L.A. Times editor O’Shea dismissed
By Thomas S. Mulligan and Dawn Chmielewski
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
6:10 PM PST, January 20, 2008
For the second time in 15 months, the editor of The Los Angeles Times has been fired in a dispute over budget cuts ordered by his publisher.
Times Publisher David D. Hiller told Editor James E. O’Shea to step down after the two were unable to agree on Hiller’s plan to cut $4 million this year from a $120-million newsroom budget, according to people familiar with the situation.
The $4 million would be in addition to reductions valued at about $3 million in the newshole, the space in the newspaper devoted to editorial content, these people said.
They said that O’Shea argued that across-the-board cuts would hamper newsgathering efforts at a time when The Times was gearing up for in-depth and expensive coverage of the presidential election race and the Summer Olympics in China.
The dispute came to a head Jan. 7 when Hiller and O’Shea had lunch at a downtown L.A. restaurant. O’Shea’s departure, which was to be announced this week, was initially reported Sunday on the Wall Street Journal’s Web site.
It wasn’t immediately clear when O’Shea would leave and who would succeed him. Speculation in the newsroom was that leading candidates were John Arthur, the paper’s managing editor, or Russ Stanton, the innovation editor.
The next editor of The Times, the nation’s fourth largest daily newspaper, will be the fourth in less than three years.
O’Shea’s firing came one month after the closing of the $8.2-billion buyout of Tribune Co., The Times’ parent, led by Chicago real-estate baron Sam Zell and an employee stock ownership plan. Zell was out of the country on Sunday and unavailable for comment, a spokeswoman said.
In an interview, Hiller disputed that O’Shea had been fired, saying that his exit was part of a plan involving senior level and organizational changes to be enacted after Zell took control of the company. “Think of it as the changes made at the start of a new presidential term,” Hiller said. “In the context of these changes, Jim and I decided we no longer saw things the same way about how to take the company forward.”
For his part, O’Shea said, “It is true that we did not share a common vision for the future of the LA Times. From my perspective he made the decision to terminate me. I cannot comment further without talking to my attorney.”
Zell has said repeatedly that his goal was to find ways of boosting Tribune’s revenue and that unceasing cost cuts were a “dead end.”
He also has said he would give greater power to regional executives such as Hiller to act as they saw fit to cope with plunging advertising revenue.
The newspaper industry, like broadcast television, is being roiled by profound changes wrought by the Internet, which competes directly and with increasing effectiveness for the attention of consumers and the dollars of advertisers who want to reach those consumers.
O’Shea arrived at The Times from the Chicago Tribune in November 2006, two weeks after Hiller fired Times Editor Dean Baquet in another budget dispute. Baquet had succeeded John Carroll in 2005, after Carroll, who had served as editor for five years, retired, saying he was bothered by continuing pressure to cut the newsroom budget.
Hiller, former publisher of the Chicago Tribune, took over as Times publisher in November 2006, succeeding Jeffrey M. Johnson, who had been ousted by his superiors at Tribune’s Chicago headquarters over the same issues.
