Renowned journalist and UCLA professor Jim Newton sits down with Podcasts contributor Kayla Hayempour.

Kayla Hayempour: Hello and welcome to Bruin to Bruin. On this show we sit down with members of the UCLA community to hear their story and advice they have for students. My name is Kayla Hayempour and I’m a podcast contributor at the Daily Bruin.

Today I’ll be interviewing Jim Newton, a veteran journalist, author and teacher. In 25 years at the Los Angeles Times, Newton worked as a reporter, editor, bureau chief, columnist and, from 2007 through 2010, editor of the editorial pages. He is the recipient of numerous national and local awards in journalism and participated in two staff efforts, coverage of the 1992 riots and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 2022, he was chosen by the American Political Science Association for the Carey McWilliams Award.

Before joining the Los Angeles Times, he was a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and he began his career as the 1985-86 clerk to New York Times columnist James Reston. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College. He came to UCLA full-time in early 2015 to teach in Communication Studies and Public Policy and to found Blueprint, a new UCLA magazine addressing the policy challenges facing California and Los Angeles in particular. He serves as the magazine’s editor-in-chief.

Newton also is a respected author of four important, best-selling and critically acclaimed works of history and recently signed with Random House to produce a book on Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and the San Francisco counterculture of the 1960s. It’s tentatively slated for publication in 2025.

I’ve had the pleasure of taking two journalistic and media ethics classes with Professor Newton through the comm department. Both courses were extremely relevant and opened up my eyes to the power of journalism and the role it plays in how we see the world. I am so excited to have him on the show today to discuss both the topic, and his journey in the field of journalism.

Professor Newton, thank you for coming on the show.

Jim Newton: Well thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

KH: I want to start at the very beginning. What was your first interaction with news and journalism? Did you always have a desire to go into the field? What was kind of the first time that you felt represented and really pulled to journalism?

JN: Yeah, for me, it took hold very early. I would say sophomore year of high school probably. I began working for my high school paper. I had a high school journalism advisor who I looked up to and I went on to become the editor of my high school paper and then later, the publisher of my college paper. I did a little bit of work as a high school student for the Palo Alto Weekly, those were the first stories that I sold. So I was bitten quite early. For me, the earliest appeal I think was that it was – I was very interested in politics and public policy and it was a way to be a part of that world without some of the compromises that, that I perceived as going with holding elected office or working for an elected official. So while I did intern in Washington and do different things, for me, the appeal of journalism was always the main draw.

KH: Definitely. I think it’s cool that there’s a connection but you’re still a little bit removed from the inner workings of the political sphere. So going off of that, was there a story that you covered or read maybe within the political space that made you realize that journalism has that power to change the trajectory of our nation? Some things that come to mind for me are Watergate, or Clinton and Lewinsky. For me, the 2016 election was the first time that I was old enough to really grasp the concept of media. But was there a particular story that really stood out from you from your experiences, either a child or a journalist?

JN: Yeah. I mean, I’d say as a child, you mentioned Watergate. My family moved out of the country when I was in elementary school. We lived in Mexico for a few years and we came back in 1974, as Watergate was really coming to a head. And so I do, I remember the hearings that summer and the coverage that went along with it. And though I was too young to appreciate the real nuances of the coverage, I did take away from that and later from the book, “All the President’s Men,” that just the enormous power that the, that journalism had, over the, the unfolding of that scandal. For me as a participant in journalism, as a college journalist the issue of South African divestment was very much front and center. I went to Dartmouth, as you mentioned, and Dartmouth’s divestment was an issue the newspaper editorialized strongly about it. I saw then that there was a way to contribute to a cause that I thought was worthy and important, but to do so, also while maintaining a commitment to telling the truth and holding the college accountable. So for me, that was a more formative personal experience while Watergate was more of a, as a spectator experience.

KH: That’s very cool to hear. And I think very relevant given everything that’s happening on our campus right now and the Daily Bruin’s role in covering all of that. I know that’s been definitely a big endeavor for us. Touching on your college experience a little bit more. What did you study at Dartmouth? Do you have any favorite college memories related to journalism or otherwise?

