Amid L.A.’s Ethnic Mix, The Times Plays Catch-Up : Media: The paper has made progress but has few minority editors making major news decisions.

Los Angeles will be the ethnic salad bowl of 21st-Century America, Ellis Island spread over 464 square, smog-shrouded miles of sprawl and mall.

Already the city is home to more people of Mexican descent than any other city outside Mexico, more Koreans than any other city outside Asia, more Filipinos than any city outside the Philippines, more. . . .

The “minorities” in the city of Los Angeles are now a majority--a third of them Latino, 15% black, 10% Asian-American; whites are now only 41% of the city’s population. The Los Angeles-Orange County metropolitan area is now 30% Latino, 9% black and 9% Asian-American; whites are a bare majority.

How well does the ethnic composition of the Los Angeles Times news staff reflect this ethnic diversity?

Not very. Like most newspapers in this country--only more so than most major papers--The Times is still an overwhelmingly white institution, especially at the upper levels.

On the professional newsroom staff at The Times, 14% are minorities; of the editors, 9% are minorities. Although both figures are substantially above the industry average, they are below those at most other major papers, especially in the editing ranks. The proportion of minority editors is considerably higher, for example, at USA Today, the Detroit Free Press, Atlanta Constitution, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer and Dallas Morning News.

Times editors say they are strongly committed to increasing minority representation in the newsroom, among reporters and editors alike, and over the last two years, since Shelby Coffey became editor, the paper has made significant improvements, especially in entry-level hiring (and in minority coverage).

The number of minority editors has almost doubled. Minority representation on the newsroom staff has increased 54%. The paper’s nine-person editorial page staff has added two minority editors and one minority writer and is now 44% minority. The Times has also expanded its hiring and development office, appointed its first minority as editor of a daily section and put its first minority on the masthead.

But more than 80% of Coffey’s higher-level appointments have been white, virtually all from within the staff. Unlike most other major newspapers, The Times still has no high-ranking minority editor with any major decision-making power in the daily news operation. The managing editor, senior editor, national editor, foreign editor, metropolitan editor, business editor and city editor are all white. The Times is widely regarded--particularly by blacks, inside the paper and out--as having one of the poorest records for minority advancement of any major paper in the country.

Unique Situation

In at least one way, The Times’ situation is unique: Unlike many metropolitan dailies, which serve a readership that includes one large ethnic minority, The Times has three--black, Latino and Asian-American. The Times’ minority staff is probably divided more evenly among the three than that of any other major paper--53 Latinos, 42 blacks, 37 Asian-Americans (and one Native American).

Blacks recruited by The Times realize that they will have to compete with Latinos and Asian-Americans, as well as whites, for the limited number of promotional opportunities that exists at any paper, and that may help deter some from coming to the paper, says Sandy Banks, a black, who has been, variously, a Times reporter, editor and recruiter and is now on maternity leave.

But that doesn’t really explain why blacks make up only 4.2% of the paper’s professional newsroom staff and only 2% of its editors--both figures considerably below those of most other major papers. The Times has only six black editors--two of whom began their jobs within the last two weeks. The New York Times, Washington Post, Detroit Free Press, Philadelphia Inquirer and Atlanta Constitution each has more than a dozen black editors, several of them very high-ranking.

The highest-ranking blacks at The Times are all assistant editors. No black appears on The Times masthead or manages a section. Although five of the paper’s 46 national correspondents are black, no black is a foreign correspondent or columnist or arts critic.

“The L.A. Times has generally not been a particularly good place for black people to work,” says Jacqueline Thomas, a black, who is deputy editor of the editorial page at the Detroit Free Press.

Times editors deny that and insist that whatever the paper’s reputation, they are determined to improve it.

“We plan to do well on the recruitment of blacks,” Coffey says.

Most blacks and other minorities agree that Coffey generally says the right things and sounds sincere--and Senior Editor Noel Greenwood is singled out by some veteran minorities on the staff for his long-term efforts to recruit minorities. Thus, the paper’s failure to do more--especially in terms of advancement--provides an interesting case study of the entire issue of minority hiring and promotion in the newspaper business.

Despite the large Latino population in both Los Angeles and Orange counties, for example, The Times doesn’t have a single Latino editor on its metropolitan desk or its Orange County news desk--or on its national, foreign, business or sports desks either. The Miami Herald, San Antonio Light and Albuquerque Journal and four California papers--the Orange County Register, Sacramento Bee, Fresno Bee and Oakland Tribune--all have greater percentages of Latino representation on their news staffs than does The Times.

In fact, at The Times--as throughout the newspaper industry--Latinos are under-represented by even greater margins than are blacks.

