Tribune Picks New Publisher, Editor of Times, Sources Say

John Puerner, publisher of the Orlando Sentinel, will become publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and John Carroll, editor of the Baltimore Sun, will become editor of The Times after Tribune Co. of Chicago officially takes command of the paper, according to highly placed Times sources.

Puerner was unavailable for comment Thursday, as were other Tribune Co. executives. Carroll declined to comment, as did Kathryn Downing, the current publisher of The Times, and Michael Parks, the editor of the paper.

The boards of directors of Tribune Co. and Times Mirror, parent company of The Times, agreed March 12 to Tribune’s $6.38-billion merger with Times Mirror, but the official change of control cannot take place until after completion of Tribune Co.’s tender offer for outstanding shares of Times Mirror stock. The deadline for the offer is Monday, and actual change of control is not likely to take place until after the shares are counted, probably no sooner than late next week.

Principals in the transaction are currently constrained from saying or doing anything that could be construed as implementing a change of control, according to Times executives. But both Downing and Parks have told senior deputies that Puerner and Carroll will replace them, several of these executives said.

Puerner, 49, has been publisher in Orlando since 1993. The Sentinel, which won a Pulitzer Prize this week for editorial writing, has a daily circulation of about 260,000 and Sunday circulation of 380,000.

Puerner joined Tribune Co. in 1979 after graduating from the University of Colorado with a master’s degree in business administration.

His journalism career began in college, when he was business manager and photographer for the student newspaper. According to a story in the Sentinel, he was on assignment for the school paper when he was “thrown out by police” after defying a ban on photographers at a speech by Jeb Stuart Magruder, a former campaign official for President Richard Nixon who was convicted in the Watergate cover-up.

Long regarded as a rising star at Tribune Co., Puerner was vice president of marketing and development for the Chicago Tribune before moving to Orlando. A leader in the company’s move into digital media and new technology, he negotiated the deal that created Chicago Online, initially a joint venture between Tribune and America Online.

Puerner would become the 10th publisher of The Times in its 118-year history and the fourth in the last six years.

Downing became publisher last June, taking over from Mark Willes, chairman and CEO of Times Mirror, who had been publisher for 20 months. Willes says he will leave Times Mirror once the Tribune takeover is complete.

Downing became a focus of controversy last fall when it was disclosed that the paper had split the profits from a special issue of its Sunday magazine with the subject of that issue: Staples Center.

Downing, who had no previous experience in the newspaper business before moving into the publisher’s office, later said she had kept the profit-sharing arrangement secret from Times editors and reporters in an effort to safeguard their independence. But when widespread news coverage of the deal identified the arrangement as a flagrant violation of editorial independence, she took full responsibility and acknowledged a “fundamental misunderstanding” of basic journalistic principles.

In the aftermath of Staples, Downing asked the editorial department to develop a set of ethical guidelines to prevent a recurrence of any similar misstep, and those guidelines, along with a new statement of the paper’s basic journalistic principles, were subsequently adopted. The principles were published on Page 1 of the paper over the names of her and Parks.

In response to other concerns expressed by editors and reporters, Downing early this year authorized an increase in the paper’s daily news hole, the space allotted for news and photographs.

Meanwhile, advertising revenue, which reached record levels last year, increased an additional 9.4% during the first quarter of this year.

Parks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who became editor in October 1997, also came in for considerable criticism over the Staples affair. Although he said he had not known about the profit-sharing agreement until after the magazine was written and edited, he did learn about it in time to have stopped it from being printed or distributed, which he did not do. He later acknowledged that he had “underestimated the impact of the Staples arrangement on our credibility” and said he had “profound regret” for what occurred.

Parks was a foreign correspondent for 25 years before becoming deputy foreign editor of The Times in 1995, managing editor a year later and editor 17 months after that. The Times won Pulitzer Prizes in 1998 and ’99 and again this week for stories published while Parks was editor.

Carroll, Parks’ successor, is 58, and until the Tribune-Times Mirror deal, he was a leading candidate to become curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, a mid-career program at Harvard University.

Carroll has been editor of the Baltimore Sun, another Times Mirror paper, since 1991. Before that, he was editor of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader and metropolitan editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. A reporter for 10 years before becoming an editor, he is highly regarded in journalistic circles.

“He would be a great choice . . . an effective editor . . . very cool-minded and professional,” said Edwin O. Guthman, former national editor of The Times, who worked with Carroll when both were editors at the Inquirer. “The Sun has done courageous, innovative stories under his leadership.”

Sun reporters won a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting in 1998 for a series on the international ship-breaking industry. The Sun also won a Pulitzer in feature writing in 1997 for what the judges called a “compelling portrait of a baseball umpire who endured the death of a son while knowing that another son suffers from the same deadly genetic disease.”

The Sun was a finalist in two other categories that year, including explanatory reporting for a three-part series on slavery in Sudan, stories for which the reporters purchased (and then freed) two slaves.