The Deal from Hell How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers

by O'Shea, James

• ISBN13: 9781586487911
• ISBN10: 1586487914
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-06-28
• Publisher: PublicAffairs

Summary

In 2000, after the Tribune Company acquired Times Mirror Corporation, it comprised the most powerful collection of newspapers in the world. How then did Tribune nosedive into bankruptcy and public scandal? In The Deal From Hell, veteran Tribuneand Los Angeles Timeseditor James O'Shea takes us behind the scenes of the decisions that led to disaster in boardrooms and newsrooms from coast to coast, based on access to key players, court testimony, and sworn depositions. The Deal From Hellis a riveting narrative that chronicles how news industry executives and editors--convinced they were acting in the best interests of their publications--made a series of flawed decisions that endangered journalistic credibility and drove the newspapers, already confronting a perfect storm of political, technological, economic, and social turmoil, to the brink of extinction.

Author Biography

James O'Shea, once managing editor of the Chicago Tribune was most recently editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is now CEO and editor-in-chief of the Chicago News Cooperative. The author of two acclaimed books, O'Shea was a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Harvard in 2009.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction: The Merger	p. 1
Beginnings: Des Moines	p. 15
Across the Street	p. 27
Otis Chandler's Legacy	p. 43
Twilight	p. 55
The New Order	p. 69
The Cereal Killer	p. 85
His Seat on the Dais	p. 105
Inside the Merger	p. 123
Making News	p. 135
A Changing Landscape	p. 149
Market-Driven Journalism	p. 163
Buy the Numbers	p. 181
Count Kern	p. 201
Civil War	p. 219
Up Against a Saint and a Dead Man	p. 231
Before the Fall	p. 253
The Penguin Parable	p. 269
Closing the Deal	p. 293
Zell Hell	p. 309
Epilogue	p. 333
Acknowledgments	p. 349
Notes	p. 351
Index	p. 379
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

No one has ever told the story of the biggest merger in the history of American journalism and its long-lasting implications. Embedded in the failure of the marriage of the Tribune Company with the Times Mirror Company is a far broader story of monumental egos, fallible souls, larger-than-life characters, and cultural clashes about the collapse of newspapers—the institutions that write the first, crucial draft of history and the only industry America’s forefathers considered important enough to single out in the U.S. Constitution.

The conventional wisdom is that newspapers—and by that I mean the credible, edited information they deliver, and not just the paper and ink—fell into a death spiral because of forces unleashed by declining circulations and the migration of readers to the Internet. But the Internet and declining circulations didn’t kill newspapers, any more than long stories or skimpy attention spans did. What is killing a system that brings reliably edited news and information to readers’ doorsteps every morning for less than the cost of a cup of coffee is the way that the people who run the industry havereactedto those forces. The lack of investment, the greed, incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy, and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public’s are responsible for the state of the newspaper industry today. I saw it, both as a longtime reporter and as an editor at theChicago Tribuneand theLos Angeles Times.