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Veteran Los Angeles Times reporter Henry Weinstein will receive the 2006 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism Tuesday night for a body of work that “is a monument to the importance of journalism in a free society, and the need for journalists who have the persistence and skill to dig into complex issues and lay them bare for the public.” Weinstein, 62, has served as a legal affairs writer, labor writer, and investigative reporter at the Times since 1978, sharing in two Pulitzer Prizes. CJR Daily spoke with Weinstein last Thursday.
Edward B. Colby: Was it inevitable that Dean Baquet would be forced to leave once he took his stand on staff cuts?
Henry Weinstein: Well, I don’t know that I can say for sure, but I guess in hindsight it looks like it was probably inevitable. I guess he has a different vision of what the paper should be than the current owners. I think that’s regrettable. The thing that I find particularly disheartening about this is it’s not like he was forced out because the paper wasn’t doing good work, it’s not like he was forced out because he had committed some ethical transgression. Far from it. Dean and John Carroll came in the aftermath of an ethical scandal here, from the Staples controversy in 1999, and the paper has done very good work — in the past half-dozen years, I think, we’ve won 13 Pulitzer Prizes. I mean, the fact [is] this paper has lost circulation as have virtually all newspapers around the country, almost every newspaper. So we are confronted with some significant structural problems, this paper like the rest of the industry. And it just seems to me that forcing out an editor, a very good editor, is not a solution to those problems.
EBC: Times reporters told the Washington Post that the atmosphere at the paper was “dismal” and “rock bottom.” How does the mood now compare to that in the newsroom during the 1999 Staples Center scandal?
HW: Oh, I think this is very different. During the Staples scandal we were outraged over an ethical transgression when the top executives of the newspaper got in bed, figuratively, with an advertiser. That was a problem that through journalism — it being reported on — and an uprising in the newsroom we were able to take care of. I mean, the paper conducted its own internal investigation, printed a very, very long story by our then-great media writer, David Shaw, about what had happened, and we instituted new procedures for the relationships with advertisers — clarified procedures and instituted some new procedures.
What’s going on now is a broader sort of problem dealing with sweeping changes in the industry, and I think that we are confronted with a very big challenge, because as you can see every day you read stories about this or that newspaper that’s having to make cuts because of declining circulation or other problems — as I say, as a result in some measure of the Internet, and shifting reader tastes.
The mood in the newsroom, certainly on the day that it was clear that Dean had been forced out, was very gloomy. People are definitely very concerned about the future of the newspaper. On the other hand, we’re still turning out a very good newspaper every day — be it about election coverage or a lot of aggressive investigative stories we’ve been doing about problems with transplants and a host of other subjects that I could name. So people are carrying on, but they are certainly concerned about what the future holds.
EBC: Beyond the initial negativity in the newsroom following his exit, does it permanently damage the paper for the public to see it lose its top editor in this way?
HW: Well, I certainly don’t think it’s good for the image of the paper. The Tribune is sending in as an editor their current managing editor, Jim O’Shea, who has a very good reputation as a journalist for many years — local correspondent, national correspondent, foreign correspondent, author of a fine book on the savings and loan scandal. But he’s obviously coming into a newsroom that has a lot of people that are very upset, and it will be a very significant management challenge for him. As to how that translates, and how it plays out, I think it’s just too early to tell. He’s arriving on Monday.
The other thing is you made a reference to the bottom line [earlier]. I just wanted to say one thing about that. This newspaper is a broadsheet, it’s not a tabloid. Our daily circulation, although some days are bigger than others — obviously Sunday’s bigger than Monday — but on any given day of the week, from week to week, the circulation does not vary the way the circulation say does of a tabloid with some exciting blaring headline. I mean, there are obviously exceptions, like [when] we have the outbreak of the Iraq war or verdict in the Simpson trial, or something like that. But for the most part circulation is pretty much the same on the same days of the week.
So one of the things I think that people need to keep in mind is that reporters can do absolutely great work, like the people that did this fabulous series that got a Pulitzer Prize and did a lot of good for the community a couple of years ago about the conditions at the main public hospital in south central Los Angeles. But those stories didn’t have a significant impact on our circulation. So a journalist can do a great job, and not necessarily have a significant impact in any given week on the bottom line. And I think that’s something that people need to keep in mind — that reporters and editors can only do so much in terms of generating circulation and revenue, and that newspapers have to put more money into marketing themselves. This newspaper’s had its marketing budget cut back severely. And in addition, I think that this newspaper and others need to be more aggressive in telling the community in a variety of ways about the service that they perform for the community, be it as simple as ads on buses or having journalists go out into schools more or to community groups. I think one thing that we have not done nearly well enough, and I don’t think it’s just us, is to have a more public presence. Journalists are, I think, generally reluctant to sort of hawk themselves. We, at least out here in L.A., most of us rarely appear on television. It’s a different environment than Washington, where you have a lot of journalists on television. But I think we need to have a more public presence, and I think we need to work on that.
EBC: The Chancellor Award invitation cites your 1979 series on housing fraud in Los Angeles and your 1982 series exposing the city’s worst slumlord as among your most memorable work at the Times. How do you think aggressive, investigative journalism can win out in the current environment, as reporters and editors across the country face cost-cutting pressure from their papers’ owners?
HW: Well, the first thing is we have to keep doing it. I think the other thing is that some of that work that I did back in the old days, you can obviously still do and people are still doing stories like that. I think the stories can actually now have a broader reach because of the Internet. You can put up more details on the Internet. We now have the ability to do much better graphics that illustrate the sort of problems that I was writing about that would help make the stories more accessible. But in the end, newspaper owners have to understand, as I said before, that although we need to make a profit to keep operating, that is not the only goal of a newspaper. And if it becomes the sole goal of a newspaper, we will lose our reason for being. There’s an old statement from a prophet that I keep in mind — I actually quoted this in my bar mitzvah speech, as did probably many other people — but it’s a statement from the prophet Hillel, who said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself alone, of what good am I?” And I think that’s something that people in this industry have to keep in mind.
EBC: Among the top tier of American papers, the Times faces a unique balancing act in meeting its state, national and international ambitions while covering a densely populated yet diffuse and fractured metro area. So if you could, what are some additional ways you think the Times can attract new readers and grow in this new era without sacrificing its ambition?
HW: Well, we’re considering a lot of things now. As you said, it’s a very difficult thing. I mean, some counties in our circulation area are even bigger than states in this country. So it is an enormous challenge. We used to have many more reporters in regional editions than we do now. I wish we could get some of those people back, but there doesn’t seem to be any immediate prospect of that. We’re at the moment just fighting to keep our existing staff, no less add people. But I think two things. One is, and I’m not the expert on this, but I do think that we have to be more creative in how we use the Web, and I also think that we may have to figure out ways to utilize people in communities who perhaps can work with us to get some hyper-local news up on the Web. We’re having a lot of internal discussions about that now. I don’t think we’ve reached any definitive conclusions about that, but clearly we’ve got to give some more good thinking about that, and we’ve got to sort of institutionalize the sort of R&D that a lot of other companies and other industries have. I wish I had a good immediate answer for you — I don’t have a magic blueprint at the moment. But one thing I know for sure is that you need to have good, hard-working journalists that are plugged into their communities if you’re going to do this work at all.
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