Newsroom

January 2011 INTRODUCTION The goal of the Los Angeles Times Media Group is to publish news and information of the highest quality. This requires our newsrooms, across our entire portfolio of editorial products, to be, above all else, a principled news organization. Making it so is the responsibility of every staff member. In deed and in appearance, journalists at The Times must keep themselves -- and the organization -- above reproach. The ways a news organization can discredit itself are beyond calculation; these guidelines do not purport to cover them all. It is up to staff members to master these general principles and, beyond that, to listen carefully to their individual sense of right and wrong.

NBC Universal will build a new West Coast newsroom and production center in Conan O'Brien's former studio on the Universal lot, the entertainment company said Thursday. The 60,000-square-foot facility will move the Los Angeles bureau of NBC News and local affiliate KNBC from Burbank to Universal City. The company didn't disclose how much the new studios will cost, but such facilities typically require tens of millions of dollars to build. "This is a significant investment in our West Coast news operations," NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker said.

In the Wall Street Journal that Rupert Murdoch took over in 2007, one regular feature was the "tick tock," an inside-the-boardroom reconstruction of a big deal. Three years after the News Corp. chairman defied business logic and bid $5.6 billion for Dow Jones, the Journal's supposedly impregnable proprietor, the journalist who covered the deal for the paper has served up a book as devastatingly definitive as any Journal tick tock. Her account comes 18 months after Michael Wolff, a veteran mogul chronicler, delivered his portrait of Murdoch's quixotic deal, "The Man Who Owns the News."

The nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for its detailed look at the actions of an overwhelmed staff at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina, underscoring the growing impact of nontraditional business models in the struggling newspaper industry. The majority of Pulitzers went to mainstream newspapers -- the Washington Post won four and the New York Times won three. ProPublica's investigative reporting win for a story by Sheri Fink was co-published by the New York Times Magazine.

The Los Angeles Times has named Sean Gallagher to run its online newsroom operations and oversee the Los Angeles Times Media Group's growing portfolio of digital properties. Gallagher will assume the title of managing editor, online, Times Editor Russ Stanton said in a statement. Gallagher had been serving as managing editor of the newspaper's website, latimes.com. "Sean's talent, integrity and command of virtually every facet of online publishing have been crucial to latimes.

Two senior Los Angeles Times editors were given new responsibilities Thursday as part of an effort to create a 24-hour newsroom serving multiple mediums. Randy Harvey, The Times' sports editor since 2006, was named associate editor and will oversee the completion of a plan developed last year to create a news-gathering operation that serves print, the Times website, mobile devices, television, radio, Twitter and Facebook.

The Voice of San Diego office has the trappings of many newsrooms -- messy desks, glowing computers, journalists hunched over phones. But something about the mood seems a little off. Where's the anxiety? Why isn't anyone trolling those websites that obsess about the latest layoffs in the news business? Where are the sidelong glances when someone gets stuck too long in the editor's office? All of that was missing when I visited the Voice of San Diego ( www.voiceofsandiego.

Facing falling revenue in a stalling economy, the Los Angeles Times on Monday laid off 75 editorial employees, part of a 200-person reduction that began last week. "The Times is no less immune to the twists and turns of the current economic situation than virtually all other businesses and institutions," Publisher Eddy W. Hartenstein said in a prepared statement. "As such, we continue to evaluate and realign our organization and operations."