JN: I majored in government, which is Dartmouth’s equivalent of Political Science, at least it was then, there wasn’t a communication major at Dartmouth. And so my, my, as I mentioned, my interest is really in government and politics anyway, so it sort of suited my interests. I worked as a columnist at the paper and as a news writer, and then later as publisher of the paper. You know, one of the things that for me was exciting about journalism at Dartmouth, while I was a student there, is there was a very active rivalry between the daily paper, The Dartmouth where I worked, and The Dartmouth Review, which was then a fairly young conservative paper. And so it was a competitive news environment. I mean, we did different things. The staffs very much did not like each other, there was personal animus along with the competition and so we competed for stories and for perspectives. And I liked it. I mean, I liked the feel of, of having not only to go get news and report it well, but to know that there was competition in that world. So I did a lot of different stories, wrote a lot of different things was during my time at Dartmouth, but but what really sticks with me, I think, is that sense of, of rivalry and competition and how that I think brought out some of the best in me and and certainly in the other journalists at The Dartmouth.

KH: And speaking of the way that you thought about journalism as a field, the way that you thought about yourself as a journalist…something that I’ve noticed in just having taken multiple classes with you now, and I can’t fully describe this or fully put it into words, but I think anybody that’s taking a class with you can kind of get a sense of this. There’s a way that a journalist thinks, and speaks, and sees the world that’s very different than anybody else in my eyes. It’s very critical. It’s very thought provoking, very poised. I guess my question is a little bit of a chicken versus the egg situation. Do you think that you thought like a journalist before even entering the field? Or was that mindset something that was cultivated a little bit more once you started working at your high school paper or your college paper, etcetera?

JN: That’s an interesting question and I’m so close to it, that it may be hard for me to answer it really. I guess…I think it’s probably more the latter, if I’m getting the order of them right, which is to say that I think it’s probably that my way of approaching issues today is probably more a product of my life and journalism than my life and journalism is a product of the way I see issues. But that’s mainly because I’ve lived so much of my life in journalism. I’m, as I say, I started this at age really, at age 16 probably. So I’ve got a lot of time under my belt in this work. You know, and also, let me just say that I appreciate the observation. Yeah, I mean, I do think that journalism, at least as I have tried to practice it, is a discipline. I mean, it is meant to cause those who practice it to try to force themselves to think objectively about issues, to see the other side of questions. I mean, I can often find myself being sort of cantankerous about it in the sense that I, in a group of people who all agree on something I almost always naturally gravitate to try and to see it out from the other side. I covered the murder trial of OJ Simpson for the longest year and a half of my life and spent it – I never, in that entire time, said to a single person, nor have I ever said publicly, whether I thought he did it. And that’s not because I don’t have views about whether he did it, but because I really don’t think it’s my job to talk about that. It’s really to try to see it from all perspectives. Not always successfully, for sure. But that’s, that’s a learned habit. Right. That’s a, that’s a professional obligation and my view. So back to your question, I think that I’ve learned to be that way as a journalist rather than being that way and therefore being drawn to journalism, but it’s probably a little bit of both.

KH: That makes sense. I think that also relates a lot to what we’ve discussed in, in your courses, that journalists are human, they have thoughts and beliefs and opinions. And you kind of touched about this for yourself, that entering the field of journalism, becoming a journalist required you to have that discipline to create that separation between your personal beliefs and what you’re reporting on. How do you think that happens? Because I would imagine it, it’s very difficult to give this objective reality when maybe inside you might have some sort of personal affinity for whatever cause you’re reporting on or, as you mentioned, with the South Africa issues that you were reporting on in college, that was something that you’ve also felt very strongly about. So how do you navigate that, that line between being objective and your own personal thoughts and opinions?

