Los Angeles Times Hires New Managing Editor

Dean Baquet, national editor of the New York Times and before that a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Chicago Tribune, will become managing editor of the Los Angeles Times next month.

Baquet, 43, will be the second-highest-ranking editor in The Times’ newsroom and, by far, the highest-ranking African American ever in the paper’s news operation. He will report to John Carroll, who left the Baltimore Sun to become editor of The Times in April and who announced Baquet’s appointment Wednesday.

Until relatively recently, most top editors at the Los Angeles Times have risen primarily through the desk-editing ranks, rather than through the reporting ranks, and Carroll said one major reason for his selection of Baquet is that he has “a strong background in reporting, and I like editors who have mastered their craft before becoming supervisors.”

It is most unusual for a paper of The Times’ stature to select its two top editors from other news organizations, rather than promoting from within, but the editing ranks at The Times have long been thin, and turmoil and departures from the paper have thinned them still further in recent years.

With Carroll and Baquet running The Times’ newsroom, it also means that the paper’s top two news executives--as well as its publisher, John Puerner--are new to Southern California, at a time when ownership of the paper has shifted outside Los Angeles. Tribune Co. of Chicago formally completed its acquisition of The Times and its parent company, Times Mirror, last month.

“But we have a strong staff that publishes exemplary journalism every day,” Carroll said, “and we’re fortunate to have many reporters and editors who are intimately familiar with the area.”

Nevertheless, Carroll said, “a newspaper that aspires to be the very best should avail itself of talent from wherever it springs up. I have hopes and goals for this paper that are very ambitious, and to achieve those, we may from time to time have to go outside.”

Carroll said he met Baquet for the first time less than a month ago--on June 24--and in the course of their conversations, he decided that Baquet was “the best person available, right for The Times and right for me.”

Baquet’s appointment signals a return to a traditional newsroom management structure at The Times, with a single managing editor responsible for all news-gathering operations. Michael Parks, the paper’s previous editor, initially appointed four managing editors, each with separate responsibilities; in January, he promoted one of them, Leo Wolinsky, to the newly created position of executive editor. Although Baquet will replace Wolinsky as the No. 2 person in the newsroom, Wolinsky called the move “a tremendous thing for the paper that will help to solidify and advance its reputation as one of the nation’s greatest papers.”

Carroll said Wolinsky’s title and duties, as well as those of Karen Wada and John Arthur, two other managing editors, will be “adjusted . . . over the next several weeks. I think highly of all three, both professionally and personally, and until then, the newsroom will operate as usual.” (The paper’s other managing editor, John Lindsay, left early this year.)

Baquet, who is expected to arrive at The Times in late August, was part of a three-reporter team that won a Pulitzer in 1988 for an investigation of corruption in the Chicago City Council. He was an associate metropolitan editor at the Tribune before moving to the New York Times in 1990.

The Los Angeles Times has been through more than a decade of change and unrest, beginning with a long recession in the late 1980s and early ‘90s and subsequent cutbacks in staff size, news hole, reach and ambition. The paper became embroiled in controversy last fall when it shared profits from a special issue of its Sunday magazine with Staples Center, the subject of that issue--a clear violation of journalistic independence that diminished the paper’s professional standing and its internal morale.

The hiring of Baquet “says we’re coming back. It says we’re really in the game,” Times City Editor Bill Boyarsky said Wednesday.

Baquet was highly regarded at the New York Times, and many of his colleagues saw him as a potential managing editor there. Bill Keller, the current managing editor, issued a memo to his staff Wednesday, calling Baquet’s departure “a painful piece of news to announce” and saying Baquet had “led his staff through some enormous news stories and launched a lot of original, powerful enterprise.” Keller praised his commitment to investigative reporting and his contribution to “the morale and collaborative spirit of the newsroom.”

Baquet would, he said, bring to the Los Angeles Times “a lethal set of reportorial instincts, the gentlest management touch I know and enough good wicked humor to rescue any number of solemn meetings. The staff of the Los Angeles Times should be reveling in their good fortune.”

Baquet, who was special projects editor at the New York Times before becoming national editor in 1995, said it was “very hard” to leave the paper. Indeed, he turned down the job of executive editor of the Miami Herald late last year.

“But I think the L.A. Times is a terrific paper, and I’ve long admired it as a competitor,” he said Wednesday. “I think John Carroll is a terrific editor and a really fine newsman, and I thought that opportunity to be his deputy at a paper like the L.A. Times was just irresistible.”

Baquet, a native of New Orleans, where his parents owned a restaurant, is married and has an 11-year-old son. Although he will be the highest-ranking black in the Los Angeles Times newsroom, both he and Carroll said race did not come up in their discussions and was not a factor in his selection. Janet Clayton, the editor of The Times’ editorial pages, is black, but the paper’s newsroom has not generally been regarded as a particularly satisfying place for blacks to work. Only 4.1% of the newsroom staff is African American.