Media Industry

Once an elite, respected newspaper, the Los Angeles Times is now simply the latest old media company brought to its knees and humiliated by a far younger and less honored online service, The Smoking Gun.

Unless you’ve spent the past 48 hours in a cave at Tora Bora, you know by now that the Times publicly apologized for using documents that were apparently fabricated in a story implicating associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs in a 1994 assault on rapper Tupac Shakur.

“The bottom line is that the documents we relied on should not have been used,” Editor Russ Stanton said in a story posted Wednesday night on the newspaper’s Web site. “We apologize both to our readers and to those referenced in the documents … and in the story.”

The Smoking Gun said the documents seemed phony because they appeared to be written on a typewriter instead of a computer and included blacked-out sections not typically found in such documents, among other problems.

Just like the fall from grace by CBS News; and CNN’s “Tailwind” scandal, and the many embarrassments at The New York Times in recent years, this latest case is a direct result of the deterioration of editorial standards in the nation’s old media empires.

The irony here, of course, is that one of the main raps against new media by old media was (and occasionally still is) that you can’t trust everything you read online.

That’s true, of course, but how have the new media news organizations fared when it comes to sorting out the truth from the fiction that comes in over the transom?

The answer is that right from the early days of the Web, new media companies have been far less prone to being “duped” (the word the L.A. Times’ used about itself) than have the old news brands.

There was, for example, the TWA Flight 800 flap.

And there were major embarrassments for the Wall Street Journal and the Dallas Morning News during the Lewinsky scandal — incidents that resembled this bizarre L.A. Times episode in one critical but rarely-mentioned aspect common to all three cases.

What’s interesting is that these old media organizations published their discredited articles not in their newspapers but on the web.

The Tupac story, written by Chuck Philips, a Pulitzer-Prize winner, was the first investigative report published as a Web exclusive, said Meredith Artley, editor of LATimes.com.

“This piece was perfect for the Web,” Artley said. “The Web audience skews younger. We had all these great multimedia elements, and we said we really don’t need to wait to fit this in the paper.”

The story and related features on latimes.com attracted nearly 1 million page View — more than any other story on latimes.com this year, according to the newspaper.

But what exactly made it “perfect for the Web?” One can’t help but wonder what role Tribune Company owner Sam Zell’s exhortations, reported here yesterday, to his minions — “You ‘effing’ people need to start listening to your audience and give them more of what they want!” — may have played in this case.

Now, instead of counting his profits, Zell had better be preparing to turn them over to the wrongly accused Sean “Diddy” Combs. Somehow, I doubt this real estate magnate will be staying in the newspaper business much longer.

In the wake of the L.A. Times scandal, I asked Bill Bastone, Editor of The Smoking Gun, how he and his colleagues came up with their scoop.

Here is his reply:

“A couple of the FBI documents were posted, as part of a big online package, by the LATimes last week when their story went live.

“We downloaded the supposed FBI 302s and they just did not look like any other 302s that we’ve seen—type, font, kerning, character renderings, etc. were way off. And it sure looked like they had been created on a typewriter (the documents were purportedly created during 2002).”

(Note here to readers: An FBI 302 form is a report of an interview by one or more FBI agents with a witness. They often are submitted as evidence in criminal cases.)

Bastone continues: “We (our three-person staff) then did a further examination of the documents, compared them with pro se court filings prepared by James Sabatino, compared them with other 302s that Sabatino had filed as exhibits in a civil lawsuit he filed a few months ago against Sean Combs, etc.

“And then we started focusing in on the contents of the FBI reports, much of which was demonstrably false and seemed geared to make Sabatino appear as if he was a major rap music figure when, in fact, he was nothing more than a wannabe with an incredibly long rap sheet (and who was sitting in a federal penitentiary).

You can read a detailed blow-by-blow of this excellent piece of investigative reporting at The Smoking Gun site.

Watching the newspaper business self-destruct these past few years has been painful, like witnessing a horrible, slow-motion train crash. As one who’s always liked newspapers — and subscribed to lots of them — I’m gonna miss them when they’re gone.

Even now, I can’t help but notice how few people in my neighborhood bother to subscribe to any newspaper any longer. I feel sorry for the delivery guys, because the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and even the New York Times have all become so light and skinny that they tend to blow away on the wind rather than reach my front door.

Maybe the strangest part of this sad saga has been the spectacle of otherwise successful businessmen who have been buying up these dying publications, like deck chairs on the Titanic: Sam Zell (The Tribune Company), Brian P. Tierney (the two dailies in Philly), Avista Capital (the Minneapolis Star), and of course, Rupert Murdoch (Dow-Jones).

What were they thinking?

Zell, probably the most outspoken of the group, is a real estate developer from Chicago. He’s been blunt about his disappointment in his investments, which include The Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsday, among others.

“The news business is something worse than horrible,” he’s been quoted as saying. “If that’s the future, we don’t have much of a future.”

Industry insiders and news reports say Zell is trying to unload Newsday, probably the most profitable part of The Tribune group, to recoup some of his losses.

Some Newsday staffers have been quoted hoping hope Murdoch will be their next boss.

“If I had my choice, I would take Rupert Murdoch ,” said one “That may sound strange, but if you pair him up and compare him to the others, he comes out well above. Cablevision’s Charles Dolan isn’t anything — nothing! He’s brainless, clueless, stupid, arrogant. Murdoch is a newspaperman. Most people here would prefer Murdoch. A couple years ago it would have been a horrible thought, but now we’re left with no other choice.”

At an all-hands meeting with his employees at the Orlando Sentinel, captured on YouTube, Zell let off some anger: “You ‘effing’ people need to start listening to your audience and give them more of what they want!”

Then, at an all-hands at the Los Angeles Times, he was asked by an ad sales guy whether they could now start selling ads to adult mens clubs and gun stores. Zell responded, “Of course, why not? What are they going to outlaw next? P*s*y?”