But the only minority of any kind to appear on The Times’ masthead is a Latino--Frank del Olmo, deputy editor of the editorial page. His predecessor, a white, was never listed. Most other major papers do list their deputy editorial page editors on the masthead.

Only one minority is in charge of any section at The Times--Karen Wada, editor of View, who was appointed last month; she is also the paper’s assistant managing editor in charge of hiring and development.

The paucity of minority editors sometimes makes The Times vulnerable to embarrassing errors.

An obituary in July on black singer Bobby Day, for example, was illustrated with a photograph of a white singer named Bobby Day. A black editor might have known which was which or, at least, might have recognized the name of the funeral home in the obituary as being a major black funeral home.

Similarly, a Latino editor might have recognized that a photograph identified in the paper in August as Ruben Salazar, a former Times columnist and news director of television station KMEX, was actually a photo of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a prominent politician in Mexico. (A Latino reporter caught the mistake in an early edition and called in to have it corrected.)

Recruitment Problems

Top Times editors say they have encountered several problems in their efforts to recruit minorities, especially minority editors. The Times wants only top-quality people, they say, people who meet Times standards, and such people--especially minority editors--often have good jobs elsewhere and are reluctant to leave them.

Other big-city papers have had more consistent success in overcoming that reluctance in their minority recruits, especially at the higher levels:

* The Detroit Free Press hired the managing editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and made him assistant managing editor for news.

* The Miami Herald hired an assistant city editor from the Philadelphia Inquirer and made him assistant managing editor in charge of local news.

* The Chicago Tribune hired an editorial writer from the New York Times and made him deputy editorial page editor.

* The New York Times hired a White House correspondent from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and, several years later, made him metropolitan editor.

Many minorities simply don’t accept Times editors’ explanations that they can’t find minority editors who meet their standards and are willing to come to the paper.

“All those white guys there (at The Times) meet those standards and are great journalists, huh?” asks Bob McGruder, managing editor for news at the Detroit Free Press. “All the editors are brilliant?”

In fact, lower- and middle-level editors have not been widely regarded, inside or outside the paper, as being among The Times’ great strengths. But The Times has long been more “a writer’s newspaper” than “an editor’s newspaper,” so the role of these editors, whatever their individual abilities, has been undervalued and they have often felt hamstrung in their efforts to do their jobs.

Although top Times editors say they have been trying to improve both the quality and the status of line editors at the paper in recent years, the freedom that many reporters have traditionally been given at The Times--more than at most other major papers--has long discouraged many editors here (and some editors elsewhere who might have come here). It has also discouraged some reporters here from becoming editors and has led at least two minority editors to return to reporting.

“The Times is not a good place to be a junior editor,” says Sandy Banks. “There are too many layers of bureaucracy to make it a real pleasure. I never got the satisfaction from editing that I got from reporting.”

Some minority editors and reporters at The Times who have been eager for promotion have been passed over, though. Despite the paper’s stated commitment, there appears to be no “game plan . . . to try to fill in the perceived deficiencies, if there were any” in these minority staffers, says Simon Li, deputy foreign editor at the paper.

“I would think, hypothetically, that if The Times really wanted to see minorities rise and be better represented in the newsroom or in management, they’d be doing a little more than recruiting at the entry level, which seems to be mostly what they do,” Li says.

Newspapers, unlike many other businesses, have historically paid little attention to career counseling and training, though, with whites or minorities. The Knight-Ridder papers have been an exception to that, and in recent years--amid mounting concern about the lack of minority editors throughout the industry--a number of other papers have instituted programs designed to prepare minorities for editing and higher management positions.

Although The Times has tried a couple of pilot programs, the paper has no ongoing training for editors or multicultural sensitivity seminars or diversity management training programs like those at such newspapers as the Washington Post, Detroit Free Press, Seattle Times and many others, especially in the Gannett and Knight-Ridder chains.

David Laventhol, publisher of The Times, says that unconventional means may be necessary to improve the status of minorities at the paper, and Coffey has appointed a staff committee on ethnic readership and coverage to examine the problem.

The committee has recommended, among other things, accelerated minority hiring, training and promotion; appointment of a high-ranking editor to supervise minority coverage; institution of multicultural sensitivity training for all top editors, and placing greater emphasis on minority hiring and promotion in determining bonuses paid to management.

Some elements of the report have been “put into the system,” Coffey says, and others are under consideration.

East Coast Corridor

Meanwhile, Times editors and recruiters say some blacks, in particular, have been unwilling to come to The Times even when the paper eagerly sought them.

