Archives for January 2018

Mr. Rich, who served as the editor in chief of The Daily News for a 13-month period that ended in 2016, will return to his former post on Wednesday, Tronc said. Most recently, he was the executive editor of HuffPost, a job he left in December, when he said he planned to start a nonprofit news site.

During his last stint at the tabloid, Mr. Rich, 46, distinguished himself with attention-grabbing headlines that excoriated Republican leaders. After Donald J. Trump won the New Hampshire primary during the 2016 presidential campaign, for instance, the Daily News front page included an image of the candidate in clown makeup with the headline “Dawn of the Brain Dead — Trump comes back to life with N.H. win.”

Mr. Rich, whose departure from the Daily News in 2016 shocked staff members, will take over for Arthur Browne, who retired at the end of December.

In a statement announcing the changes, Justin C. Dearborn, the chief executive of Tronc, said, “We are continuing to invest in high quality journalism, which will always be the company’s top priority.” He called Mr. Kirk a “talented news veteran” and Mr. Rich “a well-established media professional.”

Tronc, which publishes newspapers including The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun, is trying to leave behind a bruising period marked by rising turmoil in the newsrooms of The Daily News and The Times.

The Daily News, which Tronc acquired in September from the real estate and media mogul Mortimer B. Zuckerman, recently suspended its managing editor, Rob Moore, and its Sunday editor, Alexander Jones, because of sexual harassment allegations made against them by current and former employees.

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At The Times, Ross Levinsohn, who was named publisher in August, was put on leave after National Public Radio published an article that detailed sexual harassment allegations made against him while he worked at other companies. On the same day, the newsroom announced that it had voted to unionize by an overwhelming margin — a move that followed years of discontent.

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Tronc vetted Mr. Levinsohn, a former Yahoo executive, before he was hired as The Times’s publisher, but company executives were not aware that he had twice been a defendant in sexual harassment lawsuits while employed by other companies, according to two people briefed on the matter who were not permitted to speak publicly about it.

The fallout from the N.P.R. report on the allegations against Mr. Levinsohn, which was published Jan. 18, reached beyond Tronc on Monday, when Tribune Media disclosed in a regulatory filing that Mr. Levinsohn had notified the company last week that he was taking leave from its corporate board. (Tribune Media and Tronc, formerly called Tribune Publishing, had been one corporation, Tribune Company, before a spinoff of the newspaper business in 2014.)

Mr. Kirk joined Tronc in August and became a jack-of-all-trades for the company, serving as the interim executive editor of The Times and the interim editor in chief of The Daily News. His new appointment was largely met with a sense of relief within the Times newsroom but also a recognition that his appointment will not undo years of frustration among employees or rid the paper of its underlying financial challenges.

The man he replaced, Mr. D’Vorkin, faced suspicion in the newsroom almost from his arrival, partly because of his previous role at Forbes, where he broadened the company’s native advertising offerings and introduced a product that allowed advertisers to contribute material alongside Forbes articles. Newsroom skeptics feared that he would focus more on clicks and advertising innovations than quality journalism.

Tronc executives decided to move Mr. D’Vorkin, 65, out of the top newsroom job at a time when they were also revisiting a companywide reorganization plan, according to two company officials briefed on the discussions. The proposal seemed intended to cut costs and increase the emphasis on making Tronc’s journalism better suited to digital media. Mr. Levinsohn, the publisher now on leave, was a main architect of the restructuring plan. But the plan is now in flux, according to the two people.

Mr. Levinsohn’s leave came at the end of an aggressive attempt by Times management to thwart the newsroom’s ultimately successful union drive — a campaign that occurred as the paper’s editors and reporters were distinguishing themselves with aggressive coverage of sexual harassment in Hollywood and natural disasters in California.

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Tensions between the paper’s employees and its management team had been rising since a dispute between The Times and the Walt Disney Company. After Disney banned Times journalists from attending advance film screenings following the publication of an investigative series on the company’s ties to the city of Anaheim, some people in the newsroom questioned how Mr. D’Vorkin had handled the paper’s response.

During a staff meeting, after learning that a recording of an earlier meeting had been leaked to a New York Times reporter, Mr. D’Vorkin said that anyone involved with the act was “morally bankrupt,” according to several people in attendance. His admonition further escalated the divide between employees and management.

Several journalists at The Times said they worried that the company, eager to stanch the steady stream of reports other news organizations were publishing about it, had begun monitoring their phones and computers in pursuit of leaks. Two journalists said they had been warned that the company was monitoring employees’ emails.

