@杰罗姆i
洛杉矶时报出版人兼CEO Austin Beutner 昨天被母公司论坛报业开了。同门兄弟芝加哥论坛报报道说，他被开的原因是高层对其经营业绩与巨资大手笔引进外援不满。这位曾任洛杉矶副市长的前投资银行家2014年8月入职。O网页链接论坛报业2014年8月被正式分拆，被称为纸媒孤儿 O网页链接
其实，他在Facebook上的长篇说明 My Parting Thoughts 非常有趣。https://www.facebook.com/notes/austin-beutner/my-parting-thoughts/10207576844968463?fref=nf
My Parting Thoughts
September 9, 2015 at 1:24am
“The newspaper industry will have to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 20,” Beutner wrote. “The fat and redundancies bred over a generation by print monopolies with thick sections of classified ads and full-page print ads are gone. Cost-cutting alone is not a path to survival in the face of continued declines in print revenue and fierce competition in the digital world. New sources of revenue will have to be developed and no single one will be the answer."
I am writing to let you know that I am leaving the Los Angeles Times, effective immediately. I am not departing by choice, nor is this some “mutual agreement” on my part and Tribune Publishing. Tribune Publishing has decided to fire me. I am sorry you will read this on social media, but I no longer have access to my Times email.
I agreed to become the Publisher and CEO of the Times because I believe in Los Angeles and recognize the unique role the Times plays in our community. It is the civic conscience which holds accountable those with power in Los Angeles, helps celebrate what is good in our community, and provides news and information to help us better understand and engage with the world around us. As the thousands who attended The Taste, our annual celebration of food, this past weekend experienced, the Los Angeles and California story really does begin here at the Times.
It has been about a year since I joined the Times. We have much to be proud of as we worked together to breathe new life into an organization which had labored under the burden of massive change in the newspaper industry, compounded by a contentious merger followed by a lengthy bankruptcy.
The Times is only as good as its journalism. I am proud to say that each and every day the Los Angeles Times is reaching new, award-winning heights.
This past year Times journalists won two Pulitzer prizes and were finalists for two more, our best showing in years. We have relaunched the California and Business sections to much acclaim. Our Opinion effort has worked to increase civic engagement in our community with its new effort to grade local government. The effort has drawn Angelenos throughout the city into the conversation about what we ought to expect from our local government.
Times journalism continues to make a difference in our community and around the world. The riveting series “Product of Mexico” exposed the horrific conditions under which farmworkers in Mexico were living and working. The stories led to changes in the Mexican government’s regulation and oversight of farms and in the buying practices of American supermarket and restaurant chains. The result was improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. The Times gave readers an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at LACMA’s plan to expand and the pivotal role one person’s generosity is playing to help make LACMA’s dreams a reality. Michael Douglas shared with Times readers his journey in rediscovering his Jewish faith and heritage, a story which went viral and was shared around the world.
Importantly, the Times is also creating a digital future, engaging audiences in innovative and new ways. The “Fight of the Century” guide to the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, published in English, Spanish, and Tagalog on Flipboard, had more than 1 million viewers around the world. Our “California Conversation” with California Governor Brown on “Water in the West” was held before a live audience, watched on TV in almost 1 million households, and read by more than 1.5 million people in print and online. “Trail Guide,” our live blog on the presidential campaign, has drawn 1 million readers since making its debut in July.
We have launched 20 email newsletters to engage directly with audiences in particular areas of interest, ranging from “Essential California,” which provides the daily pulse of California, to “Counter Intelligence,” Jonathan Gold’s weekly sample of food and culture in Los Angeles, to “Water and Power,” the definitive source for information about the drought. Several of the newsletters have more than 100,000 subscribers and a few have open rates as high as 50%--far better than the industry average. Sponsors are finding these newsletters the ideal way to reach an engaged, target audience.
These verticals, or communities of interest, serve as the foundation of a plan to both identify a digital audience and generate revenue from these readers’ deep engagement with our journalism. In the digital world, more and more people are gathering their news and information from multiple sources. If the Times is to succeed, it must become very good at developing these verticals. We are off to an auspicious start. The recently launched “Education Matters,” will soon be followed by a California politics vertical and a groundbreaking effort to discuss race, diversity, and multiculturalism in our country, #EmergingUS.
