Karlene Goller Vice President, Legal and Deputy General Counsel Los Angeles Times

Karlene W. Goller is Vice President, Legal and Deputy General Counsel for the Los Angeles Times, and Senior Counsel/West Coast Media for Tribune Co. Goller is First Amendment counsel for the Los Angeles Times and the eight Times Community News newspapers. She is responsible for all aspects of newsroom counseling and litigation, as well as intellectual property matters. She also represents the papers in connection with legislative and policy matters at the state and federal levels. Goller joined the Times Mirror Co. in 1990 as corporate counsel for Times Mirror Cable Television Inc. She began counseling the newsroom in 1991. Before joining Times Mirror, she was an associate at Cole, Raywid & Braverman in Washington, D.C., where she practiced primarily communications law.

Goller was graduated from Middlebury College with departmental honors, attended Georgetown University Law Center as a visiting/transfer student, and received her J.D. from Suffolk University Law School. She is a member of the California, District of Columbia, Virginia, and United States Supreme Court bars.

Goller serves on the Board of Directors and Government Affairs Committee of the California Newspaper Publishers Assn. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School, facilitating citizen participation in online media and protecting the legal rights of those engaged in speech on the Internet. Goller is a member of the legal advisory board of the University of California Irvine’s Literary Journalism Program and serves on the legal committees of LA Youth newspaper and the Newspaper Assn. of America. She is a member of the editorial boards of the American Bar Assn.’s Forum on Communications and the Media Law Resource Center’s MediaLawLetter. For many years, Goller has served on the Board of Directors of Public Counsel Law Center, the nation’s largest pro bono legal services provider. She was Public Counsel’s 2006-07 chairperson and continues to serve on its Executive Committee.

Goller is the only non-editorial employee at the Los Angeles Times to be awarded a Top of The Times award. In 2005, she received the California First Amendment Coalition’s Beacon Award “for being the ‘consummate ‘reporter’s lawyer’” and in recognition of her efforts on behalf of the First Amendment and public access issues. In 2006, the Greater Los Angeles Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists presented Goller with its Freedom of Information Award for her work to further the free flow of information and champion freedom of the press. In 2008 she received a Special Citation at the Los Angeles Times Editorial Awards for 2007 “for her unstinting standards and her long advocacy to increase through the courts and other legal institutions the newsgathering capacities of The Times.”