JN: Yeah, I think that is challenging for sure. I mean, well, first of all, I should say, a couple of my jobs in journalism – you mentioned, I was the editorial page editor at the LA Times, I also was a columnist for a while, I write a column now for CalMatters. All of those allow for the expression of opinion, in fact, to some degree to require that. So I’ve worked on both sides of the opinion line. But for most of my career – I guess, at this point, probably close to about half of my career – I spent on the new side, which is to say in the zone where my opinions…I did my best to keep my opinions out of my work. But the analogy, I use this, and you’ll know this from taking the course, I compare it to jury service. Which is to say, when we select jurors, we don’t ask that they know nothing about a subject. I mean, we’re in the middle of the Trump case back, one of the Trump cases back in New York right now, right? We don’t ask the jurors in that case have never, they never have heard of Donald Trump or that they not know that he, or they not know about Stormy Daniels or whatever, right? We don’t ask that they be ignorant of those things, or even that they have no opinion about those things. What we ask is that, whatever opinions they have, and whatever knowledge they may have from outside the case, that they’ll be able to set that aside and decide a case on the facts presented to them. I think that’s possible. I think it’s reasonable that we asked jurors to do that. I think it’s reasonable that we asked journalists to do that. It doesn’t mean that journalists always do it well. It doesn’t mean that I’ve always done it well. But I do, I think that if you start with that as the objective, then it, it frames the work, and it gives you something to aspire to – and also allows journalists, and other, and others, to hold journalists accountable. And to say, you know, here’s where you, you did drift into allowing your opinion to show. But last thing I’ll say on this is I’ve worked for, for the most part, for big news organizations for The New York Times, the Atlanta Constitution, LA Times and there’s structure around them, right. So to the degree that journalists may slip up and allow an opinion into a piece of coverage, there’s others there to try to safeguard against that. There’s editors and lawyers and editors and bosses and their editors. And there’s lots of layers at a place like the LA Times. So the, the structure of the organization reinforces that objective to try to be objective. It’s not perfect, it’s all people, right. But, but I do think that the journalists who I respect the most try very hard to do that. And then they are surrounded by others who try to ensure that if they make a mistake that it’s caught.

KH: Absolutely, I think I’ve definitely seen that a little bit more with the publications I worked for on campus – that there really is this very long process before something even gets close to being published because of how many people read through it. I want to table that topic just for a second because I do have some more questions about it. I want to go back to your journey as a journalist. You went to college on the East Coast. How did that transition into the LA Times happen? So much of your work is centered in Los Angeles and California. What drew you to the area and what sparked that desire to cover a lot of what’s happening in LA? Because it is such a rich city with so much going on.

JN: For sure. Well, first of all, I went back east because I wanted to be someplace else. And I grew up in, I grew up in a lot of different places. But I went to high school in Palo Alto, Northern California. And I wanted to try something different. I fell in love with Dartmouth and the outdoors there and so that’s its own whole story, but, but I wanted to be back east for school. And after school, I just sort of followed my nose from one job to the next. As you mentioned, I went to work for Scotty Reston and Washington. Reston hired a clerk every year right out of college, it was a great opportunity to work for him and work for The New York Times, right at the outset of my career. I went to the Atlanta Constitution because the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times left to become the editor of the Constitution and I wanted to work for him – Bill Kovach – because he was a spectacular journalist. And it was a great thrill and honor to work for him in Atlanta. And then I came out here when he left the Constitution. So I wasn’t really looking to learn, to return to California at that point. I applied for a job at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I was thinking about the Enquirer versus the Times and then the Times came through and I found myself back here. I must say, I grew up in Northern California, LA is not the place I imagined spending my professional life. Such disdain for LA. I was Giants fan, Dodgers were just the worst thing imaginable. So I didn’t, I did not expect to be here but I really did take to it once I got here. I worked for a little while in Orange County before I moved to the main office of the Times. The Orange County edition was huge in those days. LA is a difficult city to cover. It is a city without obvious sources of power. The institutions that I was used to in Atlanta, for instance, where I covered the mayor’s office were very identifiable. It was churches in the party and the civil rights movement. I mean, there are, there are very, there were complicated people but it was easy to identify who had power and in Atlanta or which groups had power. Much more difficult here, much bigger, much more complex, much more diffuse. But in that, for all those reasons, I think, as a reporter, also very rewarding to cover – that once you begin to get it here, and you begin to really know where those levers are, it’s satisfying to be able to relay that to readers, and to follow influence. And so I have found it a very exciting and rewarding place to work even though I didn’t really set out for that to be the case. The last thing I’ll say on that, I guess is I really am glad to be working in California. My, although my work is most specifically centered in Los Angeles, I think of it as more broadly about California. And certainly that’s true in the book part of my life that I have tried, through the various books that I’ve done and the one that I’m doing, to write a history of California through the biographies of some of its leading figures. And so that too, has been a satisfying dimension to my work that returning back to California and coming to the LA Times this has allowed me to do