The Times has made strides in reengaging with the local community. HS Insider, a program to allow high school students to chronicle their daily journeys, has over 100 schools participating with a student population of over 100,000. College Connection offers effectively free subscriptions to college students. The Publisher’s Book Club has gathered around the city some of the Times’ most loyal readers to hear from authors ranging from the Times’ own Jill Leovy on her thought-provoking work “Ghettoside” to Roy Choi sharing stories of his journey in “L.A. Son.”
I am particularly proud the leadership at the Times has begun to better reflect the community we serve. Among the changes, the Times now has its first female Managing Editor, its first Latino Sports Editor, and “Black Twitter” is an assigned beat. Plans are underway to publish more content in Spanish and a partnership is being developed to serve the needs of a Chinese-speaking audience in the US and in China.
As a business, we have worked to regain momentum after a decade of turbulence. A new leadership team is in place, including people to help support our advertisers in new and creative ways. Based on the feedback from an event the sales team hosted recently where sportscaster Al Michaels shared his thoughts about the world of sports with our top advertisers, they are making real progress.
We have managed to find resources to invest in new ideas, new products, and new people while keeping spending within our budget. More broadly, we have conceived and executed on the strategic combination between the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune. This will allow more efficient use of resources at both papers, freeing up money to invest in the digital future and enhancing the chances of both papers to survive. The combination is ahead of plan and on budget. It also positions the newly formed California News Group, of which the Times and Union-Tribune are part, as the news leader in the Southern California marketplace—becoming the place where 25 million people from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border look first for news and information about the world around them.
The newspaper industry will have to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 20. The fat and redundancies bred over a generation by print monopolies with thick sections of classified ads and full-page print ads are gone. Cost-cutting alone is not a path to survival in the face of continued declines in print revenue and fierce competition in the digital world. New sources of revenue will have to be developed and no single one will be the answer. Newspapers must recognize their strength lies in high-quality content developed by world-class journalists with the tools they need to be successful. Successful digital media organizations will have fewer managers and corporate executives, choosing instead to invest in journalists and technologists.
When I agreed to take this job, many people told me it was an impossible task. Why take on the challenge? For me, the choice was easy. I could not imagine Los Angeles without a vibrant LA Times. I still can’t.
It has been a privilege to serve in this role and work with all of you. Thank you for your hard work and support and your continuing belief in the Los Angeles Times and what it means to our community.
California is where America comes to see its future and the place where that story begins is the Los Angeles Times.
I will continue to root for you to succeed.
Austin Beutner is out as L.A. Times publisher
（洛杉矶时报自己的报道，也很有趣）
Austin Beutner was named publisher of The Times in August 2014.
By MARC DUVOISIN AND CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
Tribune Publishing Co., parent of the Los Angeles Times, has fired Austin Beutner, the civic leader and former Wall Street investment banker who became publisher and chief executive of the newspaper last year.
Tribune CEO Jack Griffin met with Beutner in Los Angeles on Tuesday morning to give him the news.
A Tribune spokesman declined to comment on the firing. Timothy E. Ryan, publisher since 2007 of the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune newspaper, will replace Beutner.
In an interview, Beutner said he was given only a vague explanation for his firing.
“They wanted to go in a different direction,” Beutner said. “We articulated a strategy when I got here. If Tribune was looking for a caretaker, they picked the wrong person.”
Baltimore Sun's Tim Ryan to replace Beutner as L.A. Times publisher
In brief farewell remarks to a group of Times editors, Beutner said, “It's been a privilege to be part of this. I'm so proud of the work you've done. ... I'll be rooting for you.”
Within the past few weeks, Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad approached Tribune with an offer to purchase the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune and operate the two papers as a separate company. The proposal was rejected.
