Baquet, Dean

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Dean Baquet

1956—

Journalist

Dean Baquet lost his job as editor of the Los Angeles Times in a drawn-out, headline-making showdown with the newspaper's owners in the late summer and autumn of 2006. Baquet was a veteran journalist who became the first African-American ever to head the L.A. Times, considered one of the top five dailies in the United States. His refusal to reduce the ranks of his editorial staff eventually cost him his job, but Baquet became a hero to newsroom journalists across the United States for his bold move. "I got defiant when I thought it was mindless," he told Katharine Q. Seelye in the New York Times about the reasons behind his firing. "I understand the reality of newspapers, but they shouldn't eat themselves alive."

Toiled in Family Business

Baquet hails from a family renowned in his hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana, for producing both jazz musicians and restaurants. The Baquets trace their lineage in the Southern city back 200 years, making them one of the older Creole clans of mixed African and French or Spanish heritage who settled in Louisiana when it was still a colonial possession of France and, later, Spain. Two of Baquet's great-uncles, Achille Baquet and George Baquet, were jazz clarinetists, while Baquet's father and brother own and operate several successful Creole eateries in town.

The first of these was Eddie's Place, which became a well-known Creole-food joint not long after Baquet's parents, Eddie and Myrtle, opened it in the Lakeview area of New Orleans. The senior Baquet had quit his job as a mail carrier and sold the family home to switch careers. Baquet—born in 1956—was quite young when this happened, and he and his four brothers lived behind the restaurant and spent their non-school hours cooking, cleaning, and serving customers. At one point, all five Baquet boys shared a single bed in the apartment attached to the living quarters. All of them attended a local Roman Catholic boys' high school, St. Augustine.

Baquet studied English literature at Columbia University in New York City, and returned home to New Orleans during his summer breaks. Likely as a way of avoiding long hours of work at the family business, he landed a summer internship with a daily newspaper, the New Orleans States-Item, which eventually led to an offer of a full-time reporter's job. He quit Columbia and New York City, and began at the paper in 1978 as a police-beat reporter. Two years later, the paper merged with another daily to become the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and Baquet soon gained a reputation as a top investigative reporter. In 1984, he was hired by the Chicago Tribune as an investigative reporter, and three years later became the paper's chief investigative reporter and associate metropolitan editor for investigations. In this capacity he shared a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting with two colleagues for their series of articles that exposed the financial wrongdoings of some Chicago City Council members.

Rose to the Top

In 1990, Baquet joined the nation's top newspaper, the New York Times, as a metropolitan reporter. Two years later he became special projects editor for the business desk, and then spent a year in a similar post in the office of the paper's executive editor. In 1995 he was named the new national editor, overseeing a staff of 45 other editors and journalists. He was recruited by the Los Angeles Times in 2000 to become the paper's managing editor, and rose to the top job at the paper as its editor and executive vice president in July of 2005 after the resignation of his boss, Joseph S. Carroll. The Los Angeles Times was one of the top dailies in the country, and Baquet's elevation to the top editorial job made it the largest U.S. newspaper with an African-American editor—as well as making him the only African-American journalist to lead a major newspaper. The Los Angeles Times had recently suffered a few well-publicized scandals, and was plagued with an increasingly contentious relationship with its corporate parent, the Tribune Company, which also owned the Chicago Tribune as well as Long Island's Newsday and the Baltimore Sun, among other media properties. As managing editor, Baquet had worked with Carroll to make the drastic staff reductions ordered by the Tribune Company board and top executives, cutting some 200 jobs in all. Like most print dailies, the Times had been suffering from declining readership numbers over the past decade, but unlike some competitors was actually operating with a healthy profit margin. Baquet's boss, Carroll, reportedly resigned when the Tribune Company pushed for more cuts, and Baquet succeeded him in the summer of 2005.