KH: Definitely. And for listeners who are not aware, one of those books is “The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown,” so definitely that connection to broader California politics. It really – Los Angeles is such a, an interesting place. I have grown up here my whole life. I live so close to UCLA. And it’s been very, as much as I think it’ll be good for me to leave here for a little bit after college, it’s been really interesting to see a city change so much from the time that I was a child. And so I do think that there’s so much there. Going off of a point that you mentioned about following those influences, the different power dynamics – the ultimate goal of a journalist, as we, we’ve discussed in your, in your classes, is to uncover and report the truth. How do you go about doing that? Because like you said, trying to identify these different power structures, maybe the ones that are a little bit less obvious, is pretty difficult. Especially things that come to mind for me are like if you’re going about uncovering something much more underground or doing an exposé, how do you even go about tackling something that feels so much larger than yourself?

JN: Yeah, well, I guess…I’m searching for an example. Well, listen, let me put it this way – for five years I covered, the center of my beat was LAPD from 1992 to 1997, which was an extremely, extremely difficult time in the life of that organization. During the period that I was covering the department, we had a riot. We had the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King in the state, they were acquitted in state court and then they were convicted – two of them were convicted in federal court, in between, we had a riot. There was the Christopher Commission Report. There was…various studies of the LAPD that found racism and bias and excessive force. And so my big part of, a big part of what I saw my job as, was to report on the effort to reform the LAPD and what that meant for LA. I’ll tell you the first thing that I learned in that, really among the first things that I learned, and that is that the LAPD is not a single thing, right. I mean, it’s 10,000 officers, or now it’s about 9,000 officers, but all of them have different perspectives. Some of them, some of the most heroic and devoted people I’ve ever met are police officers. And some of the more disreputable people that I’ve met, and dangerous people that I’ve met are police officers. So there’s a lot going on in an organization like that. And I, I guess, when I talk about uncovering and reporting the truth in the context of something like that, it is to do my best, was, to do my best to understand the various forces at work within the department. Those who were advocating for reform, those who were resisting it, what reform meant, what, what it meant for it to be happening in a political context. And to try to penetrate the organization and, and explain it to readers. That’s a hard job, because there’s a lot of constituencies in that and they don’t agree on a lot. My job isn’t, was not to forge an agenda or to press for reform of the department. But it was to report about as best I could what was actually happening in and around the department, so that those other participants could use that information. And not, not because of me, but because of all those forces, I mean, I think the LAPD underwent a really profound change in that time. It has a lot of work still to do for sure, but it is a radically better place than the department that I began covering in the early 90s. So that’s, and as I said I’m not trying to take credit for that, but I think my job was to chronicle that and to bring to light facts that would allow others to act on them.

One of the most shocking things that I learned in my early time covering the police department, and this was not my discovery, this came out of the Christopher Commission Report – but there was a, the police department in those days had something called MDTs. They were mobile terminals in the cars. They were sort of like laptops, but they were more rudimentary than that, and officers would communicate using shorthand on them. And so they had shorthands, for different you know, 187 was a murder, and some of that’s out of the penal code. But there were shorthand ways of telling each other what they were up to. The, the code for a domestic violence incident involving a black couple was NHI, which stood for no humans involved. Think about that. This is a computer system that supervisors had access to. They could monitor this traffic. Police officers openly disparaged a conflict between members of a black couple as not involving humans. That’s a, that’s not only bad behavior by individual officers. That’s evidence that the organization has gone profoundly awry, that they felt that they could say that with impunity. Daryl Gates – who was the chief when I first came on the scene here – once described, he was asked why black suspects were often dying in chokeholds when they were choked by officers, and he said, it’s because they didn’t, their cardiovascular systems were not the same as normal people. As if to be black was not to be normal. When I came to, when I began covering the department, the black and whites, the police cars were known as Black and normals for that reason. This is what people were saying in front of reporters, right. So, I saw as part of my job to let the public know that. To be able to talk to police officers honestly, so that they would speak honestly to me, but also to relay that kind of conversation, that kind of conduct to the public so that others were aware of it. So is that I don’t, you never know what you don’t know, right? So I don’t know how much of the activity the LAPD escaped me or eluded me. But I felt good about the fact that I had good relationships with many police officers and many supervisors, but also with advocates of reform and critics of the police department. I had a big circle of people I talked to, and I tried to make sure that all those perspectives were reflected in the work I did. So it’s not easy and as I often said to young reporters, it involves writing little stories, not just big ones, but nibbling at things a lot. And trying overtime, not with any single story, but trying overtime to present as full a picture as possible. And it’s really not for me to judge whether I succeeded in that or not but that’s certainly what I set out to try to do.