Beutner had engineered Tribune’spurchase of the San Diego paperin May, part of a strategy to consolidate Southern California newspapers under common ownership as a way to reduce production and distribution costs and generate revenue for digital initiatives. The two papers comprised the newly formed California News Group under Beutner.
In a message he said heposted on Facebookbecause his L.A. Times email access had been cut off, Beutner wrote, “I am not departing by choice, nor is this some ‘mutual agreement’ on my part and Tribune Publishing.”
“The newspaper industry will have to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 20,” Beutner wrote. “The fat and redundancies bred over a generation by print monopolies with thick sections of classified ads and full-page print ads are gone. Cost-cutting alone is not a path to survival in the face of continued declines in print revenue and fierce competition in the digital world. New sources of revenue will have to be developed and no single one will be the answer."
Beutner, 55, wasnamed publisher of The Timesin August 2014. In seeking to offset the decline of print advertising revenue, he launched multiple initiatives: email newsletters on topics such as the California drought, public events centered on Times journalism and coverage initiatives known as “verticals,” narrowly focused on such subjects aspublic educationand California politics.
Beutner said these ventures were intended to develop an audience of regular, deeply engaged visitors tolatimes.com, the paper’s website, in the belief that advertisers would pay more to reach passionate “communities of interest.”
Beutner surrounded himself with outside talent, often from the world of Los Angeles and national politics. His hires included Benjamin Chang, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer who had worked at the National Security Council; Johanna Maska, who served in the White House Press Office under President Obama; and Nicco Mele, an Internet strategist and entrepreneur who served as the digital advisor to former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign.
Chang was brought in to organize public events for The Times, Maska is vice president for communications and Mele is deputy publisher, responsible for various digital initiatives.
The Chicago Tribune, one of the newspapers within Tribune Publishing, reported Tuesday morning that leaders of the company were unhappy with the financial performance of The Times and with Beutner’s high-profile hires.
During Beutner’s 13 months as publisher, The Times won two Pulitzer Prizes — for cultural criticism and for feature writing — along with other national journalism awards for coverage of the California drought, the plight of Mexican farm workers and other stories. The California Newspaper Publishers Assn. awarded The Times its 2015 general excellence award.
Beutner, a New York native who grew up in Michigan, graduated from Dartmouth College in 1982 with a degree in economics and went to work as a financial analyst for Smith Barney. He later joined the Blackstone Group in New York, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, and at 29 became its youngest partner.
In the mid-1990s, he co-founded the New York investment banking firm Evercore Partners. He moved to Los Angeles in 2000 in conjunction with the company’s expansion.
When Evercore went public in 2006, Beutner reportedly made more than $100 million — a figure he did not dispute but declined to confirm.
In 2007, Beutner broke his neck after misjudging a turn while bicycling in the Santa Monica Mountains and was airlifted to a hospital. It took him a year to make a full recovery. He left Evercore and poured his energies into civic and philanthropic pursuits.
In 2010, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa appointed Beutner deputy mayor of economic development, or “jobs czar,” overseeing 13 city departments and the Port of Los Angeles. He helped to streamline the business-permitting process and led the effort to pass a tax break to lure companies to Los Angeles.
Beutner accepted a $1-a-year salary and held the job for 15 months. In April 2011, he filed papers to explore a run for mayor. Espousing a business-friendly platform, he was critical of City Hall, at one point calling it a “barnyard.”
He dropped out of the race after a year, saying he wanted to spend more time with his wife, Virginia, and their four children.
Beutner served as co-chairman of the Los Angeles 2020 Commission, a panel of business, labor and civic leaders created to propose solutions to the city’s budget problems and ways to spur job growth.
In 2013, Beutner explored a possible purchase of The Times.
He was appointed publisher a week after Tribune Co. spun off the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and eight other daily papers into a stand-alone company, Tribune Publishing Co.
Beutner was the 14th publisher in the newspaper's history.
Copyright © 2015,Los Angeles Times
UPDATE
3:40 p.m.:This article has been updated with quotes from Austin Beutner's Facebook post.
11:09 a.m.:This article has been updated with quotes from Austin Beutner.
This article was originally posted at 8:15 a.m.