Sam's LA Times and Sam's LA Bagels

What's the difference between Sam Zell's Los Angeles Times and Sam's Bagels on Los Angeles' Larchmont Boulevard?

None, if you take Mr. Zell's words to heart. He told his Tribune Co. employees in June that "we're in the business of satisfying customers, and we will respond to what they say they want." More poppy seeds and fewer cheese bialys? You got it, dollink. More King Kong remake stories and less King-Drew Hospital horror stories? What you say goes, bub. The customer's always right.

But Sam's Bagels, unlike Sam's Times, is not safeguarded by the First Amendment. In fact, the press is the only business singled out in the Constitution for protection. The reason, of course, is that the founders intended the press to serve as a fourth estate -- a formidable check against the government's abuse of power, an essential outlet for dissent; not a mere privilege of democracy, in Walter Lippman's words, but "an organic necessity in a great society."

From John Peter Zenger until Sam Zell -- have those names ever appeared in the same sentence before? -- press owners have maintained that their mission is to do well while doing good, to turn a profit while also living up to their democratic responsibilities. Many of them have figured out how to do both: partly by subsidizing the stuff we need to be good citizens by selling us the fun and fluff we want; partly by deploying journalists' storytelling skills in order to turn essential information into compelling must-reads.

To Sam Zell, however, running the Times, as well the other papers he bought when he acquired the Tribune Co., isn't a public trust, and its stewardship doesn't include serving the public interest, no more than would running a bagel joint. Like the asset-stripping private equity buccaneers of the Blackstone Group, Zell's business is capitalism, plain and simple. Having saddled Tribune with more than $8 billion in highly leveraged debt (he invested only $315 million of his own money in order to take Tribune private), now he has to sell assets and cut costs at a furious pace in order to keep his debt service from eating up his profit.

In Los Angeles, that means not only putting Times Mirror Square up for sale (condos, anyone?), but also means slashing 250 jobs, including 150 news jobs; cutting 15 percent of the paper's pages per week, and, according to publisher David Hiller, "a redesigned flagship Los Angeles Times newspaper to debut in the fall, reflecting the work of the reinvent team." If Zell's editorially pared down, graphically tarted up and otherwise reinvented Orlando Sentinel is a sign of what's to come, our local paper will soon be a cross between My Weekly Reader and a ransom note.

I'm not saying that every one of the 150 Times journalists who'll be fired deserves a Pulitzer, but I am saying that a whopping proportion of them are assets that any community in its right mind would do all it could to keep on the job. I'm not claiming that print journalism is a swell business to be in right now, but I am contending that Zell's ocean of red ink is more a consequence of his own debt-ridden acquisition strategy than of declining advertising sales and circulation, and that he's punishing the city's civic IQ to make up for his piratical swagger. I'm not blind to the advent of free Web-based news and analysis, but I'm also gimlet-eyed about the nature of much of online content: a farrago of opinion, rumor and propaganda, and most of it (like most of local television news) parasitically dependent on the dwindling band of reporters and editors for national papers and wire services who actually get out of their pajamas, wear out their shoe leather and attempt to honor journalistic standards. I'm not pretending that the judgment of Times correspondents and editors is beyond reproach -- everyone has a tale of bias or neglect to tell -- but I do maintain that the Los Angeles Times is nevertheless among the top four papers in the country and that it would be a crime against democracy to dumb it down in order to cover Zell's monthly nut.

The problem with the idea of a newspaper being "in the business of satisfying customers" is that customers don't always know what they want, and they certainly don't always know what they need.

Read the rest of my Tale of Two Sams column at www.jewishjournal.com.

Comments

[daddysboy]

Like television, print media will have to die to live again if it is ever possible. I also think that the vacuousness of Los Angeles has to be a part of this. Although, since this same scenario has already been playing out in New York, maybe it's just inevitable. Living in a large city with a shell of a newspaper that was gutted long ago and is so biased it has almost become funny if you can get past the soul-crushing realization that your neighbors think this is news, I have trouble sympathizing. I do however sympathize with your ruminations about the loss of many great public voices all at once. What people don't seem to realize is that as we lose our cultural institutions, they aren't being replaced by equally respected transports. While I would disagree slightly with the tone of your description of the general internet discourse, I would agree that any one person on the internet can never have the same volume and impact as a respected journalist writing for a long-standing newspaper.

