My new  column, Goodbye Baquet, Hello O'Shea, [plus today's 1st update and 2nd update] features an interview with recently installed Los Angeles Times editor Jim O'Shea. (I'll be posting the full Q-and-A online here tomorrow.) And the Chicagoan came out fighting. He had some very angry words for his counterpart at The New York Times, Bill Keller, who's been trash-talkin' a lot in recent days. Another surprise is that O'Shea resisted the opportunity to expand his turf to include the editorial/opinion pages. LAT editor John Carroll had been in charge of that section, but not Dean Baquet. “And when I came here, the new publisher David Hiller said to me, ‘Do you think we ought to change that since the Chicago Tribune editor oversees it?” And I said ‘No.’” O’Shea explained he had “enough mud on my shoes” without navigating that terrain, too. (Meanwhile, I urge Dean Baquet to come clean about the real nature of the too-close relationship he had with the Billionaire Boys Club -- Burkle, Broad, Geffen, etc. -- whom he and/or his surrogates were actively wooing to return the LAT to local ownership.) Besides focused on fixing the LAT's state-of-disaster website and increasing its near nonexistent local coverage, O'Shea wants to do something about the paper's coma-inducing reporting and writing. “There’s some pretty well-written stuff in the paper. But my emphasis is on shorter articles. People don’t have a lot of time. So I’ve been saying to editors that we don’t work hard enough for readers. We need to give them the information up front and fast so they can make a decision about whether they want to read the story.” Also, I found it amusing how quickly O'Shea has adopted the SoCal lifestyle: He moved from a downtown hotel (“It was kinda depressing”) to a month-to-month furnished rental in Pasadena and now has leased a Manhattan Beach condo and a Lexus.  "I’ve even found myself sitting here and debating, ‘Should I go to Chicago this weekend?’ Because when I look at the ocean out there, I think, ‘What’s the point of going somewhere else?’' He rode along with the police one night into South-Central and Rampart and, admits that Los Angeles was 'a culture shock' but now says, 'Holy cow, how do you cover it?'. Here's how my column starts out:... Read More »

UPDATED THROUGHOUT DAY: Dean Baquet, the fired editor of the Los Angeles Times, has landed at The New York Times as Washington Bureau Chief and Assistant Managing Editor. His return follows the Tribune Co.'s quiet rejection of the Broad/Burkle bid for the Chicago media company. (Broad and Burkle submitted their joint bid just a day after Baquet was forced out of his job November 7th and have been talking with him ever since. "Everybody liked him. There were lots of meetings," an insider told me earlier.) Realizing that his dream of returning to the LAT was dead, Baquet quickly made the move to the NYT. Once the Tribune board concluded that the Burkle/Broad offer for the company was not "an appropriate premium" above the current share value, insiders tell me, a management-led solution is now in progress. That meant there was no longer any reason for Baquet to wait on the sidelines because he'd been assured a return to the top spot at the paper by Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad after an expected takeover. (Then again, it's always a zero-sum game waiting on the whims of any billionaire and Baquet was placed in the awkward position of having to search for an LAT buyer among very rich locals.) Baquet told the NYT that he had met with Broad and Burkle, yet characterized the conversations as casual, and claimed he kept his personal distance, thinking that he might someday be in the position of directing news coverage of them if they won the paper. Nice try, Dean. My info shows Baquet through surrogates and on his own was actively and anxiously wooing Broad both before and after he was fired -- not only to make a bid for the LAT but then to bring him back as editor. It was indeed a very slippery slope for Baquet to be navigating ethically, and one which, in my opinion, undermined his crusade as Dean Of Arc to preserve the editorial integrity of the LAT in the face of Tribune Co.-ordered staff and budget cuts. 

Baquet is replacing Phil Taubman, who will be moving to California for the NYT along with his wife, fellow NYT'er Felicity Barringer. (Taubman has many California connections, among them Stanford where he developed a friendship with Condoleeza Rice that continues to this day.) I understand there has been tension between the Washington bureau and the NYT headquarters ... Read More »