Interviewee: Shelby Coffey III

MJ: Mr. Shelby Coffey, thank you for joining us today.

SC: Thank you very much.

MJ: Would you tell us your official title here at the Los Angeles Times.

SC: I was appointed executive editor of the paper?

MJ: Can you give us your background in this line of work and how you got involved?

SC: Yes. Before that, I had been with Times Mirror's paper in Dallas, which was the Dallas Times Herald for less than a year actually, but it was then sold. And before that I had been with the U.S. News and World Report as its editor for about a year, and before that I was with The Washington Post for seventeen years in Washington, D.C. working in a variety of both reporting and editing positions.

Increased Specialization and Professionalism

MJ: You've worked for some of the top newspapers and magazines in the Unites States. How has the journalism business or the work ethics changed since you first began? I'm thinking of the Watergate hearings in particular.

SC: A variety of interesting changes have taken place, one of which is an increased knowledge and specialization and increased professionalism on the part of certainly the quality of the younger people we have here at the Los Angeles Time performing a higher level of journalism than was quite the norm when I started over 25 years ago. And that's been a real plus.

I think there is… certainly people have commented on the fact that after Watergate there became somewhat more of an adversarial role in the press corps. I think that it may be reflected in a bit differently, certainly in the Washington press corps, but there has always been a role for the watchdog press society that the American press has often served admirably in, sometimes not so admirably. And we certainly seek to learn from our imperfections.

Watergate Phases

MJ: What was it like working at The Washington Post during the Watergate era? Was there an excitement in the building like you were really playing a large role here?

SC: Yes. It was quite an interesting time. There were several phases if you went back and looked at the reporting. There was some of the initial reporting that was done and seemed to point out some difficulties among the people who were running the Nixon campaign.

Over time, and with at least a few spells when there were relatively few stories, as I recall them, only over time did the full story begin to emerge. So there was initial interest in the story, and then after President Nixon's reelection there was a lot of hostility, and I can still remember going to dinners around the Washington in which that hostility would come out against The Washington Post, in particular, and then press corps in general, that they were trying to do something that was just based on cussedness, rather than, orneriness, rather than reporting.

As time went on, it became clearer that there was quite a bit more than many first imagined to that story, and then as the hearing continued there was an amazing sequence of days and weeks in which new revelations seemed to follow new revelations, and it was quite amazing and also worrisome just as a citizen as to what had happened here.

Covering Allegations of Clinton Extramarital Activity

MJ: What is your rule of thumb about when you will run a story? For instance, a while back there were stories about President Clinton's allegations of extramarital activity that newspapers ran using the excuse that somebody else had run it. What is your rule of thumb on that?

SC: Well, we had done our won reporting on that, and our first rule of thumb was that we were not going to be stampeded by any other competition on it.

The second important element was that we had to see how it was relevant to the public performance, how private life affected public performance there. And questions did emerge about that both in Mr. Clinton's time as governor and then in a subsequent phone call that was made checking on a trooper as to what was being said about that particular period in his life.

And, as a result, we tried also very hard to put this in context and give a sense both of the milieu of Arkansas politics, the nature of the people involved, as well as the issues that this highlighted.

Minority Hiring

MJ: You are known for aggressively hiring minorities. Can you tell us about that and your feelings and thoughts on that?

SC: Yes, when I became editor, the paper was, roughly 10 percent of the editorial staff was minority, and it seemed to me that certainly if you look at the communities that we serve that that argued for our need to not only hire more minorities who would continue to add to the richness of the paper but also to look at ways in which strong minorities could move up as assistant and deputy department heads and department heads.

And in a little over six years we've moved to just a shade under 20 percent minority, and we also have a number of department heads and deputies who, in many cases, are the first non-whites to be in those jobs, and they are doing excellent jobs and, as intended, have added a wide variety of excellences to the paper.

MJ: If you had a hypothetical situation of two people, who were equally qualified, and one was a minority and one wasn't, how would you make that decision?

SC: Well, I think I've learned enough to know that you shouldn't deal with hypothetical. I think that you're always looking at people and measuring who's the best person for the job.

Explaining Part of World Gratifying

MJ: Tell us about your early days, and did you always want to be in this business?

