Back in the day, the reality that Sam Zell now owned the Tribune was hard enough to swallow inside Tribune Tower. It was even more galling on the coast, where Sam Zell of Chicago now owned the Los Angeles Times. Zell is long gone, but the occupation rages on—a great city under an imperial thumb. The other day the lead headline of LA Observed, an online news sheet published by a former metro editor of the LA Times, announced: Chicago imposing deep new cuts on LA Times, report says.
Beutner’s axing horrified Los Angeles. “A group of prominent local businessmen, including Broad and two former mayors,” wrote a letter of protest, Warren reported, and implicit in the letter, media analyst Ken Doctor told Warren, “is the question of their future support of the Times. Beutner had appealed to local leadership for advertising support; presumably, under Ryan, company leaders may be less inclined to give the Times the benefit of ad doubt, in spending marketing money.”
Jack Fuller had been the Tribune’s editor and in 1996 was now its publisher when he came out with a meditative book called News Values. Four years later, as president of the subsidiary Tribune Publishing Company, Fuller oversaw the merger of the Times Mirror Company into the Tribune Company. This was the transaction that brought the Times and Tribune into one big family, where they were expected to flourish from the benefits of synergy and scale. Seven years later, Zell took over a staggering company nobody else wanted, a company that the New York Times said was “characterized by a strong antipathy between the head office in Chicago and its biggest single asset, the Los Angeles Times.”
The Times won 13 Pulitzers during the five years of what the New York Times would call Carroll’s “constant battle” with Chicago, and he resigned in 2005. (By that time, Fuller was already gone.) Baquet took over, but a year later he and his publisher fought Chicago over staffing cuts and were fired. To replace Baquet, the Tower sent in Jim O’Shea, a former managing editor of the Tribune. And what did O’Shea do? He went native! Here’s what he told me four years ago when I wrote about his memoir, The Deal From Hell:
