The Ax-Man Cometh
‘Times’ editor Russ Stanton takes to the OC Press Club
When Spring Street flushed 150 newsroom jobs last week, we knew there was only one way to mark the occasion: with a party in Newport Beach!
Los Angeles Times editor Russ Stanton had long been the scheduled keynoter for the Orange County Press Club’s year-end (yes, I know) gala last Thursday, and – though perhaps a bit ashen, and maybe a little dead behind the eyes since he’d been busy laying off nearly 20 percent of his editorial workforce that very day – he kept his promise. (Don’t keep your distance.)
Over actually delicious salmon at the Island Hotel (formerly the Four Seasons), the Press Club listened sympathetically – there wasn’t one of us in the room who wouldn’t have taken the chief’s job at the L.A. Times no matter how gloomy its future, to then fall on our swords at a later date. Plus, the OC Press Club, of which I am a member, does tend to comfort the comfortable. We like power! It is sexy! (We also like to see sexy, powerful people indicted, and in O.C. at least, we had our share.)
Stanton’s unprepared remarks seemed an introspective and honest explication of the future of the Times – until he mentioned the ways the Times would continue to excel, and mentioned, particularly, covering the environment.
Hadn’t LAObserved reported that very day that Deborah Schoch and Janet Wilson had been laid off, and that Marla Cone had taken the buy-out? Wilson covered air quality; Schoch, according to LAO, was a past VP of the Society of Environmental Journalists and a Nieman environmental fellow at Harvard; and Cone was a noted and award-winning environmental reporter. And so that was when I realized that Stanton – for all the sympathy we in the room had for him – was sort of full of shit.
But for one shining moment, Stanton told the unvarnished truth, a truth so unexpected, reporters all over the room put down their dessert spoons and grabbed for the evening’s program on which to take notes. Stanton was talking about “the big national dailies.” “To be frank,” he said, “I’m not sure we’re among them anymore.”
Papers are still profitable; the Times is still profitable. If Sam Zell weren’t paying almost a billion a year in debt service for his purchase of the Tribune Company, there wouldn’t be a need to shrink again a once truly great paper.
Capitalism is awesome.
Smoking outside, over a glass of Champagne, I chatted with a Cal State Fullerton journalism professor. “Where were they [reporters] when Detroit shut down?” he asked, not terribly sympathetically. “Where were they when all the jobs moved to China? They weren’t there. They couldn’t have cared less when it was blue-collar people losing their jobs. They certainly never cared about unions. Now it’s different, because it’s happening to them. Guess what? Ask The Orange County Register: They can send copy editing to India after all!”
Published: 07/23/2008
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good one, bec.