Life at the Top

Ruminating with Norman Pearlstine on the crisis in local news and his career atop four major legacy news organizations

I first met Norman Pearlstine, now 80, when I was covering media for Newsweek and Norm was amid a legendary run in charge of The Wall Street Journal. Ben Bradlee was nearing the end of his storied career editing The Washington Post and Abe Rosenthal was a tyrant at The New York Times. That left Norm as the most dynamic newspaper editor in American journalism, with an extraordinary collection of proteges who went on to be star writers and editors. After the Journal, where he had once been a top domestic and foreign correspondent, he ran all TIME Inc. magazines, became chief content officer at  Bloomberg LP and the top editor of the Los Angeles Times, with a few stops in between. With Big Media in transition and local news in crisis, I thought it would be a good time to ruminate with Norm.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Hi, Norm. What are the best models out there that you have seen to save local journalism?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

There is a lot going on. The Institute for Nonprofit News has more than 400 independent news organizations as members, but it is a mixed bag, with many new local publications struggling. The Texas Tribune and The Baltimore Banner, both of which are run by former colleagues of mine at The Los Angeles Times, are as good as anything in terms of local. And I read Ken Doctor’s Lookout, which has a lot of competition in Santa Cruz.

JON:

What separates the successful ones from the ones that are not really going to work?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

Well,  it helps to have a benefactor who's willing to invest and carry it long enough to develop a broader base of support. Not unlike the way that the Sandlers invested in ProPublica, giving it the runway to do fundraising on a higher level. The Lenfest Institute, headed by Jim Friedlich and David Boardman, got enough money from Gerry Lenfest to buy The Philadelphia Inquirer, to subsidize its editorial budget, and to organize and help fund Spotlight, a newsroom in Harrisburg funded by a consortium of Pennsylvania newspapers that weren’t getting much coverage out of the state capital. Some of the more interesting ones, to me, are the non-profits that are not necessarily local but that help local publications with useful coverage. Cal Matters in Sacramento and KFF Health News come to mind. Hey Nota, headed by two former colleagues on the LA Times business side, provides a suite of tools and services that streamline operations for local publishers. I sit on the board of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. It’s staff of lawyers provides invaluable help to publishers, filing FOIA requests and amicus briefs. It has launched a “Local Law Initiative,” hiring lawyers to help journalists in five states. And last week it came to the rescue of the Marion County Record [Marion, KS] after the local police conducted what appeared to be an illegal search and seizure of the newspaper’s computers and files.

I also like some new publications which address an audience in a different way. Beth Daley is doing it as editor of The Conversation, and before that at Inside Climate News with David Sassoon.

JON:

David's a college friend of mine. He's done a really good job. And there's a new one called Climate and Capital Media that covers climate and business that is also worth reading. There's a lot of good stuff going on in different corners of journalism, but I want to stay on local news. I'm curious whether this nonprofit model is ultimately the only way you can go at the local level because it's not really scalable, not to mention big questions about whether there's any future for print, or whether it's even worth it to try to maintain these legacy publications.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

Well, you have to recognize that the decline in legacy publications at the local level is a reflection on the changes in economic trends, in how people consume information. Local now has significant barriers for success and the ones that are succeeding — NewsBreak, SmartNews — are more aggregators, although NewsBreak — where I worked as a consultant for six months in 2022 — has begun to experiment with content creation.  NextDoor is probably the largest startup. It relies on its audience to produce much of its content. What they produce isn’t always reliable. There is a fair amount of utility — a member is likely to get multiple responses after asking, “Does anybody know a good hairdresser?” But it isn’t a model for quality local journalism.

JON:

And billionaires aren't the answer. They all get tired of their investment in four or five years.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

The pandemic and softness in ad markets have been punishing, causing some billionaires to become born-again cost cutters soon after starting or acquiring a media property. It is worth asking why billionaires get involved with media. Some are jazzed by the opportunity to influence public opinion. Others, after making their fortunes elsewhere, think they are infallible. Many billionaires are avid consumers of media, if only because they were covered while building their companies. They end up thinking that fixing it has to be easier than whatever they have been doing. Patrick Soon-Shiong [owner of the LA Times]  once told me that fixing The Los Angeles Times had to be easier than curing cancer. I wonder if he still feels that way five years into it.

JON:

After Don Graham in 2010 sold Newsweek to Sidney Harman — who co-founded Harman Kardon stereos — I became Harman's sounding board for the last couple of years of his life. He had a long and basically unsuccessful struggle trying to find an editor, and then he did this deal with Barry Diller and Tina Brown that didn’t work out so well. Not long before his death, he told me that Newsweek was the hardest business experience of his entire life.

