The Deal from Hell (25 page)

As soon as it was apparent that FitzSimons would be the next CEO, Tyner summoned me to his office and asked me to help educate the new boss about what journalists do, just as I had with Madigan. FitzSimons, Tyner warned me, had sharp views about our craft, particularly regarding some of our columnists and the way we selected news for page one. I told him I understood, but largely, I naïvely viewed the opportunity of face time as a chance to shine the lights of Tribune Broadcasting's television cameras on the company's journalism.

My first meeting with FitzSimons, in which we discussed our respective backgrounds, was cordial. I floated the idea of a visit to the Washington bureau, Congress, or the White House press room, or to one of our international bureaus to see how we operated and to get a firsthand look at what journalists did every day. But FitzSimons seemed uninterested. Instead of taking me up on my invitation, he launched into an explanation of how things were done in the broadcast world. “I'm always being accused of looking at everything through the broadcast model,” he said, “and I don't want to do that.” Quickly, he turned the conversation toward David Greising, a business columnist he clearly disliked, and wondered aloud why we would have a business columnist with populist leanings—a ridiculous claim (I had hired Greising when he was Atlanta bureau chief for
Business Week
magazine, not exactly a
hotbed of populism). Notably, Greising had angered local CEOs in his columns when he challenged them (sometimes relying on humor to make his point) about everything from slumping earnings to obsessive secrecy. But FitzSimons let me know that he didn't think Greising was funny. I left our meeting feeling that my work was cut out for me.

In naming FitzSimons the new CEO of Tribune, Madigan and the board had passed over Fuller, the highly regarded editorial writer, former
Chicago Tribune
editor and publisher, and Pulitzer winner. As he rose through the ranks at Tribune, FitzSimons had zealously championed the values of the broadcaster, and his ideals often clashed with editorial. With FitzSimons as the head of broadcasting, Tribune had continued its breathtaking acquisitions of television stations, and he was pushing the company to buy the Chris-Craft group of stations, the sole remaining block of independent stations that represented a competitive threat to Tribune. Instead, Madigan decided to buy Times Mirror, an initiative strongly backed by Fuller. Why, then, had Madigan anointed FitzSimons as the presumptive CEO?

Doubtless, because FitzSimons went over better on Wall Street than the so-called professor. And the company needed to recover from the curve ball Madigan had thrown at institutional investors when he acquired an old-line newspaper company that hardly fit in with the string of TV stations Tribune Company had recently added to its portfolio. “One of the issues that caused distress was that a lot of people who had bought into Tribune, you know, big institutions, thought Tribune was shifting into broadcasting,” Hiller recalled, “and among that cadre of shareholders, there was a fair amount of indigestion about going heavily back towards newspapers, and some of them thought that it was an unsignaled bait-and-switch and they didn't like it.” Putting a broadcast executive in charge of the company was an effective correction to appease people who played a big role in setting the price of Tribune stock. Besides, Madigan, like Cook, was always impressed with personal appearances, and FitzSimons truly looked like a CEO.

Soon after my meeting with FitzSimons, I made an appointment with Pat Mullen, the man he'd handpicked to succeed him to run
Tribune Broadcasting. I wanted to talk to him about launching the kind of synergy I was interested in—a local or national public service television show featuring
Tribune
's team of talented journalists with big-name guests to discuss the most pressing issues of the day. When I described the show, Mullen seemed discombobulated. He failed to understand why anyone would tune in to that kind of show. He asked me if I had talked to any station managers. When I said I thought he, as the head of broadcast, was the one to make those sorts of inquiries, he informed me that he couldn't do anything until I had talked to them and won their support.

My meeting with Mullen simply confirmed my fears about broadcast executives: They seemed like dunces. In the months to come, I would learn that there were indeed smart and thoughtful individuals toiling in broadcast, but they usually kept their mouths shut for fear of being driven out for challenging FitzSimons' protocol. Like many Tribune executives, FitzSimons felt threatened by people who weren't of similar ilk. At heart, FitzSimons was a political conservative and staunch Catholic who was intolerant of a world with gay rights and labor unions. He preferred the more comfortable domain of a broadcaster, one dominated by market analysis and local news.

