The editor of The Los Angeles Times appears to be in a showdown with the paperÂ’s owner, the Tribune Company, over job cuts in the newsroom. In a highly unusual move, Dean P. Baquet, who was named editor last year, was quoted yesterday in his own newspaper as saying he was defying the paperÂ’s corporate parent in Chicago and would not make the cuts it requested.
The paper’s publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson, said he agreed with Mr. Baquet. “Newspapers can’t cut their way into the future,” he told the paper.
The number of jobs at stake is unclear but the paper, the fourth largest in the country, has eliminated more than 200 positions over the last five years from an editorial staff that now numbers about 940. “I am not averse to making cuts,” Mr. Baquet told the paper. “But you can go too far, and I don’t plan to do that.”
The paper reported that Scott C. Smith, president of the Tribune Publishing division, had asked the paperÂ’s executives to come up with a plan for trimming their budgets, but when Mr. Smith visited Los Angeles late last month, they had produced no such plan.
Mr. Baquet “made his opposition to further cuts clear and said there was no need for further discussion,” the paper reported.
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