A Zone of Their Own   

After the Rodney King riots, the Los Angeles Times at last created a zoned section for central city residents. The early reviews are positive.

For years the Los Angeles Times had carved from the sprawling suburbs of Southern California zoned sections that stretched from the high desert 200 miles to the Mexican border. One significant area went unzoned and was haphazardly covered: Los Angeles' own central city, where many of the city's poor and minority residents lived.

For a decade, editors and reporters had pushed for a center-city zone – proposing everything from a spartan page inserted once a week in the Metro section to a separate section appearing twice a week. And, for a decade, the business side of the paper dismissed the proposals, insisting the demographics were wrong and there was no money to be made with such a venture.

Then, in April 1992, came the Rodney King riots, which dramatized the gulf between suburban, white Los Angeles and its multihued urban core, between commuters and the unemployed, between the affluent and the poor.

Several days after they ended, Times Editor Shelby Coffey III and Publisher and CEO David Laventhol finally gave the go-ahead for a zoned section to cover the long-neglected central city.

The section would be a challenge editorially and emotionally. For minority staff members, like Assistant Business Editor Linda Williams, the new section is a test of the paper's commitment to minority issues. "One of the things that will tell how serious [Coffey] is, is what happens to the central cities section," she told AJR just after the riots.

Today, the tabloid-sized paper that debuted in September 1992, City Times, is a 28-page weekly reality. Inserted into the five-pound Sunday edition, the section covers the central city neighborhoods, from Hispanic East Los Angeles to Koreatown to mostly black South Central and Southwest L.A.

So far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. County Supervisor Ed Edelman, whose district covers a portion of City Times' circulation area, says the paper provides "balanced, sensitive and consistent media coverage of all aspects of a community's life and activities – the positive as well as the negative."

City Times has brought back to Los Angeles a style of community journalism that was familiar a generation ago. And some editors see it as a blueprint for the future.

Launching the Section

The choice of Mary Lou Fulton as editor of the section was a departure for the paper. She was an editor on a newspaper that had not readily promoted women. She was a bilingual Latina – her mother a Mexican immigrant. But most unusual, she was young, just 28, in an organization where you generally waited your turn.

Managers agreed, however, that she was the best person for the job, says William Rood, the supervising editor of all the zoned sections. In an unsolicited memo to management following the riots, Fulton urged community-based coverage and focused management's thinking about City Times.

Fulton was familiar with the area. The savagery of the riots struck her own neighborhood on the west side of Long Beach. "We had the National Guard at my Lucky supermarket and at the post office," she says, "and the DMV where I got my driver's license burned to the ground."

When she learned of the decision to publish the new section, Fulton says, "I thought, 'Jeez, what a great opportunity. I don't want it screwed up.' " She felt certain that the Times could provide a more accurate picture of the entire community; after all, what she saw on television and what she read in her own paper "just didn't square with what I knew about East L.A." where her grandmother lived.

News coverage of minority communities tended toward what Fulton sardonically calls "the murders-and-festivals syndrome, where the only time you ever see people from the city in the news is when they are killing one another in terribly violent ways or taking breathers at various ethnic festivals."

The result, she says, is an exaggerated impression of the scope of urban violence. "Nobody [hides] behind the sofas at night to avoid the bullets in East L.A.," Fulton says. Other minority staff members also had long complained that the picture was skewed.

After learning that the Times would fill the "hole in the doughnut," Fulton wrote a memo to Suburban Editor Rood. In it, she detailed her suggestions for coverage of the central city. She proposed covering the zone by neighborhood rather than ethnicity, a strategy that stressed common experiences and problems rather than differences.

Fulton suggested adapting an approach used in the Times' daily Orange County edition for Los Angeles' inner city. Each community was to be represented each week. She also instituted a "Voices" page, a first person readers' forum edited by the staff and used in other zoned sections.

The little-picture coverage would be wrapped in a weekly 1,500-word take-out, a big-picture story of interest to two or more communities. The take-outs would cover the cross-community problems, while the localized coverage would tend to be more upbeat.

Community journalism, Fulton notes, "is the one thing newspapers can offer that nobody else can... We have the responsibility of saying to the reader that you are going to find news about your community that is relevant and useful every single week in our newspaper.

"Knowing there will be east side news, or South Los Angeles news, drives the section."

A Colorful Tabloid

As approved by Coffey and Laventhol, the paper would cover central Los Angeles – from East Los Angeles, through Little Tokyo and Koreatown, to South Central and the hardscrabble white neighborhoods in the southeastern portion of the county.

Laventhol, a former Newsday publisher and editor, selected a tabloid format, with a heavy use of color and graphics that distinguishes it from the Times' other, black and white zone sections.