“It’s not easy to attract blacks to Los Angeles,” says Janet Clayton, a black, who is assistant editor of the paper’s editorial page. “This is not exactly a black mecca; it’s not Chicago, Washington, D.C., Detroit, New York.”

Moreover, some black journalists prefer to work for the prestigious papers in the East Coast corridor--the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe. The concentration of black journalists there has become self-perpetuating: More are there, so more get promoted, so more are encouraged to come so. . . .

But blacks say the temperate climate and casual, exciting lifestyle in Southern California, combined with the prestige and freedom offered by The Times, could help compensate for such concerns--if they got the right offer.

The Times’ history is less easily overcome. This is, after all, a newspaper that had to draft an advertising salesman during its coverage of the Watts riot because it had no black reporters on its staff. A dozen years later--a decade after the Kerner Commission excoriated the nation’s media for its failure to recruit blacks--The Times still had only a handful of blacks and Latinos on its entire staff.

The Times started serious minority recruitment “very, very late”--much later than most other major papers--Senior Editor Greenwood notes. That late start has left a crippling dual legacy--a bad reputation and relatively few minorities on the staff prepared to advance or to be cited to potential recruits as examples of how far they can climb at The Times.

That may help explain why some blacks, in particular, have rejected job offers from The Times and gone to work elsewhere.

Result:

Times minority numbers are “abysmally low,” says Michel Marriott, who was interviewed for a job at The Times three years ago but chose the New York Times instead, in part because “I just didn’t feel that the management of the L.A. Times, or at least the part that was dealing with me, really wanted me out there. . . . I wondered how deep their commitment was.”

Marriott, a black, who had worked previously at the Washington Post and Louisville Courier Journal, says he didn’t think The Times treated him the same way a white journalist with similar credentials would have been treated. The paper wouldn’t budge much on its salary offer, he says, and he was told, “If we did give you more, it would just go . . . (to) taxes anyway.”

“I said that was for me to deal with. I’ll have my own tax person go over this. I just felt it was demeaning and condescending,” he says.

The New York Times treated him quite differently, he says, and it was “mostly positive things about the New York Times” that ultimately dictated his decision.

Marriott says the New York Times offered him a substantially better salary than did the Los Angeles Times and also alleviated his concern about the cost of living in New York by telling him that if he couldn’t afford New York after a year, he could transfer to Washington. Meanwhile, he says, he was allowed to live in a nice Times apartment for which he paid the rent but which he probably could not have duplicated on his own as a newcomer to the city.

Although Los Angeles Times editors insist they wanted Marriott very much and feel they made him a good offer, they say it would be inappropriate to discuss in detail their negotiations with any individual employee or recruit. But Ron Harris, who ran the minority recruitment program for the paper’s metropolitan staff from 1985 to 1987, says he can understand why Marriott and many other minority applicants feel the paper doesn’t really want them.

“Instead of looking for a way to get minorities in, the editors were looking for ways to knock them out,” says Harris, a black, now on the paper’s national reporting staff. “They’d always find some way of saying the guy didn’t measure up, didn’t meet our standards. The Times was so arrogant they made minority applicants feel like lepers and cripples.

“At some point, you have to ask, ‘Are we really the only paper on the planet that cares about good journalism?’ Other good papers took chances and hired some of the very people we rejected and they’ve done damn well.”

Level of Commitment

Harris says part of The Times’ problem in attracting minorities when he was recruiting was that, as a reporter, he had no real standing at the paper; recruiters from the papers he was competing with were often high-ranking editors.

“That sent a clear message from those papers that the top levels, the entire paper was committed,” he says. “At our paper, it was just a few of us who were committed--especially Greenwood--but that wasn’t enough.”

The Times has since established a hiring and development office, staffed with three editors, and Coffey says that office has played “a significant role” in recent minority promotions and recruitment, which have raised the number of minorities among full-time newsroom professionals at the paper from 86 to 133 in the last two years. Moreover, Metropolitan Editor Craig Turner says that he and other ranking editors on the metropolitan staff now attend some “job fairs” where many minorities are recruited.

But several minority reporters who have been considered for jobs at The Times said they still feel slighted by the process here, in part because The Times discussed jobs inferior to those they were offered elsewhere.

The problem is that most new reporters at The Times, regardless of ethnicity, start in one of the suburban zone sections or regional editions, which have become a training ground of sorts for the main paper. The Times has made several exceptions to that policy, to hire minorities that the editors thought especially talented, but it’s the general practice--not the few exceptions--that have helped create the paper’s poor reputation with minorities.

