‘Anything could happen’: Amid newsroom clashes, Los Angeles Times becomes its own story
The news has been frenetic lately for reporters at the Los Angeles Times. Massive wildfires swept a region just getting over a historic drought, followed by deadly mudslides, and then the explosive Turpin family child-abuse saga — a chain of events that tested the chops of the prizewinning newsroom.
But some of the biggest news at the Times has been coming from within its downtown headquarters. The paper — one of the largest and most important news organizations in America — has been beset by turmoil the past two weeks, prompting questions about its future.
After decades of successful resistance by management and years of demoralizing cutbacks, the Times’s journalists voted overwhelmingly last week to unionize. Before bargaining can begin, however, reporters are concerned about a plan by the Times’s management to reorganize the way the paper produces news.
Under a new “pyramid” structure proposed this month, a network of nonstaff contributors would produce the bulk of the information the Times publishes online. Reporters say the paper has quietly begun hiring a cadre of editors to supervise the reorganization, which would effectively create a new company within the company.
The man who introduced the plan — blindsiding the newsroom when he presented it to an investor conference in New York — was publisher Ross Levinsohn, the fifth person to hold that title in the past five years. Last week, Levinsohn was suspended by the paper’s owner, Chicago-based Tronc, after NPR revealed a series of sexual harassment allegations against him in previous jobs. The company said it is investigating.
The state of play at the Times, as well as the existential dread swirling around it, was neatly summarized in a tweet this week by Matt Pearce, a Times national reporter and an organizer of the union effort: “Basically, anything could happen at this point at the L.A. Times and people in the newsroom could only be half surprised by it. We’re hiring [editors] that aren’t being announced to the newsroom, our publisher wants to turn us into a pyramid, and by the way, he’s under investigation.”
In fact, more shoes are dropping.
On Thursday, reporters protested after top editor Lewis D’Vorkin suspended Kimi Yoshino, the Times’s financial editor. His reason was unclear — neither party would comment — but Times reporters say D’Vorkin suspected that Yoshino had been a source for other media reports about the Times, including an unflattering profile of D’Vorkin in the Columbia Journalism Review, which dubbed him “LA journalism’s ‘Prince of Darkness.’ ”
“We were very upset to learn yesterday that Kimi was abruptly asked to take a leave of absence and not even permitted to return to her office to collect her belongings and turn off her laptop,” said a letter signed by Times business journalists and promptly disseminated online. “This treatment of Kimi is a serious cause for concern.”