Newsmagazines are dying but the real crisis is in local news. Several years ago,  I tried to get the Facebook Community Fund to contribute to local news, because Facebook did so much to destroy it. They did a little but not much.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

Right now, Google and Facebook [and others] are removing all news from Canada. It’s my understanding that’s because Canada passed a law that requires the platforms to pay publishers for news.

JON:

That's horrible. Millions of people still depend on these platforms for their news. Do you know Steve Waldman, the guy who co-founded Report for America, which combines local journalism with national service?

He's now started a group called Rebuild Local News and he’s working on various government solutions. The one that really interests me is a bipartisan bill that would provide a refundable tax credit to businesses that employ local journalists and give businesses a tax break for buying ads in local publications. This would expand the ad base at the local level by essentially cutting 50 percent from the cost of all advertising by local businesses. I thought that sounded really ingenious. If in smaller communities of 20,000 to 100,000, you made it half as expensive for the local hardware store to advertise, that might really help.

Let's talk about you a little bit. Norm. Your career fascinates me.

How do you go from being a self-described nerd to hanging out with some of the coolest people in the world and having big jobs where you're totally at ease with movers and shakers? How did you develop that sense of ease and that emotional intelligence that has obviously served you very well?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

I was fortunate to spend more than two decades at The Wall Street Journal when it was respected by the people it covered and venerated by its readers. Much of my identity was fused with it. It was a badge brand and wearing that badge made me comfortable in the presence of the people and institutions we covered.  There are two kinds of journalists. Some think of the journalistic enterprise as a church — they have to be completely removed from the public to avoid conflicts. I represented another kind of journalist. I thought the time I spent with the people we covered gave me insights that improved coverage. There was always the risk of getting too close to my sources, but there were systems in place that protected me and the publications I worked for. The Wall Street Journal gave me the license and the confidence to ask anybody anything. 

JON:

It seems like you pretty quickly got over any feelings of intimidation that a normal person would have while hanging out with CEOs and rock stars. And you also got lucky in being at the right place at the right time.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

When I started work for The Wall Street Journal in Dallas, in addition to being the backup oil and gas reporter, I was assigned the cotton beat. And the way the Journal worked in those days, I also covered Memphis, home of the Cotton Exchange. My first trip out of Dallas was to Memphis. I couldn't find anything worth writing about cotton, but there was a garbage strike going on and it had attracted the support of local and then national civil rights leaders, including Ralph Abernathy and then Martin Luther King, who had traveled from Atlanta to Memphis to march with the garbage workers. I had helped establish a chapter of the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council while in law school, and one of its board members, a Memphis native, introduced me to Abernathy, who convinced King to give me an interview. 

JON:

I'm assuming that you were not there on the actual day of [Martin Luther King Jr.’s] assassination. But you got there shortly thereafter to cover the funeral?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

I had  interviewed King the day before he was assassinated. We didn't talk about his vision and his legacy. We talked about garbage. I flew back to Dallas on the fourth of April and was in the newsroom when he was assassinated. I flew back to Memphis that night.

JON:

You spoke to him just hours before he gave the speech at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple, which is one of the most haunting speeches in American history. That’s where King, the night before he’s shot, says he doesn’t expect to live a long life and he’s been to the mountaintop, “And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you….” Apparently, he was ailing. He had a fever which might partly explain the sweat on his glistening face. It made me a believer in premonition. What did you sense from him earlier in the day?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

We were in the Peabody Hotel. Abernathy had a suite there that we met in and I didn't pick up any of that in our conversation. King had just flown in from Atlanta. I joined the Journal in January of 1968. This was the beginning of April. I was green. So I don't know that I even knew to ask the right questions.

JON:

Did the Journal side with the mayor and the people on the other side of the garbage strike, or was it down the middle?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

The newsroom was scrupulously down the middle. I thought it was remarkable how straight the Journal was.

JON:

Another amazing story that you were fortunate enough to cover: You were in Vietnam in 1975 during the fall of Saigon.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

You have to take advantage of the situation when it happens.  Peter Kann, who was then the Journal’s star reporter in Asia — he had won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the war in Bangladesh — had covered Vietnam brilliantly, but he had to return to Hong Kong for family reasons. I was the only other Journal reporter in Asia, so New York told me to get to Saigon as fast as I could. Other than reading Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place (about the collapse of Dien Bien Phu), I knew nothing about Vietnam, and I was terrified.

