Free The Deal from Hell by James O'Shea

the best and most prosperous papers on the globe by following the money. The paper’s readers didn’t live on streets like Bleakwood, or in barrios like Boyle Heights. They lived in Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Culver City, the South Bay, or Malibu, alongside moguls and movie stars.
    Given how large and diverse Los Angeles was, the Times needed people like Wolinsky, locals who understood the challenging nature of the vast metropolis the paper covered. Reporting on a large metropolitan area is no easy task for any newspaper. Under Otis, the Times circulation area grew to encompass some eighty-eight separate municipalities, ranging from Pasadena, the tony, tree-lined town that seems as midwestern as sweet corn, to Little Saigon, a vertical strip mall that rests on a flat sandy plain home to some 135,000 Vietnamese. Parts of Santa Ana in Orange County would be easy to mistake for a town in Mexico, while the neighborhoods around South Central and East Florence in Watts resemble the most hard-boiled ghettos in the Bronx. The northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley stretch to an urban desert, and the posh enclaves along the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica symbolize raw wealth and power. The Los Angeles Times circulates in an area about as large as the state of Ohio, but one that ultimately lacks a center of gravity. Despite years of development, downtown Los Angeles remains a drab urban landscape; its most enduring features are Frank Gehry’s sweeping stainless-steel Walt Disney Concert Hall and a skid row that resembles a Palestinian refugee camp. (In one ten-square-block area, some 114 dialects are spoken.)
    Though he grew up in a barrio, Wolinsky understood Los Angeles as well as did Otis, who had created several local editions of the Times to serve its diverse constituencies. One edition of the Los Angeles Times served the San Fernando Valley; one, Orange County. There was
a paper for the San Gabriel Valley, and a paper for San Diego. “The way it was supposed to work,” recalls Pete King, a longtime Times writer and editor who would one day recruit Wolinsky to run the a.m. city desk, “is that we would produce six different papers.... These papers had their own editors and in some cases, publishers. The talent level was so high that we could take the best of the stories for these papers and put them into one paper. We made a mega paper out of the six papers for people who wanted it.... The LA Times was important to a certain Los Angeles—the suburban, middle-class, upper-class Angelino. It was never a paper of East LA or the barrios.” Over the years, the paper would be accused of having a bad case of penis envy of the New York Times , but King said the brand of journalism that Otis had created really wasn’t about “knocking the New York Times off its perch.”
    â€œThere was an LA Times way of doing journalism,” King explained. “We didn’t get plaudits for it. In fact, we were sometimes ridiculed by East Coast papers. But we were wildly successful. We had some excesses and we had some bad days. But on our good days, you wouldn’t see anything like it in any other newspaper. . . . It was doing it our way. It fit the city. . . . It’s not like we didn’t do daily journalism. Like I’m city editor and Rodney King happened,” said King in a reference to a police assault of the African American man that led to highly publicized riots in the 1990s. “It was not like we didn’t cover the news. But we also did the narrative story. That was our ‘A’ game. I had a goofy theory. A story would jump [from one page to another] so many times, but the coverage was like LA, a city of sprawl. People didn’t leave for work until 9 a.m. because of the traffic. So they had time to read.”
    It’s easy to see why King, Wolinsky, and other journalists would go to extraordinary lengths over the years to protect Otis’