Newstradamus

Jim O'Shea

The newspaper business is very homogeneous. If you're in it long enough, you get to know a lot of people. Jim O'Shea, who has been getting a lot of attention this week after being fired as the editor of the Los Angeles Times, is one of them.

Somebody asked me a few weeks ago what I thought would happen now that Chicago real estate mogul Sam Zell had bought the Tribune Co. I didn't guess that one of the first casualties would be O'Shea, who was at the Chicago Tribune for 30 years.

He and I first met as young journalists in Des Moines in the early 1970s. When I bought my first house, he helped me wire it for 220 to accommodate a huge window air conditioner. (As I recall, he had put himself through college as an apprentice electrician.)

He went off to the Chicago Tribune as a business reporter and in the ensuing years he worked his way up the ladder to become managing editor. We kept in touch in a casual way, seeing each other at conventions, or when I would occasionally stop at the Tribune where I have a number of friends.

In 2006, he was sent to take over in L.A., and now has become the third editor there in as many years to leave or be fired over budget issues. Apparently, instead of cutting his budget 1% as requested, he proposed to increase it in order to meet the demands of covering the presidential campaign and the Olympics. So it seems that even though Jim was fired, it could be ruled a suicide. But he went out with his head up, getting in some licks at the state of newspaper journalism today.

I'm sure he'll land on his feet, as his two predecessors have. John Carroll became a visiting lecturer at Harvard, and Dean Banquet is now the New York Times Washington bureau chief. (Michael Parks, who preceded Carroll, became dean of the journalism school at USC.)

Now today we learn that Phil Bronstein is out as San Francisco Chronicle editor, bumped upstairs to what sounds like a corporate figurehead position. It follows close on the heels of Carol Leigh Hutton's departure from the San Jose Mercury News.

These are tough times to be a newspaper editor, although those of us toiling at smaller community papers have a tough time identifying with editors who have staffs of hundreds, get six-figure golden handshakes and leave for jobs as good or better.

However, we all face difficult decisions during tough economic times, which we're going through these days. The best way to deal with it is to help your staff put out the best news product with the resources you have, and be willing to walk away when it stops being fun. As O'Shea said in his comments to his staff in L.A., "There are plenty of other challenges out there for me and I don’t intend to sit around idle. There are bike rides to be had, books to write and hopefully another opportunity or two to make a difference."

It is hard to generalize about the news business; L.A.'s messy situation is unique in many ways. I prefer to think about what's going on as a painful birth process of a new journalism, with a business model rededicated to the role of the Fourth Estate in a democratic society. On the other hand, maybe Woody Allen was right:

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."