On Monday my Gmail/Gchat was aflutter with these kinds of messages: "Did you hear?" "Good thing you got out in time!" "Are you a soothsayer?" Everyone was referring, of course, to the Tribune Company having just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Most of you know that Tribune will go down in my life history as my first full-time employer. I was a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times' California section before I quit and hightailed it to San Francisco for a career in the Internet/new media realm this past April.
I wish I could say that news of the nation's second-largest newspaper company's bankruptcy came as at least something of a surprise. The truth of the matter, though, is that it was exceedingly obvious even from the get-go, and before this economic meltdown, that things were not going well and weren't going to get any better any time soon.
For starters, my job interview last spring coincided with the first of what became a regular string of layoffs and forced early retirements over the past year and a half. During my time in the Times' newsroom, I saw a new publisher come on (only to leave soon after I did), the editor-in-chief dismissed, another take over, and Sam Zell take over the parent company. Oh yeah, and my workspace was whored out for weeks to a Hollywood shoot populated by Robert Downey, Jr., Catherine Keener, and Jamie Foxx (watch for my cameo "performance" when the film releases). Clearly, we were very, very strapped for cash.
Despite all these clear signs of trouble for the company and the newspaper, it wasn't easy to hand in my resignation. Ever since high school, my dream was to be a newspaper reporter. Countless internships, fellowships, freelance stringing gigs, and even an entire "active citizenship in journalism" volunteer project I started and coordinated during my college years made applying for the few open staff positions at the most respected papers in the country not completely out of reach. When I was offered the LAT gig a month before graduating, I didn't think twice about leaving my East Coast life behind for a city I'd only ever been to once, for the job interview.
The people I worked with in that newsroom are certainly the smartest, bravest, and best writers and editors I know. Every day I was there, I was aware of the heavy degree of intellect and professionalism that defined the career of a newspaper journalist and editor. It is because of the people I worked with and for there that it was hard to make the decision to leave years before my time was up.
In my bio on this site, it says that while at the Times, I "realized that old-school media is, indeed, old." That was the ultimate problem. As a child of the computer age, I didn't ever—not once—in my entire time I was there, read the paper in broadsheet form. It seemed anachronistic to care whether my story was on the front page because I never held it in my hands. What I did care about was why my story wouldn't go live on the site immediately even when it had gone through the editing and fact-checking process. Why are we waiting for the morning edition? I asked myself many, many times. Several other times, my art-heavy story would go online without the photographs, making the entire story essentially meaningless to the online reader. The last story I worked on (which was ultimately rewritten by another reporter) was one of the first to involve original video production. Toward the end of my short-lived tenure there, news blogs started to come to fruition. They weren't great ones, but they were a start. There was talk of moving the online department to the same floor as the newsroom—a simple, very good idea. But they weren't there yet (though that may have changed by now). During the California wildfire season, the Times' website was the place to get breaking news, at all times of the day. Episodes like those showed we had it in us, just not full-time.
The dissonance between the incredible journalism the LAT produces and the reality of the "first draft of history" that takes place online is ultimately what felt so old-school about an otherwise incredible, storied institution of respected journalism.
The good news, of course, is that filing for bankruptcy may take the LAT and the Chicago Tribune to where they have to go in terms of new media—mostly because they have no other choice. The Washington Post and New York Times have been headed in that direction far longer than they have, so speedy catch-up is necessary for these incredible bastions of journalism to stay relevant and, of course, economically viable.
It's because I know what the people behind the Los Angeles Times are capable of that reading the news of Tribune's bankruptcy felt so bittersweet. I can't wait to see what good will come of this, because it will, indeed, be good. The bailout necessary in newspaper journalism is not economic, it's paradigmatic. And that bailout just arrived—in Chapter 11 wrapping paper.
-- Daniela Perdomo
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