Faced with Biggest Story of 2005

The first challenge that Baquet faced as the Times's new steward came just weeks into the new job when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast. The story made national headlines for days, but Baquet had a more personal stake in the story, with the entirety of his family having to flee to Atlanta, and his brother Wayne's restaurant in the Treme neighborhood, Lil' Dizzy's, seemingly ruined by the flood. Covering the environmental disaster and its catastrophic aftermath became "the most emotionally difficult story I've ever been involved with," he told a former colleague of his from the New York Times, Shaila Dewan.

Another crisis loomed barely a year after Baquet took over in Los Angeles, when management in Chicago told Baquet and the other top executive of the Los Angeles Times, publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson, to find a way to trim the paper's budget further. They refused, and then explained their decision in a Times story that ran on September 14, 2006; this move turned the conflict into a rare public glimpse of the routine "long-simmering conflict between many newsrooms and boardrooms around the country as newspapers face an industrywide economic slump and continued demands by Wall Street for improved financial results," noted Seelye, the New York Times journalist.

At a Glance …

Born Dean Paul Baquet on September 21, 1956, in New Orleans, LA; son of Eddie Sr. (a restaurateur) and Myrtle (Romano) Baquet; married Dylan F. Landis (a writer), September 6, 1986; children: one son, Ari Theogene Landis. Education: Attended Columbia University, NY, c. 1974-78.

Career: The States-Item, New Orleans, LA, summer intern, mid-1970s; Times-Picayune, New Orleans, began as police-beat reporter, became investigative reporter, 1978-84; Chicago Tribune, investigative reporter, 1984-87, associate metropolitan editor for investigations and chief investigative reporter, 1987-90; New York Times, metropolitan reporter, 1990-92, special projects editor for the business desk, 1992-1994, special project editor for the office of executive editor, 1994-1995, deputy metropolitan editor, 1995, national editor, 1995-2000, assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief, 2007-; Los Angeles Times, managing editor, 2000-05, editor and executive vice president, 2005-06.

Memberships: Fellow, Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Awards: Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting (with William Gaines and Ann Marie Lipinski), 1988.

Addresses: Office—New York Times, Washington Bureau, 1627 I St., 7th Fl., Washington, DC 20006.

Baquet and Johnson became overnight heroes to an entire generation of working American journalists, and their stance against an unfriendly, out-of-town corporate owner was perceived as a long-overdue David vs. Goliath-type of battle. In Los Angeles, reporters and editors of the legendary Times felt that executives in Chicago had done little to dispel fears that there was a secret plan to diminish the Los Angeles Times's esteemed reputation. The situation was further complicated by the Tribune Company's decision to place the paper up for sale, and many hoped that the new owners would be one of a few Southern California-based investors rumored to be interested in the Times.

Ordered to Resign

A stand-off ensued between the Chicago-based management and Baquet's newsroom in Los Angeles, and this took an ominous turn when Johnson was ousted on October 5 and replaced by David Hiller. In late October, Baquet spoke at the annual convention of the Associated Press Managing Editors organization, and told his fellow journalists, "It is the job of an editor of a newspaper to put up a little bit more of a fight than we have put up in the past," he said that day, according to Editor & Publisher. "Your newsroom wants you to lead them." On October 31, Baquet was ordered to hand in his resignation in ten days' time. Word leaked out, however, and the speculation over his future at the paper emerged as an Internet news item alleging he was about to leave the paper; the rumor appeared on Election Day, and Baquet handed in his resignation a few days earlier than planned, on November 7, 2006.

Baquet's leave-taking prompted an outpouring of support for him among newsroom and other staffers at the Times, who had political campaign-style buttons and posters made of his image to show their solidarity with his stance against further budget cuts. The paper was still on the auction block, and hopeful employees and Angelenos alike theorized that a more friendly owner would most likely rehire him. Late in January, 2007, Baquet instead announced his return to New York City and the New York Times as its new Washington bureau chief and assistant managing editor, telling the paper's Seelye that the past few months were "a long time for me to be outside a newsroom, and it's starting to make me nuts."