Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Bob Chamberlain/Los Angeles Times, via Associated Press

Dean Baquet in the Los Angeles Times newsroom on Tuesday.

Enlarge This Image

Al Seib/Los Angeles Times, via Associated Press

Dean P. Baquet, right, in July 2005, when he was named editor of The Los Angeles Times. With him was the publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson.

He is to leave his post Friday and be succeeded by James O’Shea, the managing editor of The Chicago Tribune, who will start Monday.

Mr. Baquet’s departure follows that of the paper’s publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson, who openly objected to cuts ordered by the Tribune Company in September and was fired last month.

David Hiller, who succeeded Mr. Johnson as publisher, said in a statement yesterday that he had had discussions with Mr. Baquet about staffing levels. While the company maintained its position that further cuts might be necessary, Mr. Baquet still considered them excessive.

“After considerable discussion during the past several weeks,” Mr. Hiller said, “Dean and I concluded that we have significant differences on the future direction of The Times.”

Colleagues of Mr. Baquet said the firing had less to do with a dispute over job cuts than his vocal resistance to them, made plain in a speech last month in New Orleans, in which he encouraged editors at other newspapers to “push back” against owners who wanted to cut newsroom staffs. In fact, when Mr. Hiller addressed the newsroom yesterday, he said he expected no job cuts, at least for the rest of the year, and he told editors it was still possible that any further cuts could be reached through attrition, according to people at the paper.

Mr. Hiller said in an interview later that public debate was not a “fatal problem.” But he added of Mr. Baquet’s speech in New Orleans: “I did not think it was helpful to Dean and me in working through things. My issue was what it said about whether we saw eye to eye on how we lead this great newspaper forward.”

Of future job cuts, he said he did not know what next year would bring, and he did not have a specific staffing level in mind, but that “over time” he expected that the staff would be reduced. In the last five years, the newsroom’s size has fallen to 940 from about 1,200.

The Los Angeles Times has steadily lost circulation in the last decade or so, falling to 776,000 daily as of Sept. 30 from a peak of 1.2 million in 1990.

The two-month showdown in Los Angeles has been a stark example of the conflict between many newsrooms and boardrooms across the country as papers face an economic slump and continued demands by Wall Street for improved financial results.

The stock prices of most public newspaper companies have fallen in the last two years, yet many of the publications remain profitable. The Los Angeles Times reported that its operating profit margin was 20 percent, higher than that of the average Fortune 500 company.

Mr. Hiller said in his statement that changes were “threatening the financial position of the whole industry,” and that the cuts were not about maintaining high profit margins. “Look no further than recent reports on other large metro papers in Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas and San Francisco,” he said.

Many colleagues of Mr. Baquet said they had considered his departure a matter of time. The news was supposed to have been announced tomorrow, but word began leaking out yesterday, and at midafternoon, Mr. Baquet confirmed it to his staff. “Believe me, I didn’t want it to come out this way,” he wrote in a memo. He could not be reached for comment last night.

Many on the staff of The Los Angeles Times said the news caught them off guard and threw the paper into turmoil, coming on election night, one of the busiest and most complicated times for news organizations. Mr. Baquet’s departure, on top of the potential sale of the paper, creates even further uncertainty for the staff.

“People are crushed,” said Alice Short, a deputy metropolitan editor. “People really believed in Dean and that as long as he was in that front office, we were going to be O.K.”

Vernon Loeb, an investigations editor, said the employees were stricken. “It was like a parent had just died,” he said. “We’ve kidded ourselves into thinking that Dean is such an artful dodger, he could play this string out forever.”