Others within The Times said that the fight with the parent company shouldn't be viewed so simplistically. Baquet, they noted, is a well-known and respected figure within the journalism community. He won a Pulitzer Prize as a young investigative reporter (ironically, at the Chicago Tribune) and went on to become national editor of the New York Times.
His predecessor, John Carroll, left The Times in part because he believed that Tribune was cutting too many positions from its largest and most prestigious paper.
"Don't you think the Tribune board should be able to see a pattern here?" said one Times business manager. "Shouldn't the board take the responsibility to go one step deeper and find out what's really going on at the Los Angeles Times?"
That position has gained wide sympathy within the editorial and business offices of The Times and other Tribune properties. One executive repeated a complaint heard at several Tribune papers: "The only thing I hear about is cost cutting and nothing about expanding the business. The business doesn't have a future if all we are going to do is keep cutting it."
Veteran Los Angeles Times legal affairs reporter Henry Weinstein said he and other journalists at the paper were proud of their editor and publisher for taking a stand.
"People here feel they work for a terrific newspaper but that it's endangered," Weinstein said. "Why would Tribune want to diminish an asset that contributes so much to the company?"
Another Tribune Co. journalist posted a letter Monday on a journalism website criticizing the company for its "cost center" mentality. "You can't make money at newspapering ... by positioning the brand as a money-losing operation whose future depends on perpetual budget cutting," Rinker Buck, staff writer at the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, wrote on Poynter Online.
Relations between The Times and Tribune Co. have been tense since the Chicago company bought Times Mirror in 2000.
An editor of another Tribune paper said that Times managers "have found it really hard to take orders and instruction from the operator of a smaller and less accomplished news organization."
A former top news executive for Tribune acknowledged the quality of the Los Angeles paper. But he added that "there has always been a feeling in Chicago that the place had, in every single area, at least three people working at a job that could have been done by one or two."
