Better Times   

The once trouble-plagued L.A. Times is back on track.

IF YOU'VE BEEN searching for positive news, the journalism business has hardly been the place to find it in recent months.
It's been a dizzying blur of downsizing, cutbacks, buyouts, layoffs.
The downbeat drumbeat has been enough to try the resolve of even the sunniest optimist.
All the more reason that when there's good news, it ought to be celebrated.
Which brings us to the Los Angeles Times.
You know the history: how the once-awful Times was brought to the brink of greatness under the leadership of Otis Chandler, then kind of lost its way in the 1990s. Things really went south in the unlamented Mark Willes era, which culminated in the much-ballyhooed Staples Center fiasco. Finally, the Chandlers cashed out, as owner families tend to do, selling the Times and the rest of Times Mirror to Chicago's Tribune Co.
As everyone knows, it's a media critic's sworn duty to decry the relentless consolidation of the newspaper industry, on a daily basis if possible. But this might be one of those cases when one chain gobbling up another chain turns out to be a good thing, at least as far as the L.A. Times is concerned. Because as Susan Paterno reports (see "Let the Good Times Roll"), things are looking up in la-la land. Dynamic leadership and an audacious determination to make the Times the best newspaper in the country have launched the paper on an upward trajectory.
Top editors are scrutinizing the Times section by section with an eye toward raising the level. Age-old fiefdoms and duchies that often worked at cross purposes have been dynamited. And like a big-spending NFL franchise going after hot free agents, the Times has been stealing top reporting and editing talent from coast to coast, in a couple of cases from the New York Times.
Not that the L.A. Times has been spared the cost-cutting that has been so rampant in the industry during the downturn. The Tribune Co., after all, is hardly, to use Sen. Sam Ervin's wonderful Watergate-era phrase, an "eleemosynary institution"; it's a sophisticated business known for consistently putting up impressive profit numbers. Casualties at the Times have included a dozen zoned Our Times sections (and 125 reporters who worked there) and 1,600 parttimers who delivered the paper to retail outlets and news racks.
But rather than mindlessly cut, cut, cut, the Times has at the same time added selectively, creating a new foreign bureau, doubling the size of the D.C.-based investigative team.
Of course, the Times was hardly chopped liver, even in its darkest days. With its massive, talent-laden staff and extensive Washington and foreign operations, the Times continued to pump out lots of good journalism. Now, under the direction of Publisher John Puerner and Editor John Carroll, and with the solid support of Tribune Publishing honcho Jack Fuller, the Times seems poised to reach its potential.

AT TIMES IT WAS hard to know which there was more of, coverage of the disappearance of Chandra Levy or coverage of the coverage. So I'll spare you any long dissertations.
But a couple of thoughts.
I've complained long and loud about JonBenet Ramsey and Marv Albert and other overplayed frissons of yore. But, Dan Rather to the contrary, there's no way that the missing intern and the duplicitous congressman aren't news.
The basic plot line‹smart young woman comes to D.C. to work in the government, vanishes without a trace‹is simply a good story. Throw in an affair with a congressman and it only gets better. The redeeming social value? The congressman doesn't tell law enforcement officials about the relationship until his third interview. (Close associates, and Rep. Gary Condit was awfully close, are the key in missing persons cases.) He's accused of asking a former paramour to deny they had a relationship. And he refuses to level with his constituents. As Ben Bradlee would say, nothing but readers.
It's a story, but not a page-one, above-the-fold, day-in-and-day-out story. My local paper (and the hometown paper where the drama played out), the Washington Post, seemed to handle it about right, as did many others.
Who overdid it?
The New York tabs, which, go figure, covered it like the New York tabs. And the true villains of the piece, the cable pundit shows, which gave it the full O.J.-Monica treatment. This is the kind of thing the cable news channels live for, and it was true wall-to-wall.
Just when we thought it was safe, Barbara Olson was back on the tube.