Fulton and Tony Marcano, until recently assistant editor, have sought to avoid making City Times a "good news section" of resolutely upbeat stories. There has not been a single complaint about the often critical cover stories, she says, precisely because of the evenhanded coverage.

The insert has made a difference. The Metropolitan Transit District beefed up its security force after City Times did a comprehensive story about crime on buses in the area. And reporter Robert J. Lopez has followed the transit district's budget for this year to make sure the forces are maintained.

Similarly, Lopez, a former fireman, has investigated Fire Department failures to monitor the teeming hotels and apartments that serve as Los Angeles tenements. His stories have begun appearing on page one of the main news section of the L.A. Times, turning up the heat that much more.

The majority of the cover stories deal with cross-community, cross-neighborhood problems: check-cashing services as a banking system for the poor; the true cost of enterprise zones in South Los Angeles; the largely Anglo command of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD); school vandalism; and the pervasive fear of crime on central city bus lines.

In one issue in late September, stories ranged from the LAPD's efforts to reach the city's diverse Latino communities to the opening of two branches by a black-owned bank in neighborhoods desperately short of mainstream financial institutions. Other stories dealt with the lack of funds for water polo at inner city high schools and one neighborhood's approval of previously prohibited street vendors.

It is bottom-up journalism, street-wise, frankly concerned with the people and the communities of which City Times is a part.

To cover the two million people living in the circulation area – more than half of them Latino, 21 percent black and 9 percent Asian – the paper has a full time staff of nine, and eight "contract stringers." The full time stringers are responsible for producing weekly coverage of a particular community.

The reporters have to scramble. Each of those geographical regions is subdivided into literally dozens of enclaves, gang turfs, neighborhoods and locales with their own ethnic groups, organizations and shopping districts. The area called "South Central," for example, contains neighborhoods such as Sugar Hill, Central Avenue and La Brea.

According to Fulton, the section hews to the prototype designed in September 1992, mixing community coverage with the take-outs that sum up the common experiences across all neighborhoods. Her big surprise came in the popularity of its coverage of high school sports. Among other things, City Times offers comprehensive coverage of Friday night football games in the early edition of the Sunday paper, available on Saturday.

A Crowd Pleaser

City Times costs $1.5 million annually to produce, and while one Times staffer says that "it's making a lot more money than we thought it would make," it is still well in the red. The business side has been pleasantly surprised at the number of non-minority, out-of-the-area advertisers who have bought space. The original plan was for a 16-page edition. It now averages 28 pages, with as many as 19 ad-free.

Household penetration of the L.A. Times is relatively low in the central city, with less than one in five receiving the paper. City Times' press run is 100,000 copies, 85,000 of which are inserted in the paper for home delivery and street sales. The rest are placed in strategically sited news boxes or given away.

The innovative approach has not gone unnoticed. In July, Rolling Stone media writer Jon Katz wrote, "Journalism doesn't want to or can't afford to cover inner cities anymore, only the gentrified downtowns and affluent suburbs that advertisers want to reach." The exception is "a remarkable weekly called the City Times – a secret newspaper almost – that the Los Angeles Times publishes."

City Times appears to be popular with the local population as well, if a sampling of public opinion is any indication.

Sophia Park, a communications specialist for Los Angeles' Korean Youth and Community Center, says the section is "really helpful to us." Not only have stories about the center's programs stirred public interest, she says, but "it's a good resource about what's going on in the community." Further, she says, City Times seems more supportive and accessible than the mother paper's Metro desk.

The Rev. Leonard Jackson, who handles press relations for the First AME Church in the West Adams district, praises the new section for "giving people in South Central an insight into the community they can't otherwise get. It is serving its purpose and serving it well."

Public officials similarly have welcomed the zoned section.

Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, whose multi-ethnic district is blanketed by City Times, praises the section for covering stories largely neglected by other sections of the paper.

"The Times' foray into a medium for predominantly minority community readers is, perhaps, a recognition that the preponderance of their future readers are going to be more diverse in ethnicity and reader interest," Ridley-Thomas says.

The councilman touches on a demographic and marketing reality. Los Angeles' white majority is no more. So-called minorities now constitute more than half of the metropolitan area's population. Therefore, City Times just might be pointing the way for the Times as a whole. Suburban Editor Rood acknowledges that "we're looking at it as an interesting new format for local news.

"It's a successful publication, the most satisfying and exciting thing I've been involved with in a long time," he adds. "What it has shown is what can be done when we are in a community rather than on top of it."

Current City Times Editor Tony Marcano – after a year and 50 issues, Fulton is leaving to attend Harvard's Kennedy School of Government – is even more confident. This is the wave of the future, he says, "as far as everyone here is concerned."

Shelby Coffey is more cautious, but he does allow, "We are trying to explain Southern California to Southern California." l