LOS ANGELES, CA (July 15, 2008) – As the buyouts, layoffs, and cutbacks continue across all Tribune Co.-owned newspapers, today's news is that two top Tribune executives are also taking the exit door.
The publisher of the Los Angeles Times, David Hiller, formerly the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, got shown the door by new owner Sam Zell himself yesterday. The Times is in the process of cutting 250 more jobs across the newspaper.
As the cuts continue across the board in Los Angeles, a source in the newspaper's photography department says that the current plan calls for 10 people to be cut from the visual staff (three photographers, one multimedia person, three pre-press technicians, and three picture editors).
In a note to the Times staff yesterday Hiller wrote, "When I told my mother than Sam wanted to see me this morning, she said, 'do you think he wants to make you CEO of the whole company?' You see where a lot of my optimism comes from."
When Zell bought the Tribune Co. last year the real estate mogul was quoted as saying that Hiller would be held accountable for the Times' financial performance. The Times reports today that under Hiller the paper has experienced the "steepest drop in cash flow of any in the Tribune chain of 11 newspapers," and that Hiller had "acquired a reputation among Tribune brass as an indecisive leader."
Hiller's 21 months as publisher were marked by the sharpest staff reductions and production cuts in the newspaper's history, and the departure of two editors who left because of the Tribune Co.'s demands to cut staff, cut resources, and cut news pages.
Los Angeles Times editors John Carroll, Dean Baquet, and Jim O'Shea quit or were forced out when they resisted Tribune Co. efforts to cut back the Times staff over the last couple of years. When the current round of cutbacks are finished by the end of summer, the Times' newsroom will be approximately half the size it was within the last decade.
Also yesterday, Chicago Tribune editor and senior vice president Ann Marie Lipinski told her staff that she's leaving, less than a week after the Tribune announced cutting 80 more newsroom jobs and a 14 percent reduction in the number of news pages they'll be printing. Lipinski joined the paper in 1978 as an intern and rose through the ranks to the editor's job in 2001.
Lipinski said her decision to resign was "a long time coming" and that the job was "not the fit it once was."