“What the L.A. Times does is extraordinarily cautious,” says Austin Long-Scott, a former Times reporter and now a journalism instructor at San Francisco State University. “There’s an awful lot of dissatisfaction among people who’ve interviewed at the L.A. Times because they think they’re good enough to come in and sort of start being stars and The Times is saying, ‘Well, we’ll put you in the Glendale bureau for a while’ or ‘We’ll put you in San Diego.’

“It turns people off,” Long-Scott says.

Many experienced reporters--white as well as minority--resent having to start in the outlying offices, especially if other papers are offering them positions on the more prestigious metropolitan staff, with prospects for a transfer to the even more prestigious national or foreign staffs in the not-too-distant future.

Unsuccessful in attempts to recruit experienced minorities, Greenwood finally decided that The Times had to “develop our own pool” of minorities. In 1984, at the suggestion of Bob Rawitch, who had found “discouragingly few prospects” on an early minority recruiting trip for the paper, Greenwood started METPRO, a two-year training program for young minorities, jointly financed by The Times and its parent company, Times Mirror Co..

Initially, William F. Thomas, then editor of The Times, was skeptical about the program.

“Bill didn’t think we should be in the business of running a school for journalists,” Greenwood says.

Thomas, too, wanted more minorities on the paper, and he ultimately went over budget and violated the paper’s hiring freeze several times to hire minority reporters. But it was not Thomas’ style to push nearly as aggressively or untraditionally as an Al Neuharth at USA Today or a David Lawrence at the Detroit Free Press, so the paper didn’t do nearly as well under him as many others did in minority hiring or, especially, advancement.

Even METPRO, which became a respected pioneer in the industry, was initially treated as something of an orphan by The Times.

The paper wouldn’t agree to hire a METPRO grad for the first two years, Greenwood says. But when other papers proved eager for them, the paper changed its policy. Now the paper is glad to have METPRO graduates, 10 of whom go through the program each year. Eight METPRO grads now work for the Times. (Newsday, The Times’ sister paper in New York, now has a similar METPRO program to train minority copy editors.)

Greenwood has also instituted a special two-year trainee program to bring in talented young minority reporters who don’t have the experience that The Times customarily requires; four new full-time reporters have joined The Times from that program.

The Times is now “pushing hard in a variety of ways” to increase minority representation in the editing ranks, editors say, even though the results so far are relatively modest.

The paper’s 9-month-old Ventura County edition, with a mix of regular employees, METPRO and two-year trainees, has seven minorities on a staff of 24 (29%) and is “a good example” of how Greenwood hopes his approach will build minority representation at The Times--especially with Coffey “very persistent and very much focused on it.”

Although Thomas made increased minority representation a priority, Coffey made it “an even more important priority” when he succeeded Thomas early last year, Greenwood says.

Since Coffey took over, the paper has appointed most of its few minority editors and increased its minority reporting staff significantly. Three minority editors were promoted just last week--a black, a Latino and an Asian-American.

The local, general assignment staff in particular has increased its minority representation; eight of 13 reporters hired in the last two years have been minorities, bringing that staff from 11% minority to 32%--almost evenly divided among blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans.

The paper’s business section, which had been the most ethnically diverse section on the paper before Coffey took over, is 22% minority--12 minority staffers and two minority editors on a staff of 54.

While acknowledging that “we have plenty more to do,” Coffey says he feels good about the progress the paper is making.

“Changes in this area in big institutions need to be steady and sustained,” he says. “It’s a marathon, not a 100-yard dash. At The Times, we’re into the run but nowhere near the finish.”

Coffey particularly delights in telling about how all other local news media were kept away from a fire scene in the city’s garment district late last year while four Times reporters--two Latinos, a Korean-American and a Chinese-American--were given free rein because their language skills not only enabled them to interview the victims but, in some cases, to translate for the Fire Department paramedics.

But criticism of The Times continues, from within and without. Not only is there a paucity of minority editors--none even in the “model” Ventura County edition--but the paper still has no minorities running any regional editions or suburban zone sections. There are still no minority arts critics at The Times and only one minority columnist, one minority foreign correspondent and two minority sports writers. The metropolitan staff is still only 12% minority, trying to cover a county that is now 54% minority.

Many minorities on The Times staff and elsewhere wonder why, if Coffey, Greenwood and other top editors are so committed, there hasn’t been more progress--in particular, more minority advancement.

Times editors say they prefer to promote from within but have been unable to do so with many minorities because there are so few experienced minorities on the staff. But The Times has on occasion hired white editors from outside--most notably, Coffey himself and, several years earlier, the national editor and an assistant editorial page editor who is now the foreign editor. Besides, there are few experienced minorities on the staff largely because the Times started recruiting minorities so late and has not generally made the kinds of offers that would attract experienced minorities. Thus, the paper has relatively few minorities who can serve as mentors or role models--or, in the immediate future, as editors.

