little of that appeared in the story despite her best efforts but the rules of corporate make it all but impossible to tell the truth. The forms of storytelling that are considered corporately professional stifle the truth, stifle the writing skills of reporters – that’s why so many people read blogs and news sites where people can say what they know and what they believe.
I bring up this irrelevancy because the LA Times today is a pale imitation of the newspaper I competed against for 30 years at the Herald-Examiner and the Daily News, the former long dead and the latter dying slowly and painfully.
I despise the Times to the point that I publicly and repeatedly defamed the paper for what I’ve called its criminal neglect of higher purposes that have made it a co-conspirator in much of what has gone wrong in the region.
For decades, Times journalism has lacked a moral compass, lacked a vision for LA or Southern California that transcended the greed of their owners and the political correctness of its staff. That put the truth ahead of all other values. That stood for the greater good of the greatest number instead of pimping for their own careers as editors and reporters and the economic interests of the powerful.
My point was and is that the LA Times is the most powerful institution in a city and region where the only other organized politically-consequential force is Maria Elena Durazo’s Federation of Labor and the confederation of selfish interests that have created a pathetic City Hall political machine where the carefully sculpted public story has nothing to do with what is really going on in the back rooms.
So let’s all give a big cheer and welcome Austin Beutner as the new CEO and publisher of the newly created Tribune Publishing Company’s largest newspaper, our own rapidly diminishing LA Times.
How such a capable and unpretentious man could wind up in such a position after a successful career in investment banking that made him wealthy – not as a CEO, not as a newspaperman – is amazing.
The Times is the only hope for raising the public’s awareness of the looming calamity that faces us because of decades of corrupt and incompetent government and the replacement of good-paying factory jobs with no job or menial low-paying jobs.
Austin (photo) and I have talked at length several times since he recovered from a broken neck caused by a bike riding incident and got involved in civic life as the Eli Broad nominee to rescue Antonio Villaraigosa from the fog of City Hall’s corrupt and ineffective culture, even fronting for an earlier effort to buy the Times and make it a nonprofit.
From what he saw and learned from his City Hall foray, Beutner got the bug and in a delusionary moment that a rational fellow like himself rarely succumbs to, announced he was running for mayor.
He never stood a chance and never could have done the things he wanted to even if he somehow had won.
As publisher of the Times, he just might be able to make a difference he never could have made as mayor.
Beutner put together the Kantor 2020 Commission which came up with a lengthy list of significant reforms that were largely ignored by the impotent press and totally ignored by City Hall.
So he has been inside and learned in detail a lot about what’s broken. He’s developed an agenda for reform. He knows the Times has a fundamental duty to stand up for what the city needs and a commercial opportunity to survive economically the only way it can: By becoming a great local newspaper in print and online.
That is the antithesis of the Times’ longstanding goal of becoming New York Times West, an imitation of something great that it was never capable of delivering.
So here are some thoughts on what must be done:
- Challenge every department head to submit their detailed blueprint for turning the spiral of decline around and offer an appraisal of the value added by each of the employees who work them.
- Fire all of them unless they offer creative, forward-thinking solutions to reallocate their resources and refocus their mission on making the paper interesting to the readers rather than to other hackneyed journalists and Pulitzer Prize judges.
- Buy the Daily News and its sister papers in the LA Newspaper Group from Long Beach and the South Bay to San Gabriel Valley and San Bernardino. Make them 2-4 times a week intensely local papers like the Glendale News-Press and others in the Times’ portfolio.
- Hire people who have created interesting and dynamic news websites like the one NBC News and other commercial enterprises have created by going outside their own products to produce comprehensive news sites using all available information.
- Test all the people who write headlines for print and online and fire all those who can’t put into words that are provocative and interesting what the stories are about. Replace them with British and Australian journos who know how to do that.
- Reduce most news to two or three paragraphs that contain the guts of the news. Abolish the strangling forms of corporate journalism storytelling that make them boring and uninteresting. Give the writers their heads to tell stories in a way that people would actually want to read them because they are interesting, amusing, and informative and have a strong point of view with the context needed for them to make up their own minds.
- Do what Rupert Murdoch did to the old grey lady, the Times of London, and to the Wall Street Journal when he bought them: He spiced up the look of the papers and the content despite all the objections of people who can’t stand change even when it’s necessary for survival.
Despite his modesty as a guy who only knows what he reads in the paper over his breakfast cereal, Austin Beutner is in the right job where he can actually change the political agenda of the city and help create the kind of enlightened public conversation that would uplift the entire region.
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To get his hands on the power of the Times he is going to have to clean house and bring in hard-nosed professionals from outside to purge the culture of write-long-write-right-write-once-when-it-no-longer-matters that the Chandlers and their minions created – journalism without a vision, without broad impact, without meaning.
Print media have been dying since the 1950s because they pretended television didn’t exist. They got away with it a long time because they had deep market penetration and a distribution system that couldn’t be matched. Still half the papers in the country disappeared and by the 1960s, we all knew we were dinosaurs, clinging to life in the face of direct mail and then the Internet.
Today, Rupert Murdoch has spun off publishing so it will stop dragging down profitable movie and TV businesses. They took the Time out of Time-Warner with a spinoff of publishing and last week, Tribune, now out of bankruptcy did the same.
The future of newspapers is grim. The future of news is great. The problem is how to pay for it, how to make a website so indispensable that people come to it in great numbers and spend a good deal of time learning about the world around them.
The core ideals journalism are the core ideals of America – freedom, justice, equality, fairness, mutual concern and respect, the pursuit of liberation individually and collectively to achieve our true destiny.
OK, we’re talking about turning the whale into a shark under impossible circumstances. But Beutner is capable of understanding the problem, using his soft hands with their firm grip to start the process of saving this once dominant institution from its downward spiral to oblivion into a must-read able to pay its bills and serve its community.
Cultural change of impacted institutions is extremely difficult but it’s a skill set Austin has developed in the world of corporate takeovers and as Bill Clinton’s emissary to the former Soviet Union where he was engaged in helping to turn a communist economy into a free market economy.
(Ron Kaye is a lifetime journalist, writer and political observer. He is the former editor of the Daily News and the founder of the Saving LA Project. He writes occasionally for CityWatch and can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 66
Pub: Aug 15, 2014
