More than jobs are at stake

NEARLY 90 years ago, Walter Lippmann wrote, “The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.”

One need not share his predilection for Olympian overstatement to believe that there’s a great deal at stake in the distress and turmoil through which American newspapers now are passing. Nowhere is that truer than in Los Angeles, where The Times’ publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson, was forced Thursday to resign because he resisted the Tribune Co.’s demand that he further cut the staff that produces this paper. He has been replaced by the Chicago Tribune’s publisher, David D. Hiller, who -- like Johnson -- has had a long career with Tribune, including service as the company’s general counsel and as manager of its interactive business.

Dean Baquet, The Times’ editor who also resisted the demands for reductions in staff, was asked to remain and has agreed to do so, telling people within the paper that he intends to argue that further diminishing the number of journalists he directs will undermine The Times’ ability to provide its readers with a newspaper of acceptable quality. Since acquiring this paper as part of its purchase of Times Mirror six years ago, Tribune has cut the number of reporters, editors, photographers and designers from about 1,200 to 940. The paper’s editors say that Chicago believes that about 800 would be a more appropriate number. At the same time, Tribune has reduced the number of people employed in producing and distributing the paper from 5,300 to 2,800.

Johnson has said that his differences with Tribune turned not only on his belief that “newspapers can’t cut their way into the future” but also on his frustration over Chicago’s unwillingness to spend on initiatives designed to arrest the paper’s decline in circulation from 1.1 million daily in 1999 to 852,000 this year.

Much that is of consequence to this paper’s future will turn on the relationship between Hiller, the third publisher installed by Tribune since acquiring The Times, and Baquet, the second editor. Thursday, Hiller told the Wall Street Journal that he and Baquet had “decided that we would spend time in a conversation about the future of the newspaper. And then we would know after those conversations whether we saw the way forward with the newspaper going to the same place. And if it was going to the same place we would go together, but we wouldn’t know that until we had the conversation, and I want to be very open and take a good fresh look at everything.”

Hiller’s two predecessors, of course, did just that and came to conclusions about this paper and its future that were unacceptable to Tribune.

Lippmann’s sentiments notwithstanding, it cannot be argued that a newspaper’s mere physical persistence is a guarantor of democracy or the common good. On the eve of the Civil War, Americans were, per capita, the greatest newspaper readers in the world. Yet those papers, little more than vehicles for advertising and partisan vitriol, encouraged rather than arrested a democratic society’s slide into fratricide.

It was the memory of that searing descent that led the American historian Henry Adams to muse in his memoirs that this nation’s “politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

So it seemed 100 years ago to one of the American nation’s greatest interpreters, and so -- as these days of bitter red state-blue state division suggest -- it could seem again. Newspapers have a vital role to play in preventing that; indeed, it is the very essence of their obligation to a society under the protecting wing of whose Constitution they conduct their business. However, they can play that role and meet that obligation only if they’re up to the job. The remarkably constructive and, not incidentally, lucrative part that major American newspapers have come to play since World War II rests on three hard-won achievements:

One is the transformation of editorial pages from organs of mindless partisan propaganda to civil voices of opinion. Papers still may lean left, right or toward the center, but they overwhelmingly do so with an attention to rules of argument and civility unimaginable in the not-very-distant past. More important, they routinely make space for other points of view and are rightly criticized when they fail to make enough room. (It’s interesting that the most striking of such transitions from partisan rag to nonpartisan analyst occurred at the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.) The second change involved the provision of adequate resources to inform readers about local, national and foreign news. Without facts there are no opinions that count for much, however well expressed.

In some large part, the astonishing financial success of postwar American journalism rested on a recognition that an educated and increasingly urbanized readership demanded more sophisticated information on a broader range of topics than ever before and on newspaper managers’ willingness to invest in covering them. Finally, by stripping muckraking of its ideological component, big-city newspapers created modern investigative reporting. In doing so, they unwittingly cut the ties that long had bound them to their cities’ moneyed establishment. It’s now taken for granted that it is through vigorous investigative reporting that a newspaper demonstrates that it holds the interests of its community as a whole above those of any narrow faction or class.

Doing all these things costs money, but by investing in civil and reasonable editorial pages, in truly serious local, national and foreign reporting, and in vigorous, nonpartisan investigative journalism, the owners of American newspapers not only enriched their communities but also made themselves wealthier than even they ever had dreamed. The era into which we now are moving will involve new ways of distributing journalism -- new combinations of print and online venues and, surely, avenues we cannot foresee. There is nothing to suggest, though, that readers’ expectations regarding the scope of major news organization’s journalism or the demands of service to the common good will in any way diminish.

To borrow a homey image from Henry Adams’ agrarian America, the smart guys among our newspaper managers will not be the ones who eat their own seed corn simply to fatten themselves through another fleeting season.

Whether newspapers belong to individual proprietors or corporate stockholders, the future -- and its profits -- will belong to those who are both socially responsible enough and financially hard-headed enough to carry what is indispensable about the present into the era now struggling to be born.

Los Angeles will be one of the places where we’ll eventually find out whether newspaper journalism’s current distress is a birth pang or a death rattle.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com