SC: U have always enjoyed writing since early days in school, and as a result when I had a chance when I was at the University of Virginia to do some writing for The Washington Post, I took that and found it interesting. They brought me up at a time of expansion and so I started out actually as a sports writer, did two stints in the sports department, did magazine writing as well, and that was a yeasty and interesting time because the sports department was a place where there were less constricted rules at that point. And you could write some vigor and some freshness that some of my friends in other departments were having trouble getting past the editors. Nowadays I probably would have more sympathy with the editors. Nevertheless, I've always found that sense of trying to explain some part of the world to yourself as well as to others very interesting indeed, very gratifying.

What we do, which is to go out and take, in our case about 250 stories a day, pieces of reality, try to put them into words and explanation them in a way that will give people a sense of the aspect of the world that they live in, seems to me a worthwhile cause, so I've been very happy.

Aiming for Balanced View

MJ: Are you looking for your reporters to be objective, or is that even possible?

SC: Well, I think one of the things that is a difficulty is that when you get into, say, a philosophical determination of pure objectivity, people can always raise a question and say, "Well, just because you began a story at this point and not that point it seems that that's not pure objectivity." Words themselves are approximations. They are not the things itself.

So I think that what we have to do is understand that and also understand that we, as reporters, begin stories with some conceptions that are brought by our own cultural backgrounds. So we have to be ready to be engaged in a dialogue with the people and the subjects that we're covering, with the communities that we're writing for.

And that, to my mind, is one of the most interesting parts of journalism that is to learn the other things that may go into the background of the story or where the story may go next. It seems to me that our aim should be for fairness and for a sense not to move toward subjectivity but to give a balanced view of an issue being addressed. In that way, we can make our contribution without getting caught up in an endless argument of whether something was in some Immanuel Kantian sense of pure objectivity.

Broad Range on Opinion Page

MJ: You have the Column Right and Column Left. Could you explain that and how that works?

SC: These are on our opinion pages, which runs opposite the editorial pages. We have a number of different columnists who write for us. We subscribe to a number and then we also commission a number of pieces so that people, who are dealing with some of the large issues of the day, as well as regular opinion columnists, may sometimes appear on the opinion pages.

One of the things that we thought was important, especially on the opinion pages where people are paid not to be objective but to take a particular stand, we wanted to be sure that we were getting a fair number of folds who represented the largest prevalent shades of opinion - people of the left, people of the right, more liberal, more conservative.

Now there is, of course, an argument that can be made that those terms are not exactly what they used to be, and sometimes you'll see a very well-credentialed conservative taking what might seem to be a contrary stand on an issue, and likewise a person on the left moving otherwise. But we felt that this would give us, would enforce a chance to see the broad range of opinion and also would be helpful in making sure that we were getting those kinds of contributions.

Effect of Computers

MJ: What will computers do to newspapers; will we even have newspapers in the future?

SC: I have obviously a great interest, as do lots of other people in the media business broadly, in where computers evolve to and where newspapers themselves are evolving. At this point there are considerable interesting elements of computers.

We started at the L.A. Times our own online version called Times Link which is on Prodigy in which you can call up many stories from that day, you can call up stories from the past so that you can go considerably deeper on subjects. There is other material, which we have that applies to your local community, which allows us to run things like school lunch menus for your community that day which we wouldn't have the newsprint space to run in the regular paper.

So there is no doubt that there is a very rich world there in cyberspace, and we've gotten over 16,000 subscribers in just a very few months. We're pleased with that progress.

On the other hand, I think it will be a considerable amount of time, a number of years, until computers as they evolve become quite the major medium of choice compared to newspapers, in my view. And I think the page is strong and is hardier than is sometimes through to be in this time of media mergers and technological changes that we're all interested in and all keeping track of.

But a couple of things convinced me along those lines. One is that newspapers themselves are very cheap in terms of the amount of information that you get. They're also divisible, they're portable, they allow random access: as the computer people say, you can go straight to the sports page if you want to, you can start with the entertainment section or the front page. They are very adjustable and they have a great deal of information.

MJ: Well, Mr. Coffey, thank you for joining us.

SC: Thanks you.