[JFo]

I don't think there's much more Mr. Zell could do to the Los Angeles Times that will make it any worse than it already is. It is a dreadfully written paper; I find it hard to finish even an article in which I have an interest in the topic. Come on, they don't even have a staff that can come up with a Sunday Magazine more than once a month. I only receive it now for the movie guide and because I somehow feel it is perverse not to receive the local newspaper anywhere. But I certainly don't look to it for the news or the features. Thank God for the New York Times.

[billw8017]

Scalia and the NRA feel that the gun industry is protected by the constitution's second amendment. I also seem to remember a reference to the Post Office. Frankly, the alternative press may be closer to the spirit of the first amendment. The media has features similar to entertainment and sports. That is, some amateurs do it for nothing or very little while stars can make out very well. The point has been made that well off media stars do not perfectly relate to the interests of the general public.

Let business leaders run the major press into the ground by the solid business practice of delivering less and charging more so a small press with passion and popular connections may flourish better! This would better resemble the partizan papers sponsored by America's founding fathers.

[SonnyBono]

The problems with the Los Angeles Times started when the part of the Chandler family that was interested in money took control from the few remaining family members that were interested in the news business and wanted the Times to be one of the great papers of the country. The moneyed interests won out - part of the family dispute was some lame ass member of the family felt disrespected so he had no problem doing away with the legacy of the Times as a paper that cared - Yet another reason to bring back the estate tax and make some of these @ssholes actually work for a living. About the only thing left of the Times that still has any integrity is the Sports section and a few of the writers - but they do employ Jonah Goldberg - that Bob Novak wantabe.

[thatvisionthing]

So I'm thinking of how this country bails out Chrysler and bails out Bear-Stearns. Had the auto giants been allowed to fail, maybe we'd have electric cars now and a million people in the Middle East would still have homes and loved ones. Instead, as anyone who saw Who Killed the Electric Car? knows, Big Auto had every one of them crushed, even while pained ex-leasers tried to hold press vigils to save the last ones. I think there's one in an auto museum someplace, but the working guts are gone, it's just the body. So glad we bailed out Big Auto.

Then Bear-Stearns. About the last thing Eliot Spitzer did before his world collapsed (any interesting spying involved there?) was write a Washington Post column about the mortgage industry and Bush's complicity: "Predatory Lenders' Partner In Crime": Bush. See Greg Palast: http://www.gregpalast.com/elliot-spitzer-gets-nailed/. Meanwhile for all the patsies on the other end of the mortgages, too bad so sad.

I guess I'm suspicious of the likelihood of good coming from any government bailout. But watching the press go down when other scum were bailed out? Hard.

[Sioen]

We do need journalists for our democracy to work. The problem is, the current model -- corporate ownership of large mass-market media -- doesn't serve journalism or democracy well. We've all been lied to by corporate interests for long enough.

Traditional MSM needs to die, and a new model needs to take over. Let the big media companies sell entertainment -- it's all they really want to do anyway, and it's certainly all they're good at (if that).

But for news, we need small, independent folks -- an army of them across the country, wearing out their e-mails AND their shoe leather, reporting on stuff that matters to their communities. The Internet gives us a model where it's possible to support smaller sites with targeted readerships. Add to that some nonprofits to do bigger investigative projects, such as ProPublica, and we'll have a radically decentralized, genuinely independent network that will be less prone to corruption, bias and pack mentality.

Sadly, it's going to take some pain to get there, especially for the best journalists currently -- those in newspapers -- as this shaking out takes place. But our nation will be better for it in the end.

[dooleynoted]

"The Internet gives us a model where it's possible to support smaller sites with targeted readerships. Add to that some nonprofits to do bigger investigative projects, such as ProPublica, and we'll have a radically decentralized, genuinely independent network that will be less prone to corruption, bias and pack mentality."

