Puerner lodged his objections mostly in private and did not criticize Tribune when he left the company in March 2005 after five years at the helm in Los Angeles. A few months later, Editor John S. Carroll also left The Times, saying that the push for staff cuts hastened his retirement.
Johnson's tenure at the paper was considerably shorter. His executive staff found it surprising that he was being jettisoned for not making enough job cuts, since he had been known inside the company as an aggressive cost cutter. The Times' workforce has dropped from 5,300 to about 2,800 since Tribune's takeover in 2000 -- with the editorial operation suffering only a fraction of the cuts that hit other divisions.
Although the editorial cuts brought the conflict with Chicago into the open, Johnson and Smith had fought before -- particularly over a requirement that any new initiatives at the paper be undertaken at little or no additional cost. Johnson told associates that he was frustrated, for instance, when Chicago held up plans for new Internet sites, including one focused on travel and another on entertainment.
The publisher and his allies considered the newspaper a national brand and hoped to build an improved website around The Times' name. But Tribune wanted a more centralized approach that would draw more heavily on all the company's 11 newspapers.
Smith and other Tribune managers believed that the business had to shrink rapidly to meet the reconfigured size of the audience, but Johnson argued that The Times needed to spend more to make more -- fighting for a larger audience and more advertisers.
"Jeff told them, 'If you are going to block my growth strategies and I'm just going to keep cutting, I'm not sure what the job is,' " said one co-worker who asked not to be named because the outgoing publisher spoke to him confidentially.
Johnson said he had no regrets about his tenure or how it ended. "We agreed on a lot of things, but we just had some other areas we didn't agree on that were important to me," Johnson said. "So Scott asked me to leave. And I did."
james.rainey@latimes.com
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Chronology
Aug. 25: Tribune Publishing President Scott C. Smith flies to Los Angeles to meet with Times Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson and Editor Dean Baquet to discuss proposed staff cuts. The Times executives decline to present Smith with a list of reductions.
Sept. 13: Twenty Los Angeles civic leaders send a letter of protest to Tribune, saying that continued staff reductions threaten to seriously erode the quality of journalism at The Times.
Sept. 14: Johnson and Baquet go public in an article in The Times with their resistance to staff cuts, with Johnson saying, "Newspapers can't cut their way into the future."
Sept. 19: Johnson is summoned to Tribune's Chicago headquarters and emerges with the situation apparently defused. In a statement the next day, Johnson stresses common ground with Smith and a need to have The Times and Tribune "working together."
Sept. 21: Tribune names a committee of independent directors to explore options that could include sales of The Times or other properties, or a sale of the entire company.
Oct. 5: Tribune executives including Smith fly to Los Angeles and force Johnson to resign.
Los Angeles Times
