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# CityWatch Today: The LA Times, Once a Print-Media Tragedy, is Rising from the Near-Dead
April 18 2019
Written by Joe Pompeo.
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**GUEST WORDS**--Having survived a foul-mouthed owner, “frat boys,” and new-media loopiness, LA’s paper of record is now journalism happy-news, with a passel of prestige hires and a billionaire running it “like a family project.” But not everything is rosy in El Segundo.
Of all the once-mighty media organizations that have been brought to their knees, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more tragic saga than that of the *Los Angeles Times.* The 138-year-old broadsheet was decimated by the same market pressures that have turned newspapers all over America into sad shells of their former selves. Print advertising? Off a cliff. Newsroom headcount? Down by hundreds. Foreign bureaus? *Poof.*
But the story of the *Los Angeles Times* over the past 15 years is far more Shakespearean than most. The latter-day management of the Tribune Company, and all of its subsequent corporate permutations, resulted in a well-documented series of scandals, disasters, and embarrassments for the *Times* and its then-sister titles (the *Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun,*etc.). There was the profanity-laced reign of **Sam Zell,** who landed Tribune in bankruptcy and famously remarked to a journalist during a meeting in one of the company’s newsrooms, “Fuck you.” There was the [downfall](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/business/media/06tribune.html) of various top Tribune executives, who were exposed for running the company like a boys’ locker room, as opposed to a respected institution bearing the legacy of LA’s legendary Chandler family.
More recently, the “Tronc” era, under Chicago businessman **Michael Ferro,** was a combination of ludicrous digital jargon (“harness the power of our local journalism, feed it into a funnel, and then optimize it”), head-scratching strategy dictums (remember when the *L.A. Times* was supposed to go global with bureaus in Hong Kong, Seoul, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Lagos, Moscow, and Mexico City?), and, of course, more bad behavior. NPR [revealed](https://www.npr.org/2018/01/18/578612534/accusations-of-frat-house-behavior-trail-la-times-publisher-s-career) two sexual harassment lawsuits and accusations of inappropriate conduct involving newly installed *L.A. Times* publisher **Ross Levinsohn** (he denied the charges, was cleared by an internal probe, and moved to a different job within Tronc). Additionally, two women [accused](http://fortune.com/2018/03/19/tronc-chairman-michael-ferro-allegations/) Ferro of sexual harassment and inappropriate advances, and to top it off, as NPR also reported, there was a dinner with a group of company executives to whom Ferro allegedly [complained](https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/675961765/tribune-tronc-and-beyond-a-slur-a-secret-payout-and-a-looming-sale) that Los Angeles was run by a “Jewish cabal.” (Ferro denied the allegations.)
In the midst of it all, the *Times* newsroom was [on the verge of insurrection last year](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/business/media/los-angeles-times-editor.html) over an ill-fated leadership shake-up, the unexplained suspension of a popular business editor, and an [apparent effort](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/los-angeles-times-scab-fears_n_5a6a09bbe4b06e2532657c66) to build a shadow newsroom while the existing staff was unionizing. “They just had an unbelievable string of assholes running the place,” one former *L.A. Times* journalist told me. [(Read the rest.](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/los-angeles-times-once-print-media-tragedy-is-rising-from-the-dead-patrick-soon-shiong?inline))
-cw
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