KH: Wow, there’s so much that can be said about that. I think, first of all, we’ve seen the continuation with the summer of…I think it was 2020, with George Floyd, Ahmaud, Arbery, Breonna Taylor. I mean, that, that has really been an ongoing discussion in the world of the media. Also, I think the fact that you, as you said, you never know what you don’t know, but I think it’s very interesting to be the one to balance all of those different viewpoints. Because ultimately, as readers, as listeners, as viewers, it’s not something that an ordinary person can do, to go have connections with all of these people. And so that really is the, the role of a journalist, is to be able to bring that to the public so that everybody can be informed. Navigating those situations…can you describe to me what the newsroom was like? I mean, my parents have told me stories about the ‘92 riots just from living through it as residents of Los Angeles. But beyond your personal role in those very high pressure topics, what was the newsroom like? Was it a collective chaos and then satisfaction at the end? Was it really a team effort? Were you working a lot as an individual? What was it like to just be in this broader world of the LA Times or news publication in general?

JN: Yeah, listen, I loved working in newsrooms. And the biggest, most exciting newsroom I ever worked in would have been the Metro staff of the LA Times in the 90s. When I came to the Los Angeles Times in 1989, I think it was, there was a news staff of about almost 1,300 people at the, at the LA Times. That’s all in – that’s various additions, photographers, reporters, editors, secretaries, everything. So that’s a lot. But it was huge is the point. Today, I think it’s maybe four or 500. Don’t hold me to that. But it’s obviously much reduced. You know, it was a, the Metro staff – which is where I spent most of my time at the LA Times certainly in those years – was big, diverse, probably should have been more diverse, a lot of efforts to diversify it in those years. But I came downtown in 1991 I think it was from the Orange County edition to cover federal law enforcement – that was my first beat. I worked, my closest colleague was Henry Weinstein, he covered federal courts, somebody else covered LAPD, someone else was covering criminal courts. So it was maybe six or seven of us who had kind of overlapping beats. Over time, those shifted around a fair bit. But it was both individual and collective. I mean, my beat was my beat. And so I really approached that as something that it was my job to stay on top of. My beat started, as I said, with federal law enforcement and expanded to include LAPD as well. But it was also collective, certainly the response to the riots was a giant staff effort that took all of us to various parts of town, same with the earthquake. Same with other big stories that erupted during the time. The LA Times had a reputation well earned, I think, for responding in force to really big stories. We were a good newsroom when it came to, to handling something that was fast breaking and multi dimensional. So in that sense, the riots really played to our strength as a newsroom. Those were highly collaborative efforts. And I just recall people all sort of, with the earthquake in particular, the earthquake took place very early in the morning. And so we really – much of the coverage already was laid out before people even got to the newsroom, because people reported their neighborhoods and then came in. It was a really efficient and effective newsroom in those moments, but those are rare. They don’t come up every day or even every year. For the most of the run of the mill daily operations of the newsroom, is mostly individual reporters working with their individual editors, making sure that beats are covered. Some beats are very active – the beat that I had, I probably wrote three or four stories a week, off my beat. Other beats would have been less, generated less daily coverage. So everyone was kind of in their own rhythm. But I found it a very congenial place to work. Newsrooms have characters right, and there’s always people that get on your nerves. And that’s, that certainly would be true today. But I would say overall, it was a really cooperative, mutually supportive kind of place to be.

KH: Yes, it’s been interesting for me to…this because this is my first year on staff with the Daily Bruin and just seeing the inner workings of a, that kind of well oiled machine is definitely very interesting. When it comes to readers kind of going about news consumption – we’ve seen in recent years the rise of misinformation and disinformation. Media literacy, and news literacy has become increasingly important when it comes to people consuming news. What is your recommendation for college students or just society at large when it comes to the different sources that they’re getting their news from?