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In a statement, Tronc said that it was committed to respecting employees’ privacy. “There’s never to our knowledge been a situation where the company is monitoring people’s emails,” the company said.

The tensions intensified last week, when the business editor, Kimi Yoshino, was abruptly suspended without a public explanation. In a note to Mr. D’Vorkin that was widely circulated on social media, Times employees wrote that Ms. Yoshino was “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.”

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“We are deeply troubled by the way this situation is being handled,” they wrote.

Times journalists also said they were concerned by what they had learned of the reorganization plan — which seemed to be the subject of a presentation given by Mr. Levinsohn to investors earlier this month that described a “Los Angeles Times Network.”

Under the proposal, newly hired editors would supervise reporting that could be fed to all Tronc publications, according to several people briefed on the potential restructuring.

That system, two of these people said, would include the creation of sites that would generate their own revenue. It would rely on Tronc employees and outside contributors who are not part of any existing Tronc newsroom.

In recent weeks, newsroom employees were puzzled to discover the names of several apparently newly hired editors in an internal human resources database, an image of which was shared with The New York Times. Among them were Bruce Upbin, formerly of Forbes, who was listed as an assistant managing editor; Sylvester Monroe, formerly an editor at The Washington Post, who was also listed as an assistant managing editor; and Louise Story, a former New York Times reporter and editor who was listed as a managing editor.

Ms. Story has since decided not to join Tronc, writing in an emailed statement, “I had agreed to work at Tronc and at The Los Angeles Times in very high-level managerial roles. But, as a result of recent significant changes in those roles, I decided not to work there in any capacity.”

In the internal database, the new hires were shown under Rob Angel, the chief of business development at The Times, but are now expected to report to Mr. D’Vorkin, according to a person at Tronc familiar with the personnel decision.

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Since Mr. Levinsohn went on leave, Tronc and Times executives met in Chicago to discuss which parts of the restructuring plan could continue, according to the people familiar with the discussions.

The recent unrest has its roots in the frustration that Times employees had with previous leaders. Last year, some grew critical of several top managers — including Davan Maharaj, the editor and publisher — in part over the handling of an investigation into the former dean of the medical school at the University of Southern California. Tronc removed Mr. Maharaj and several other newsroom leaders in August, saying that The Times had failed to transform fast enough on the digital side.

Many employees expressed optimism that the D’Vorkin-Levinsohn team would foster the kind of journalism that has garnered the paper more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes. Now they are looking toward a new leader.

The Los Angeles Times Guild congratulated Mr. Kirk in a statement. “We also look forward to working together in the future as one team — and we look forward to hearing his plans for the paper.”

Mr. Kirk said that his goal as the top editor at The Times was to “double down our great coverage of California and Los Angeles and beyond.”

“That’s what readers expect from us, and we want to continue that,” he added.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/business/media/tronc-editors-daily-news-los-angeles-times.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Since Mr. Trump took office a year ago, the political press has endured a sustained assault from a chief executive who has called journalists “the enemy of the American people.” Yet the news media has also driven decisions inside the West Wing to a degree perhaps unmatched since the scandal-ridden days of Richard Nixon. And White House aides and reporters alike say that political reality is being refracted by the media in an unprecedented way.

Some reporters, in unguarded moments, say that they fear for journalists’ safety. Margaret Talev, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, was moved to tears in an interview as she recounted the death threats that now routinely land in her colleagues’ emails.

Other journalists — ironic, cynical or simply enterprising, depending on your point of view — have embraced the moment as the wildest ride of their lives, and a lucrative one, too: The number of Washington reporters with cable television contracts, some with salaries verging on six figures, has surged.

It is a boom time for investigative reporting — witness the revelations unearthed by The New York Times, Politico, The Washington Post and others — and also for rank incrementalism. A story’s “buzz,” variously defined by the number of retweets, Facebook likes or panicked text messages from White House aides that it generates, is at a premium, fueling news outlets that condense political reporting from 1,000-word stories into stand-alone nuggets designed to set Twitter aflame.

Trust in the press has eroded thanks, in part, to Mr. Trump and his allies, the ubiquitous phrase “fake news” osmosing its way into the American psyche. Yet newspaper subscriptions and television news ratings, once in free fall, have perked back up.

“When he says you’ll miss me when I’m gone, and your ratings will go through the floor, he’s absolutely correct,” Mr. Bannon said, mischievously, of Mr. Trump. “That’s McLuhan talking through Trump.”

