An Insider’s Look at the Deal From Hell

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The Deal From Hell: How How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered American Newspapers by James O’Shea. 350 pp. PublicAffairs (2011). $28.00.

It’s no secret that American newspapers have been on a sharp decline for the past few decades. Despite ample time for reflection and analysis, there is a remarkable lack of understanding among reporters as to why their profession has reached the brink of collapse. This year with his new book The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers, storied journalist and former managing editor of the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune, James O’Shea becomes delves into the nature of the industry’s affliction.

As a Tribune and Times veteran, O’Shea not only had a front row seat to their messy merger, he was a key player in the second act. In 2006, he was dispatched to the west coast where he led the Times for 16 months. The 2000 merger of the Tribune Company, which included the Chicago Tribune, with the Times Mirror Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times, was a staggering $8.3 billion dollar deal. It created a monster media group, the third-largest newspaper company in the nation. It also created the biggest bankruptcy the industry has ever witnessed. O’Shea holds up the tumultuous marriage as a case-example of what’s wrong with the entire newspaper industry today.

The book relates how mounting financial pressures created a toxic scenario. In an effort to keep profits high by lowering costs, the LA Times, like many other news organizations, depreciated their most precious asset—journalism—and continued to perpetuate the cycle of decline.

Much of the struggle had to do with the wall between the newsroom and the boardroom. The Tribune Company brought several business hotshots to the paper to pump up profits but they had no journalism experience. During O’Shea’s tenure, the two sides were never able to balance the interests for stories that generated views and profits with the type of expensive, in-depth, investigative journalism that wins Pulitzers.

He argues mainly that a changing media landscape may have created new competition for newspapers but it was individual greed that really brought the two major newspapers to their knees. The second half of the title, “How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered American Newspapers,” leaves no doubt about who he believes is to blame.

Parts of the book, however, come across more like a personal memoir. He makes some curious choices to recount an idyllic adolescence in St. Louis and his beginnings as a reporter for the Des Moines Register.

When he gets to the real story, O’Shea can’t help but give himself a few extra pats on the back. There are attempts to appear modest and balanced too, but overall he draws a flattering picture of himself: an ambitious reporter with uncompromising morals, repulsed by market-driven journalism tactics. To his credit, he acknowledges his own biases in the preface of the book and since its release, has publicized several disputes of his account on his website.

The story ends abruptly when our first-person narrator leaves Los Angeles, after one spat too many with publisher David Hiller over the paper’s integrity. Since then the Tribune Company has been able to resolve some of its issues and recoup, though not to its former full distinction. But the reader should remember that despite improvements, newspapers have yet to find a true solution to their financial woes. Social media, mobile platforms and other avenues of new technology will continue to shape the journalism story. O’Shea’s book is a good unpacking but it is only the prequel.

What The Deal From Hell provides is the first real account of the crisis and a long overdue one at that. It gives a fantastically detailed history on two pillars of the American newspaper industry. On yet another level, it serves as a fascinating business lesson in how a media news giant that produced high-quality journalism could still fail so shockingly. It is a book well worth the reader’s time so long as it’s digested with a dash of salt.

 

 

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