JN: I really do think this is the question for the future when it comes to media. I mean, listen, I have news, there news operations that I have come to trust over time. So I read The New York Times, I read the LA Times, I read The Washington Post. There are more specialty publications that I also have come to trust – I work for CalMatters, I think CalMatters does a really good job covering policy issues in California. I, for my book research, I do various books, I, there’s different publications that are helpful. So the project I’m doing now, the Village Voice has been a good source, the underground, some of the underground press has been helpful historically. I think different, depending on your interests there are different news sources that may be the most valuable ones. What I am, I guess what I would caution is to not rely solely on opinion based press. Everybody’s got an opinion about everything sorry, everything, right, and so anyone can have an opinion and it doesn’t require you to know very much to have an opinion.

KH: Trust me. I’ve seen, I’ve seen a lot of that.

JN: I’m sure you have, and there’s more of it all the time. And so I guess I, and it’s fashionable, I think, to question objectivity. And I get it, I get that we are prisoners of our experience that it is difficult for us to be genuinely objective. But I do think there’s merit in investing energy in news organizations that are trying to do that, with the obvious caveat that they will not do it perfectly. But I think the mere exercise of attempting objectivity is helpful for readers. In the end, I don’t think it’s my job as a journalist to tell you what to think about an issue. It’s my job to tell you as best I can, what’s happening with an issue, so that you can decide. But that is not the view that Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson, or any of the million people that we could name, have. They are there to shape your view of the issue or, or to report a story in a way that reinforces their views of the issue, or of the personalities involved. And there’s, that’s perfectly valuable thing to do. That’s fine. I mean, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t do that, they should. But as a reader, as a consumer of news, to me, I’m less interested in what Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow thinks about Biden, or Trump, than what Biden or Trump actually did yesterday, or what their platform is for the country or what their vision is for leadership, whatever. I’d like to know as much as possible, what they actually are doing and thinking so that I can decide. And so for me, that’s, that’s more valuable in my news sources. And so I see I try to seek out new sources that are doing their best to present the information that way.

KH: I think that that’s very well put. The – I agree that the point of the media or news organizations in general is to give you the information so that you can be the one to make a decision that’s informed and informed based off of what you’re reading. And I think, especially on social media, that’s where a lot of young people are getting their news now. It does become this echo chamber where it’s a lot of opinions and it’s very difficult to kind of weed out what is fact or what is not. We’ve, we’ve also discussed in classes that I’ve taken with you how journalism is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy, so attacks on journalism, the degradation of journalistic ethics, can often be a sign of a crumbling democracy. Going off of that, faith in media has declined a lot in recent years. I was having a conversation with one of my cousins the other day who feels like news has gotten much more biased. And I was saying to him, well, maybe it’s not that journalists are more biased, but it’s that readers maybe are. So the lens through which they’re consuming their news feels a little different than maybe how it did a few years ago, because they’re coming into it with their own personal ideas. How have you seen attitudes towards journalism change from when you first started to now? And is there anything that you can pinpoint that kind of caused that shift? What are your thoughts on the topic in general?

JN: Yeah, another big topic. I mean, I think you’re absolutely right, first of all, to observe that. I think dissatisfaction with media is often because readers want to find reinforcement in the coverage for their views. And if they don’t find it, then they think something’s wrong with the coverage, not, they don’t seem to use that as an opportunity to question whether their beliefs may be incorrect, or whether they should adjust those beliefs. I’ve seen this, this is just a very small example, but I see it in some of the very vitriolic reaction that Maggie Haberman of The New York Times gets – and much of it from the left, where it seems like readers want her just to attack Donald Trump. She has, she historically has had very good access to him, right, and so I think readers are suspicious of that. And they see if the, if she reports something that’s sort of neutral about Trump, that somehow she’s complicit, that she’s, she’s owned by him. And I just, I mean, I don’t know her, but I don’t think that’s a fair read of the coverage, at least as I read it. But I think it is because people have such strong feelings about Trump that if you are not there actively denouncing him, they are dissatisfied. This is readers from the left, presumably, predominantly. But the opposite is true, too. I mean, I think this, this conservative critique of The New York Times that it’s just a leftist newspaper, it’s just crap. I mean, it’s a newspaper that is left of center on its editorial page, but it’s a big corporation that is very established. It is not a radical publication in any way. And it does its absolute level headed, best to be fair in its newspapers. Does it get it right? Not always, for sure. But that’s not proof of some institutional bias. You know, we used to do this – at the LA Times when a reader would cancel their subscription, there was a process by which they would, there was a sort of exit interview, and they would be asked, “Why did you cancel your paper?” I remember, this is years ago, but we had – someone presented a list at some meeting that I was at about why readers were canceling the paper. The first reason was people were moving out of the area, right, so it had nothing to do with content at all. The second reason was that people found the paper too liberal and the third reason was the paper, people found the paper too conservative. So can’t please everybody.