In 2001, just before September 11, Madigan announced that FitzSimons would become president and chief operating officer of Tribune Company, a step away from the CEO title he would get in 2003. And, by then, undoubtedly, FitzSimons would have the chops for the top job. Although Fuller had started cutting costs and integrating the temperamental Times Mirror papers into the Tribune fold, the process was as rugged as covering the war in Vietnam. FitzSimons simply had a better story.

By 2001, Tribune owned twenty-three television stations, including sixteen affiliated with the WB Network, which featured programming designed to appeal to the lucrative eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old demographic. When you combined its television stations with the more limited reach of its newspapers, the company could reach 34 percent of American households, which resembled the national TV networks.
The proportion of profits churned out by the broadcast division exceeded its contributions to revenue, too. FitzSimons's television properties accounted for about 28 percent of Tribune's revenues but 39 percent of its profits, a stellar performance that got him the top job. Now he faced the challenge of whipping the newspapers into shape to make them market-driven purveyors of local news, while making a profit like the TV stations.

My views of FitzSimons evolved the more I engaged with him, particularly once Lipinski elevated me to managing editor of the
Chicago Tribune
, a job that placed me in control of the paper's newsroom. As we interacted, I began to discover the depth of FitzSimons' conservative roots.

When I told FitzSimons that we should revive
Newsday
's failed effort to publish an edition for New York City, he, to my surprise, agreed. A New York edition, he offered, would at least provide an alternative to the left-wing
New York Times
. When the
Chicago Tribune
featured a photograph of two men kissing after a Massachusetts court ruling approved of gay marriage, FitzSimons stopped me on the street to ask why the
Chicago Tribune
would ever run such an image on page one.

Although he was hardly as blunt or direct as the broadcasters McManus studied, FitzSimons clearly was in the “market-driven journalism” camp. I found him to be smart, hard working, honest, dedicated, determined, talented, and ambitious. But in my experience he could also be petty, mean-spirited, and almost obsessively single-minded. I think his tendency to be a meddling micro-manager also exposed his hostility to journalists. He said he didn't understand why a newspaper editor who presided over declines in circulation shouldn't be fired, just as a station manager with tepid ratings in broadcast would be.

Those of us in editorial countered that newspaper editors were not running popularity contests; if they were doing their jobs, they would routinely anger readers and vested interests in the community. But FitzSimons didn't completely buy it. He thought that journalists, like broadcasters, should use market research to give readers what they wanted, not news that some high priest of the news cycle deemed important.

Over the years, I'd seen many market surveys asking readers what they wanted in their news pages. If all we had to do was ask readers what they wanted and then give it to them, surely someone would have complied long ago and a winning formula would have been devised. FitzSimons correctly tried to get the journalists at the
Tribune
to focus on issues that no one wanted to confront, ones that questioned the value of stellar journalism if fewer people bought or read our newspaper. And the truth be told, editors like me did a poor job defending ourselves; we often retreated behind the wall separating the business and editorial sides and refused to take responsibility for declines in readership. But the problems weren't that simple, easy, or honest.

FitzSimons' drive to instill a marketing discipline into news soon created a surging tide of conflict at the company's newspapers. Just after he took over, FitzSimons ordered readership surveys for all Tribune papers, including some that compared how journalists regarded their papers with the views of readers. The results proved that readers and journalists were not always in sync.

FitzSimons and the like-minded publishers he began to appoint took aim at the journalism of papers like the
Tribune
and the
Los Angeles Times
, arguing that readers wanted local news, not long, complicated stories like one I had ordered up examining the struggle for the soul of Islam in the wake of September 11. If you just looked at the readership surveys, FitzSimons was right: The average reader in Southern California ranked his or her top news interests in order of relevance as local, Southern California, national, and news about the economy. But if you overlaid onto the charts the interests of the
Times
most dedicated readers, they reflected a different set of priorities: national, international, national government, politics, and arts and entertainment.