Yes and that will have no impact. The elites already marginalize leftist independent reporting but sometimes those reports are picked up by the larger MSM and do resonate. The need is for an independent press to have a larger voice, not to make it smaller and less powerful. the world is full of radical publications that are only read by those who write them and their friends and which have no effect whatsoever on the issues they write about. That's what your fantasy will result in for all of the press. Our nation will be worse in the end.

[websmith]

An after it's over, the Times will more accurately reflect Sam's political persuasion. Some freedom of the press.

[Gidster]

In a few short years there will only be 1 or conglomerates in charge of all media and we will only receive the information they allow us to receive.
The truth does not sell papers anymore.

[hughbetcha]

Thanks very much for a spirited defense of a once-great-paper and for the respect you showed to working journalists. I am frequently aghast at the contempt heaped on the MSM by those who simultaneously and, let's be honest, parastically rip them off. For the most part, bloggers aren't out there gathering facts, knocking on doors, rummaging through records at city halls throughout the nation. They wait for someone else to do it then base an opinion on it. Content must have some bedrock reporting. It must be more than opinion or it's meaningless. So what happens when the folks who dig up King Drew horror stories or uncover insurance companies dropping cancer patients illegally or chronicle the lives of the poor and dispossed are all gone? What will bloggers and opionators draw upon? At that point all reality will become relative and darkness will fall on all of us.

[dooleynoted]

Bloggers aren't the only ones doing the ripping off. I'm amazed at the readers of Huffpo who puff out their chests and post with such pride every time a negative newspaper story is posted about how they "never read a paper anymore" and the "MSM is so corrupt it serves them right." Usually, and with these posters never seeming to notice the irony, it's a story taken from a newspaper site they just read on huffpo. I always ask OK what do you propose to replace newspapers and journalists with that will serve us better and never get an answer. For those who don't know they history of journalism we used to in this country have newspapers that were totally sensationalistic and openly biased in their political beliefs and it failed our democracy. That's what led to journalism schools. Do some research see if you think those past papers and today's Intent "news and "political" sites are much different and if that past is a future you truly want. there's nothing wrong with a new delivery information system - less destruction of forests and other benefits from the Internet replacing print newspapers - but if the news operations are tossed out too, I don't see how that advances the mission our Founding Fathers had for a vibrant press.

[Paul]

I cancelled my susbscription after 35 years because the LA Times has become a worthless rag.

[fairwitness]

It reflects the general "dumbing down" of our cultural intellect, which appears to be in very steep decline. The most fundamental crisis is in our lack of respect for Truth itself--we've been spun and dissembled and swindled and sold into misapprehending any aggressive "narrative" as Truth, and it just doesn't work--narrative is a weak and empty substitute for honest wondering and subsequent engagement. One can, of course, cynically ask, "What is Truth", and deny the possibility at all--th e defacto default position now, it seems--or the question, taken seriously, can stimulate mindful inquiry and open discourse. But we have rapidly devolved into substituting competing narratives for genuine, earnest inquiry, and our debasement--political, intellectual, moral, and social--continues unabated.

Diogenes has nearly run out of lamp oil.

[OCwriter]

And herein lies the problem: "the public doesn't always know what it wants or needs..." ends this columnist's spiel about the sacredness of print journalism...Print journalism is in this mess because of arrogance....period. You all didn't think the Net was any threat to your sacred POV about the world as we know it. You also didn't do your job during the outbreak of the Iraqi war because you were all too busy trying to become pundits on Fox and CNN rather than investigate the real story which, turns out, wasn't as sensational as beheadings and weapons of mass destruction search...Police yourselves better and maybe we'll pick up a paper and use it for something other than training our puppies.

[daddysboy]

No, print journalism is in this mess because people are too easily drawn in by shiny objects and behave no more civilized than raccoons most of their lives. Why spend the time fashioning superior content when a hand-held camera running through the forest will suffice?