Another explanation for the paper’s slow progress on minority advancement may lie in the unique culture of The Times--an operation so placid and so stable for so long that one former editor dubbed it “the velvet coffin.”

“Change comes from agitation below and leadership above,” says reporter Andrea Ford. Or, as David Lawrence puts it:

“It’s not done by goodwill.”

Although Coffey is a more hands-on editor than Thomas was, he’s not one to issue fiery commands or provoke confrontations either.

Coffey agrees that goodwill alone will not bring about major change, but he points to the improvements the paper has made of late and says, “The best progress is made by appealing to the better angels in people’s nature to do the right things. Then goodwill can be a result if not a cause.”

The Times newsroom, like most, reflects the personalities of its top editors, so instead of the ferment, debate and contention typical of most big-city newsrooms, The Times’ newsroom is generally tranquil. Largely because of the tone set by top editors--and, perhaps, the laid-back lifestyle of Southern California--civility, not agitation, is generally the order of the day at The Times. The kinds of challenges to authority that can provoke dramatic change are not common in such an environment.

But many veteran minorities at The Times seem more disgruntled now than ever before. That disgruntlement helped spur formation of the minority editors caucus this year. Minorities realize that progress has been made of late, but that progress has raised expectations and those expectations have not been fulfilled.

In the past two years under Coffey, The Times has appointed a new associate editor, editorial page editor, metropolitan editor, city editor, business editor, Sunday magazine and Sunday Calendar editors, food, travel and real estate editors, three regional edition editors, three suburban zone section editors and two successive assistant managing editors in charge of Column One; all 18 of these have been white. (Eight of the 18 editors are women; The Times, having been slow to recruit and promote women, is playing catch-up there, too.)

Including the city editor, the paper has also appointed 12 new editors on the metropolitan desk in the last two years; only one, Karen Robinson, a black, is a minority, and she replaced another black.

Robinson says she has “no doubt” that the whites chosen for all the other jobs were “eminently qualified,” but she also says, “When a paper has opportunity after opportunity to make some inroads and does not, you have to question, ‘Where is your commitment?’ ”

Indeed, after one recent promotion of a white editor was posted on the office bulletin board, someone scrawled across the bottom, “More old white guy news.”

(The notation was a bit misleading; six of the 12 new editors are women.)

Efforts Told

Coffey, Greenwood and Turner say they have tried hard to find minorities for some of these positions, and Greenwood points out that the first and most minority editors at the paper have worked under him.

But Greenwood’s domain is by far the largest at the paper, and the number of minority editors in that domain remains very small; every editor that Greenwood has promoted to a position of real authority--two metropolitan editors, six senior assistant metropolitan editors, two suburban editors--has been white. So have the vast majority of lower-level editors and virtually all the reporters given the prestigious “specialist” beats--politics, science, medicine, religion, the environment. These factors help explain why minorities on the staff, especially blacks relatively new to the staff, have become increasingly dismayed and increasingly skeptical.

Greenwood dismisses most in-house criticism of The Times’ record as “posturing,” “personal aggrandizement,” “sour grapes” and “mean-spirited shots from left field.” But he and other Times editors--saying it would be inappropriate to discuss any individual personnel case--are unwilling to illuminate the one event that did the most damage to The Times’ reputation among blacks in recent years--the departure in mid-1989 of Philip Dixon, a black assistant metropolitan editor.

Blacks at The Times especially admired Dixon, but they were not alone. Bob Baker, a white reporter, says Dixon was “one of the best” editors he worked with at the paper, and Simon Li, the deputy foreign editor, who has known Dixon since they worked together at the Philadelphia Inquirer, says, “I thought he was a damn good editor.”

Many people at The Times--and in the black journalistic network nationwide--saw the paper’s inability to find a job that would keep Dixon happy at The Times as indicative of its lack of commitment to blacks.

There were several factors involved in Dixon’s decision--including family--but when he left The Times, he told several colleagues that he was going in part because he didn’t think a black man had much future at the paper.

Times editors insist blacks do have a future at the paper.

“It was a real shame to lose Phil,” Coffey says. “We’re going to have setbacks in increasing minority advancement. But we will do it.”

Meanwhile, Dixon is now an assistant city editor at the Washington Post, and his new employer seems delighted with him.

“Phil Dixon is a terrific editor,” says Leonard Downie, managing editor of the Post. “We think he has a lot of management potential. He’s a very creative editor. We feel very lucky to have him.”

Joyce Sherwood and Peter Johnson of The Times’ editorial library assisted with research for this series.