JON:

There were so many amazing reporters in Vietnam. Ron Moreau [who died in 2014] was one of the greatest foreign correspondents ever and we loved him at Newsweek. In 1995, he took me all over Vietnam — not quite as dramatic as when you were there.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

I admired Ron’s work and I regret we never met. While covering Korea, I got to know Don Gregg, who was then the CIA station chief. Don gave me an introduction to Thomas Polgar, the CIA station chief, who gave me an off-the-record briefing that was almost exactly how things were going to play out. And it was helpful that flying to Saigon from Tokyo I was on the plane with Keyes Beech and Bob Shaplen and these two [legendary] reporters took me under their wing. Those touch points enabled me to do a lot that week, and then I went out on one of the last flights from Tan Son Nhut [Airport] to Guam, and ended up spending some time there in one of the refugee camps.

JON:

What was that like getting onto one of those last flights? You had a press credential and a passport, but was it still hard?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

Well, the hard part was getting to Tan Son Nhut. I tried hitchhiking and finally got a cab that drove me to where I could present my passport and so forth. And I got on a C-141 with the wives and children of South Vietnamese fighter pilots who had threatened to bomb Saigon if their families didn't get out. I was the one person aboard who wasn't related to a very good Vietnamese fighter pilot. They all flew their planes to Bangkok and then were reunited with their families. Others were airlifted out on helicopters from the embassy a few hours before that.

JON:

I would have been afraid that I wouldn't get a seat when I got to the airport. But at least if you can’t get out and have to stay, you get a better story.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

That was sort of the model. It was glamorized. I was weighing that against being told [by editors in New York], “We want you out of there.” I [doubt] I knew enough to write much beyond what I was able to do in the few days I was there.

JON:

Yeah. You wouldn't have been able to do much after the North Vietnamese tank famously pushed over the gates to the [South Vietnamese] presidential palace. It's pretty hard to do any real reporting at that point.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

My friend Fox Butterfield of The New York Times ended up going to Cambodia from Saigon. I never knew quite how he got there. But The New York Times had assistants and cars and things. While in Tokyo, I had a desk in the AP office where I shared a phone with one of its copyboys. I made good friends in the office who helped me make appointments. I wrote Fred Taylor, then the Journal’s managing editor, seven memos from Tokyo saying if you gave me an assistant and an office, I could double my productivity. He never answered. Soon after I had become managing editor, we had one of those retreats where you drink too much, and I ran into Taylor and I said, “I sent you seven memos when I was in Tokyo saying if you give me an office and an assistant, I could double my productivity. You never answered me. What the hell was that all about?” And he looked at me and he said, “I didn't want to double your productivity.”

JON:

That was around the time you became legendary for being able to peel a banana with your feet.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

I think I peeled my last banana about the time I became managing editor of The Journal.

JON:

What were the secrets of your success in all those editing jobs?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

Prior to my getting there, the Journal had a reputation as a place people left to go to The New York Times for both a bigger byline and more money.  Peter Kann [the publisher] was especially supportive of efforts to turn that around. I went on a hiring spree when I arrived. It was only after close to a year that Peter realized I'd hired 140 people. Putting Al Hunt in charge of the Washington bureau changed it overnight. He was a great magnet for talent. And my first two hires at the Journal were Paul Steiger and Jim Stewart [both major talents]. I learned very early that the more I delegated, the more I got to do. If I have a legacy in journalism, it's the people who worked for me and then went on to do great stuff — stuff I couldn't have done.

JON:

Did you have rules of thumb? Some young reporter comes into your office. What were you looking for him or her to say in the interview that would make you realize they had some kind of X-factor that could make for a good reporter?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

To a very large degree, I relied on the recommendation of the editor the reporter would work for. I had a rule that I would hire anybody who had lasted a year working for Steve Brill [at The American Lawyer] because I figured he'd trained them extremely well.

 JON:

You’re basically saying that you were like Tom Sawyer, getting other people to paint the fence for you.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

I like that.

JON:

It’s too modest for what you accomplished. Unlike Abe Rosenthal, you were not a dictator. You ruled through persuasion.

Let’s talk about a would-be dictator, Donald Trump, who you got to know very early on. What was his secret?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

The people playing the slots in Atlantic City saw the Donald walking in and going up the escalator, and they stopped playing. They looked at him in awe. As much as he had no real interest in them — and God knows he didn’t want to have to shake hands with any of them — they somehow feel better about themselves because they're in his presence.