But today, I think because people feel so defensive and so polarized, if the news organization isn’t reflecting their views, they assume that something is just, is, is fixed about it, right, that the fix is in somehow. I don’t think that’s fair. I mean, I think some news organizations are really opinion shops. But I think to your earlier point, I think often what we’re seeing is highly opinionated readers who are looking for reinforcement, and when they don’t find it, they blame the news organization. And that’s too bad. By the way, I would just, one thing to add about that – there are political people and institutions who benefit from that. If you strip people away from their loyalty to news organizations, if you cause them not to trust objective news, what are they left with, really? What they’re left with is loyalty. Now, and I’m saying this not to be partisan but to observe it, Trump has talked about this openly. Trump wants readers not to trust organizations like The New York Times so that they will be left with their confidence in him. That’s a strategy, and I’m not saying he’s alone in practicing it, he’s just alone in actually talking about it. So you know, this is not, it’s not an accident. This is not happening just by coincidence. I think that the partisans recognize that an objective press is a threat to them, and they are working to try to erode that public confidence in media. And they are to some degree succeeding.

KH: That’s such a fascinating way of putting it. I mean, it’s definitely something that I’ve, I’ve observed. Again, not to say that he’s the only example, but I think especially as we’ve seen with the trials recently, the attack on coverage, the attack on, not even just from a news perspective but public institutions and the way that they operate can definitely change the way that people are loyal to a certain political figure. It’s been a very, I think that that’s such a prime example that, for most people who are in college currently, is something that they’ve been able to follow a little bit more from the beginning. So it’s definitely been interesting to see that develop. You mentioned briefly, people canceling their subscriptions and that kind of stuff. I want to briefly ask about the paywall of journalism. As you touched on, news organizations are often corporations who need to make money. Many people that I know would not pay for good journalism – what do you think the implications of that could be for readers and media companies?

JN: I think one of the things that my generation of journalism managers really flubbed early on was, was how to distribute on the web. Because we have raised really a generation of young people who, who are not willing, or are very reluctant anyway to pay for news. And here’s the problem with that – is that somebody’s gotta pay me. I can’t do it for free. And journalists, some journalism is just really expensive, right? It’s very expensive to keep a bureau in Gaza, or to have journalists risk their lives in Ukraine. You can’t ask a journalist to go spend a year in Ukraine under fire for free. Somebody’s got to make that possible. And, by the way, we’re not just talking about a journalist – you’re talking about a reporter, and a photographer, and a translator, and you’re talking about equipment and security. There was a time again, this is a long time ago so it’s probably not current anymore, but I remember at the LA Times during the first Iraq war, I remember we talked about, someone raised the figure that we were spending a million dollars a month to keep a bureau in Baghdad. Well, who pays for that? Historically, most of the bill for journalism has been supported by advertisers. Readers paid a fairly nominal amount for a subscription and then, but because the LA Times had a million or 1.2 million readers or whatever it was at its peak, that’s valuable for advertisers to get their material in front of them. So advertisers paid the bulk and readers paid a relatively nominal amount in circulation for subscriptions.

