Outgoing 'L.A. Times' Editor Laments Budget Cuts

By: Joe Strupp Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll wants a vacation. So don't call his decision to leave the paper he has run for five years a retirement. He just wants a little extended time off before he plans to go back to work -- somewhere.

"I was talking to my wife the other day and said that I had never had a two-week vacation that I could remember," Carroll told E&P Wednesday, about an hour after he had announced he'd be leaving the paper next month. "So that was a consideration. Taking an open-ended vacation, then finding something else. I am not retiring."

Carroll, 63, said he may even take up his wife's suggestion of driving around the country for four months. "I don't know myself well enough to know how long I can be idle," he joked. Carroll has been married to his wife, Lee, for 20 years.

The outgoing editor, whose last day will be Aug. 15, admitted that several factors played into his decision, a change he had been contemplating for more than a year. "There are multiple things," he said, including the budget cuts the paper has had to endure in recent years.

"I can't say that I was thrilled by them," he said of the cuts that eliminated more than 60 editorial positions last year. "But my thinking has developed over time. I think I have given just about all I could for the paper. I think I could do more, but it is time to turn it over to someone else."

As Carroll leaves the industry, at least for the moment, he laments the overall budget cutbacks that are hurting newspapers nationally. "It's worrisome," he said. "I think a lot of papers around the country have been cut too much in order to achieve extravagantly high profit margins."

But he is pleased to leave the paper in the hands of Dean Baquet, his managing editor, whom he hired away from The New York Times five years ago, shortly after Carroll became editor. Carroll had previously edited The Sun in Baltimore and the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader.

Carroll nearly left the newspaper business in 2000, just before the Times tapped him to replace former editor Michael Parks. Carroll had just been offered the chance to run the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University when Tribune executives offered him the Times job. "I decided that a big bone in my body said to go to L.A.," Carroll recalls. "I am glad I did. It has been everything I expected and more."

Carroll noted that his biggest achievement was to simply improve the paper's quality of journalism. "Doing it in a way that raised morale in the newspaper," he said. "We have done a lot of things. I've been amazingly lucky."

Still, the editor said the cutbacks in resources and tighter budgets have weighed on his efforts. "I have been concerned about that," he said, quickly adding, "I still think the L.A. Times is well-equipped to do amazing journalism."

Carroll said Baquet is more than qualified to take over and believes his replacement will do well. He added that his successor is already talking about expanding local coverage and building up the Web site. "Dean is going to have to figure out how to do that," Carroll added. "We've got an ambitious agenda this year." Baquet did not return calls seeking comment Wednesday afternoon.

Stressing that he plans to eventually get back to full-time work, Carroll would not say what his next job would be. But, he hinted, "it will probably be something related to journalism. I want to clear my head first."

The New York Times, in its Thursday edition, quotes Carroll's friend, Eugene Roberts, the legendary former editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times, saying that the cuts that the Tribune Company wants to make in Los Angeles amounted to a "national tragedy."

It quotes another friend and former colleague, Bill Marimow, claiming that Carroll "reached a crossroads that would require dismantling much of what he'd done in terms of staffing, space in the paper and his own values about what constitutes great journalism."