Something for LA Times Readers to Know - 22 August

For those of you who are not in the area  or are not LA Times subscribers, sorry, but you get this any way.   Since this will not appear in this manner of detail in the LA area, this article for those who need to know from a source outside of Los Angeles;

MEDIA

Publisher and Top Editors Ousted at Los Angeles Times in Leadership Shake-Up

By SYDNEY EMBER

AUG. 21, 2017

Ross Levinsohn in Santa Monica in 2013. On Monday, he was named publisher and chief executive

Tronc, the parent company of The Los Angeles Times, abruptly replaced the newspaper's top leadership on Monday in a shake-up that stunned many in the newsroom.

Ross Levinsohn, a longtime media executive who held a senior position at Fox's digital group and was once considered a top candidate to lead Yahoo, was named publisher and chief executive of The Times. Jim Kirk, who until this month was editor and publisher of The Chicago Sun-Times, will be the interim executive editor and will run the newsroom's day-to-day operations.

Mr. Levinsohn and Mr. Kirk, who joined Tronc less than two weeks ago after the sale of The Sun-Times, will replace Davan Maharaj, who has been The Times's publisher and editor since March 2016, when Tronc combined the two roles across its newspapers. Several other leaders at the paper, including Marc Duvoisin, a managing editor; Megan Garvey, the deputy managing editor for digital; and Matt Doig, the assistant managing editor for investigations, were also fired. Lawrence Ingrassia, another managing editor and a former editor at The New York Times, recently said he was retiring.

"We're frankly not where we need to be from a digital perspective," Justin C. Dearborn, the chief executive of Tronc, said in a telephone interview on Monday. "We also think The L.A. Times over all just needs a little refresh and a little personality back."

The shake-up at one of the country's most storied newspapers occurred roughly a year and a half after Tronc's new leadership team, led by the Chicago entrepreneur Michael W. Ferro Jr., gained control and began shifting the company's focus to digital and pushing a technology-driven approach to journalism. The company, formerly called Tribune Publishing, which also owns The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun, rebuffed a takeover bid from Gannett last year after a bitter public process.

Mr. Dearborn said that The Times was not transforming itself fast enough on the digital side under its current leadership and that Mr. Levinsohn was hired to expedite that change.

Mr. Levinsohn, who has advised Tronc for roughly 14 months, said in an interview that he would focus on expanding The Times's presence "on all platforms."

"They do a great job of putting the newspaper out there day in and day out," said Mr. Levinsohn, who was interim chief executive officer at Yahoo. "I think it's important to be fast, to be accurate, to have opinions and to get that out into the world in a more aggressive fashion."

Though Monday's purge surprised some in the newsroom, internal grumbling about the newsroom's leadership had surfaced recently and some of the paper's journalists had sent letters of complaint to Tronc executives, according to several people familiar with the complaints, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Tension arose between Tronc's leadership and Mr. Maharaj over proposed budget cuts, which Mr. Maharaj was resisting, one of the people said.

Mr. Maharaj was not available for comment.

This is not the first leadership overhaul at The Times in recent years. In 2015, the paper's publisher, Austin Beutner, was fired after only a year in the job, a move that sharpened divisions between The Times and its Chicago-based parent company.

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Juan
 

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