"Sam Zell is Killing Papers!"

One of the people I interviewed for the "How to Save the News" article I published a few months ago was a person I'd known in his days as a newspaper reporter, who works for a major technology company. After our official interview was over, we went out to have a coffee and then compared unhappy notes about the incredible accelerating collapse of the Los Angeles Times, a paper we both had a soft spot for.*

In the interview, we'd been talking about the big, structural pressures on the news business -- shift of classified ads to Craigslist, shift of paid subscribers to free online readers, and so on. But it wasn't all structure and circumstance, this person said.

>>"Who's killing newspapers?" he asked rhetorically. "Sam Zell is killing papers!" Zell is of course the Chicago financier whose leveraged takeover of the Tribune chain, including the LA Times, saddled the papers with enormous debt that forced newsroom cutbacks and a bankruptcy filing in 2008.<<

Those are a few lines I had in an early draft of the story. They didn't appear in the final version, because (a) we'd been "just talking," so it wasn't an official interview; (b) when I went back to ask if I could use this comment, the person didn't want to be quoted by name, because his new company did business with Tribune; and (c) I didn't want to use this as an anonymous "blind quote," on the principle that you use those as rarely as possible, and virtually never when they contain an attack on a real, named person. Even if it's Sam Zell!

I say "even" Sam Zell (left) for reasons explained in the detailed, convincing, and very damning story by David Carr in today's NYT, which richly illustrates what my ex-reporter friend was talking about. Carr's subject is how Zell and his allies ruined the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times, and he spares few details. (Extra grace-note touches on the culture they brought to the papers, here.) Even with the very best, most business-sophisticated, most journalistically inspired leadership, keeping papers like the LA Times and the Tribune viable would be a challenge. The Zell team was far from that ideal group. They took over a patient in weakened condition  -- and instead of providing nourishment, succor, and rehabilitation, they bled it out.
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* I grew up reading the LA Times, in an era when you couldn't get the NYT nationwide. My first "paying" newspaper job was phoning in high school sports results, from the Citrus Belt League, for their coverage, and I was a copy boy there after my first year in college. The friend I interviewed had once worked for them in a "real" reporting job.
Source of Zell photo here.