FAULT LINE.(John S. Carroll, Los Angeles Times)

By the morning of July 20th, after months of gossip, everyone in the third-floor newsroom of the Los Angeles Times knew that John S. Carroll, who had been the newspaper's editor for five years, was going to resign. Through the large glass window of the conference room, the staff could see Carroll, along with the senior editors and the publisher, Jeffrey Johnson, who had rarely appeared in the newsroom. They all looked sombre. A few minutes after the meeting adjourned, the staff assembled at the national desk, across from Carroll's office, to hear Johnson confirm that Carroll was indeed leaving.

Tension between Carroll and the Tribune Company, the newspaper's Chicago-based owner, had been growing for a couple of years; Carroll, who is sixty-three and had edited three newspapers, was expected to leave soon, in any case. The departure ceremony was brief; the speakers relied on cliche and euphemism to get through the ordeal. History, the publisher said, would look at Carroll's stewardship as an "incredibly special period"--a reference to the fact that the newspaper had won thirteen Pulitzer Prizes since Carroll's arrival. Carroll, who speaks in a monotone, with a trace of a North Carolina drawl, said, "There have been any number of factors in my consideration, and I'm not going to go into them all." Having worked in newspapers his entire adult life, he'd decided it was time to move on, he said. "Leaving is always hard, and this is hard for me." Carroll then hugged Dean Baquet, the managing editor, whom he had hired not long after he came to the Times.

Carroll didn't say much else. When Newsweek asked him if the Tribune Company appreciated the journalism of the Times, he said, "I want to be candid with you, but I'm going to have to duck on that one." But, to anyone who had followed Carroll's career, and knew about his problems with the newspaper's owners, the reply was in fact candid. As he later told me, he had grown weary of "incessant cost-cutting" by the Tribune Company. He believed that, on the contrary, investing in the newspaper would eventually produce higher profits, which was what the company eagerly sought, and that cutting costs, while it would temporarily improve the bottom line, would erode the paper and might someday destroy it. Carroll and the Tribune Company had been arguing about these issues for five years. The resolution would now be left to his successor.

In March, 2000, the Tribune Company paid $8.3 billion to buy the hundred-and-sixteen-year-old Times Mirror Company from its controlling shareholders, the Chandler family, who received cash and stock and were awarded four of the sixteen seats on the Tribune board. In addition to the L.A. Times, the purchase gave the Tribune Company control of Newsday, on Long Island; the Baltimore Sun; and the Hartford Courant, among other assets, bringing the total number of Tribune daily newspapers to eleven. (Tribune's holdings also include twenty-six television stations; the Chicago Cubs; a quarter of the WB network and a regional sports network; a third of the Food Network; and a television entertainment division.) The biggest prize in this new acquisition was the Times, which became the company's largest and most prestigious newspaper. This was something of a sore point in Chicago--the Chicago Tribune, founded in 1847, was the company's flagship but had little more than half the readership of the Times.

In Los Angeles, the newsroom initially welcomed the new ownership. Five months earlier, the paper had been deeply embarrassed when it was revealed that the Times Mirror C.E.O., Mark H. Willes, a former executive with General Mills, and the newspaper's publisher, Kathryn Downing, had entered into a profit-sharing partnership with the new Staples Center, a sports and entertainment arena, and had then published a special edition of the Times' Sunday magazine devoted to the center's opening. The arrangement, which was kept secret from the paper's editor until shortly before publication, gave Staples Center half the advertising revenues for this supposedly independent journalistic enterprise. The Times and its top management had been humiliated, and the Tribune Company seemed to promise a new era.

There was optimism in Chicago, too. Ann Marie Lipinski, the editor of the Tribune, said, "For the most part, the print journalists were happy that the company was laying down a major bet on the viability of these things we love," meaning newspapers, at a time when "people were looking to divest themselves" of newspapers.

Like most newspaper companies in the United States, the Tribune Company has to confront not only declining circulation and disappointing advertising sales but a belief on Wall Street that newspapers are a poor investment. While the population of the United States increased by sixty-four per cent between 1960 and 2004, daily newspaper circulation dropped by 3.7 million--to just over fifty-five million. There is something almost prehistoric about using expensive newsprint and elaborate delivery systems, to homes and newsstands, in the age of the Internet.