The discussions roiling the ranks at Tribune rarely grappled with the significant but subtle differences; the research was widely viewed as an assault on journalistic principles, with FitzSimons and his marketing hawks leading the charge. If someone challenged the results of his market surveys, FitzSimons doubled down to overwhelm them
with the zeal of an evangelist smiting his opponents, particularly newspaper editors who, in his mind, were more interested in impressing their friends with Pulitzer Prizes than winning readers by giving them what they wanted.

“He [FitzSimons] wanted to edit the paper by referendum,” Carroll recalled. “To him, news judgment and marketing were the same thing. I had this feeling from Dennis that we should judge what we put on page one based on marketing. He didn't want any complaints. My judgment was that we should get complaints. That is part of being a vibrant voice in the community.”

FitzSimons didn't appreciate how fundamentally the newspaper operation that Fuller had built differed from his baby, the broadcast division. At the
Tribune
, Fuller picked people for leadership positions who sometimes disagreed with him, gutsy editors like Lipinski or Carroll. In Tribune Broadcasting, FitzSimons had selected his cronies—people like Mullen, a loyal soldier who towed the line.

Perhaps more shocking and disheartening to me even than FitzSimons' market-driven approach to news and his disregard for subjects he didn't agree with was his lack of curiosity. Once every three or four years, the
Chicago Tribune
convened a conference where national and foreign correspondents could get some face time with their bosses and discuss the stories that would be big news on their beats over the coming months and years. It was a great exercise that gave editors a chance to hear about upcoming news stories and reporters an opportunity to meet with fellow correspondents and the home office. Madigan had relished the conferences, often bringing his wife along, and offering editors seats on the company jet. Because the
Chicago Tribune
had fewer correspondents than the
Los Angeles Times
or other major papers, the
Tribune
's eleven foreign correspondents covered wide swaths of territory. Listening to their reports about their beats usually gave attendees an expansive view of developments that would be making global news headlines over the coming months. Many of the stories our foreign reporters were covering were destined to be the sorts of investigative journalism projects for which the
Tribune
was known.
In 2003, I saw our upcoming conference in Istanbul as an excellent opportunity for educating FitzSimons about journalism, and to my surprise he agreed to attend.

As the
Chicago Tribune
copy boy steered our car through Washington Park en route to Midway Airport on Chicago's South Side, Lipinski took a call on her cellphone from publisher Scott Smith, who was also traveling to Turkey. When she hung up she reported that we'd been delayed—FitzSimons didn't have his passport. I assumed that he'd simply neglected to pack it. I was wrong. FitzSimons didn't know he needed to carry his passport with him. Tim McNulty, the
Tribune
's foreign editor, had dutifully gotten FitzSimons a visa from the Turkish Consulate. FitzSimons had assumed that McNulty had taken care of everything and that he didn't have to carry a passport with him. “You guys are the world travelers,” FitzSimons said sheepishly after we'd all arrived at the Signature Air offices at Midway. “I'm just a guy who goes to New York.”

As we crossed the Atlantic, FitzSimons started talking about the war in Iraq, a subject of particular interest to me. I had decided to travel to Iraq after our foreign conference to learn firsthand about the dangers our correspondents faced covering the war, then in its early stages. As an editor who often put correspondents in harm's way, I believed that I should willingly go anywhere that I would send a reporter. I had traveled to many dicey places with
Tribune
correspondents, but this was a special case.

FitzSimons started to relax on the plane, chatting amiably with Lipinski, Smith, and me. When I told him I would be going to Iraq after Istanbul, he began questioning the thoroughness of the overall coverage of the conflict, using the same logic and language as Bush administration critics. I was ill at ease—especially with the knowledge that Donald Rumsfeld, then U.S. Secretary of Defense, had been a Tribune board member. By then I had heard most of the arguments: The media focused too heavily on the negative elements of the Iraq war and not on the positive actions of the American military (hospital-, school-, and road-building initiatives).