JON:

In 1991, Leonard Stern, who owned Hartz Mountain pet food company and supposedly hated Trump, underwrote a critical documentary called Trump: What's the Deal? all about his bankruptcies, which you chronicled so well in the Journal. He went crazy over that. And I was in the documentary saying that he didn't have any real money and also that he had lied about saying that Mikhail Gorbachev was scheduled to meet him at Trump Tower when he was in New York. I got a letter from Trump’s lawyer threatening to sue me, which the Newsweek lawyer just laughed at. She said, "Join the club. He's threatened to sue half the people in New York." He paid Stern off to suppress the documentary, which didn't surface online until 2016. It's worth watching.

You had a flap where you went on his helicopter to Atlantic City.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

I thought it would be a way to talk to his bankers, who were also aboard. I was sensitive to the ethical issues and I wouldn't have done it without approval. But that doesn't really go to the issue of whether it was the smart thing to do. It wasn't.

JON:

I don't think there was anything particularly wrong with it because, as you said, you want to spend as much time as you can with sources or potential sources as long as you maintain some critical distance. I have a bigger problem with you and Nancy [Friday] inviting him to your wedding.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

I resolved that I'm not going to talk about Nancy and I'm going to stick to that.

JON:

If I had been in your situation, my wife wouldn't have agreed to that in a million years. This subject raises a broader question about what wealth and power do to people. Did you get your head turned a little bit?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

Maybe. I'm now married for the fourth  time, which as Oscar Wilde said [of second marriages], is "the triumph of hope over experience." We were married in Judge Robert Sack's chambers [in 2005], with  two of his law clerks as witnesses and that was the best wedding I've ever had.

JON:

 I'd like to talk a bit about your time at TIME.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

I was hired in 1994 as Time Warner’s Editor in Chief, reporting to Jerry Levin. That changed in 1996 after Time Warner acquired Turner Broadcasting, including CNN, which continued to report to Ted Turner. From that time on I was Time Inc.’s Editor in Chief reporting to Don Logan. Don turned out to be the smartest boss I ever worked for, and he, like Jerry, was totally committed to editorial independence, even when Carol Loomis, writing in FORTUNE, trashed the AOL deal.

JON:

And Jerry Levin has also taken a huge amount of shit over the years.

NORM PEARLSTINE:

Yes, he has. He was a visionary who was comfortable giving a lot of authority and responsibility to strong-willed division heads. As a result, however, he was unable to get them to work together when the company had to speak with one voice. And he ignored them when they tried to talk him out of merging with AOL.  I’ll always be grateful to him for bringing me to Time Warner, and while there, I never felt pressure to do anything. The only time he ever really got mad about the coverage, it wasn't about him. It was a piece that Entertainment Weekly wrote about [a studio executive] who got a blow job at an Oscar party. He thought it wasn't fair.

JON:

There were a number of books that were very critical of Jerry Levin, but given what happened to his son [a schoolteacher who was murdered by a former student]....

NORM PEARLSTINE:

That was horrible. He was sort of reclusive by nature, but after his son's death, he became even more so.

JON:

Didn't Jerry get into Eastern meditation?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

He was doing some mindfulness stuff in Los Angeles, but he then developed both Parkinson's and kidney failure. He's had a rough time.

JON:

So let me just end by asking a quick question about New York and LA. How would you compare and contrast the cultures?

NORM PEARLSTINE:

I have worked in LA three times but I worked in New York for 35 years between the second and third times I worked in LA. I think that it is much harder in New York to define a community. If you're in real estate or in law or in media, you tend to have a global view of your associates and you may not know the person who lives down the hall in your apartment building. Los Angeles is in many ways the creative capital for the world, at least in terms of entertainment. But there's a disconnect between entertainment and ancillary things like law and real estate, not to mention the rest of the place.

Around 50 percent of Los Angeles is Latino and you would not have known that from the media companies covering it. So if you take entertainment out of Los Angeles, you don't have much else, at least when it comes to coverage of business. When I first went to Los Angeles. If you mentioned energy or oil, there was Arco and Oxy [Occidental Petroleum]. If you mentioned defense, there was Lockheed, Northrop and North American Rockwell. If you mentioned banking, there was Security Pacific and the LA office of Bank of America was bigger than San Francisco’s. When I got back there in 2018, other than Disney, it was hard to find a publicly held company that you really felt you had to cover.

JON:

It’s amazing that over the years, LA has become more — not less — of a company town. And one that’s basically shut down right now because of the strike.

Thanks, Norm.