Mr. Bannon played a not-minor role in creating the current media atmosphere: At Breitbart News, where he was executive chairman until his abrupt exit this month, he whipped up anger against CNN and other major news organizations; upon entering the White House, he instructed the news media to “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

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Wearing four visible layers of shirts (including a zip-up fleece from West Point, which one of his daughters attended), Mr. Bannon declined to speak on the record about his own role in making the fraught new media environment. But there were signs that, like Mr. Trump, he is aware he has benefited from the same news media that he likes to denigrate.

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A copy of “Devil’s Bargain,” a chronicle of Mr. Bannon’s rise to prominence by the Bloomberg Businessweek journalist Joshua Green, sat on the mantel above the fireplace. The book is being adapted into a television series by the powerful Hollywood producer Jason Blum, who recently flew to Washington to meet with Mr. Bannon at his home.

A year ago, the worries of Washington journalists were manifold: eviction from the West Wing, the end of regular pool reports and briefings, a Breitbart takeover of White House coverage. None of these anxieties came to fruition; in fact, last week, when Mr. Trump wandered into a small reporters’ briefing with his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, Breitbart’s White House correspondent was one of the journalists grumbling afterward about not being invited.

Mr. Trump has forsaken formal news conferences, and his usual forum for sit-down interviews has been Fox News. (Last week, in Davos, the president acquiesced to interviews with CNBC and the British presenter Piers Morgan, who has usually been friendly toward Mr. Trump.) But he has embraced the so-called “pool sprays” — journalist jargon for a White House photo-op — to spar with reporters off-the-cuff, sometimes for nearly an hour at a time.

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“Amid the insanity of the attacks on our industry, you have this journalistic nirvana,” said Jim VandeHei, a co-founder of Politico who now runs Axios, an outlet that went live a year ago with the aim of distilling Washington’s complexities into highly tweetable micro-scoops. “You get play-by-play visibility you could only dream of under previous presidents.”

Mr. VandeHei proselytized for his site’s “smart brevity” philosophy during an interview at Axios’s Virginia offices, inside a co-working space where pale ale is on tap and the coffee urns specify the altitude at which the beans are grown.

Axios covers the Trump administration with a bullet-pointed morning newsletter, by the well-connected Washington journalist Mike Allen, and quick-hit scoops from its sole White House reporter, Jonathan Swan. To hear Mr. VandeHei tell it, the era of the in-depth newspaper story is over.

“People aren’t reading that long and, to be honest, they shouldn’t have to,” he said.

An Axios buzzword is “illuminate” — tell readers exactly what they need to know, and nothing more. Mr. Swan, a newcomer to Washington who regularly breaks news, does not attend White House briefings, where fresh information can be scarce.

His avoidance of the ritual is likely to cheer liberal critics who say the Washington press has been too meek and rigid in adjusting to the Trump juggernaut. There were groans, in November, after a briefing during which the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked White House reporters to preface their questions with a list of what they were thankful for — a schoolyard exercise that some journalists played along with.

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But Ms. Talev, a Bloomberg News correspondent and the president of the Correspondents’ Association, said that the briefing remains an opportunity to force the administration to speak on the record — a crucial forum in an era when truth is blurred. “We think briefings serve people; we think open dialogue serves people,” she said in an interview at Peet’s Coffee, a block from her West Wing desk.

Ms. Talev said that her father escaped Communist Bulgaria in the 1960s, where dissent was squashed and criticizing government officials was forbidden. Her work, she said, feels personal these days. Under her watch, the Correspondents’ Association has created a new committee on reporters’ security, to assist members who receive threats, an increasingly common occurrence.

April D. Ryan, the White House reporter for American Urban Radio Networks and one of the few black correspondents in the briefing room, has described receiving menacing and racist messages; she was subsequently derided as “Miss Piggy” by a high-ranking official in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Last week, a man in Michigan was arrested on suspicion of threatening CNN’s Atlanta headquarters, the kind of real-world effect that reporters here worry may be the inevitable result of a president who once called the press “a great danger to our country.”

Work in the capital, however, goes on. Beneath the White House briefing room, where about two dozen journalists occupy a warren of cramped offices and cubicles, the mood is like that of any other workplace, as it was under past administrations.

But subtle subversions do exist. For months, a New Yorker cartoon has been tacked to the wall in a prominent place by the stairs. It shows two bearded prisoners hanging inside a dungeon.

One prisoner to the other: “Personally, I prefer the old White House pressroom.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/business/media/media-trump.html?partner=rss&emc=rss