That’s, that model has not translated perfectly to the web. The biggest sort of breakdown of it is that at the LA Times, and most news organizations, for years what we did is we circulate, we distributed a print product and asked you to pay for it, and then said, but if you don’t want to pay for it, you can get it for free online – and then we were surprised that people chose to get it for free online. You know, if you tell someone you can either pay for something or have it free, they will generally take it for free. And the problem with that is that the advertising model has not risen up to pay the bills for most news organizations. And that’s why the LA Times, instead of having 1,300 news staff has 500 or 400, wherever it is now. And candidly, you just cannot do as much with four or 500 people as you can with 1,300. Ultimately, the people who have suffered from that are not just journalists, although clearly journalists have suffered from it, but are the public who rely on that information. There’s a lot, a lot to be said about how that has changed news priorities and news values. And I think that’s, for me the one thing I’ll say on that is one effect that it has had is nationalizing coverage. There are fewer readers for a story about the LA City Council than there are for a story about the United States Congress. And therefore, if you are monetizing your newsroom based on traffic, you are likely to rate on a higher, on a more, geopolitically at a higher level, right, national or foreign, just because that’s where the readers are. The problem with that is that what it means is you’re ultimately failing in your duty to hold local and state government accountable for its actions. And so there’s a lot of civic mischief that comes out of that shift in dynamics and, and I do think we’re already paying a real price for it and we will only pay more and more so as we go forward – unless young people and others can be persuaded that is worth it to them to pay some amount to subscribe to news. The New York Times is the paper that’s done the best job of getting over this hump. And that’s because The New York Times is a different kind of paper. It’s really a national, international demographic paper. It’s not really a metropolitan daily. So there’s a lot, there’s a lot to be talked about in all of that. But I do think it starts with people acknowledging that there’s value in news and being willing to pay for it.

KH: Absolutely. I will say The New York Times has really gotten my generation with the games.

JN: Whatever gets you in the door, you know!

KH: I have to hand it to them, somebody did that one right.

JN: It’s really true.

KH: As we start to wrap up, I want to go back to you. You’ve now entered a teaching role. You have blueprint on campus. You also have your book coming out soon, a new one. What has that transition been like for you? Did you ever think that you would land one way or another as a professor?

JN: Teaching came late to me. I love it, I really, I was drawn at first to UCLA by the opportunity to continue from a different vantage point, something I’ve been working on for a long time, which is the, the use of journalism to, to enlarge and engage a civic community. And I tried to do that, particularly as editorial page editor at the LA Times, and I’ve tried to do it now from the, through blueprint. But as part of my sort of package to come over here – I’d actually started teaching at UCLA part time prior to this just because there was a need for an ethics professor at one point, and I came over to do it just once a year. But I built that up and I’ve really enjoyed it. And I’ve certainly enjoyed meeting you and other students, and it’s exciting to work with young people and to see people, help young people understand the importance of this work. So all that’s been just a joyful discovery for me. And blueprint, as I say, is really, I see it really as a continuation of the journalism that I’ve been doing just in a different kind of form. And then the book writing part of my life – I actually started this when I was still at the paper. What I discovered at the paper is that I could do about two thirds of a book while working full time with the paper and then I needed to take a leave to finish. So I did my Earl Warren book and my Leon Panetta, I collaborated with Leon Panetta on his memoir, I did both of those while working at the paper. The Jerry Brown book I finished after coming to UCLA. Oh, and the Eisenhower book I also did, I took a brief leave from the paper to do. It is, the UCLA rhythm is more conducive to book writing than the papers. I mean, the reason I had to take leaves from the paper was – it’s just, for me anyways, some people can do this, but it’s just very hard to write all day and then come home and write all night. I just, I just couldn’t do it, physically was just exhausting. UCLA is a more forgiving schedule and so allows for that better devotion to book writing. And so I’ve been happy to do that. And book writing for me is also journalism. I have only worked in nonfiction and for me, it is a way of scratching an itch that journalism always leaves – which is I always felt as I finished the story at the paper, that there was more than I could have said, and that the demands of daily journalism and space and everything else required me always to leave some amount of the story untold. Book writing is the opportunity to really tell the whole thing and also to be really responsible for the whole thing myself rather than having to work within a larger organization. So it’s satisfying – I miss the newsroom. I miss – every election night I wish I were back at the paper but, but there is a big payoff in return for that and I’ve been really blessed and delighted to be able to explore that part of the work too.

KH: That’s very cool. I think Jack of, Jack all trades definitely but–

JN: –or of one trade in many forms.

KH: In many forms, exactly. But I do have to say – I understand the satisfaction piece because I think with, anytime I finish writing something, to know that you’ve really done everything you can to capture somebody’s story is very powerful. Our last question, I wanted to ask if you have any advice for UCLA students. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about budding journalists or the media, but anything that you think would be noteworthy to leave our listeners with.

JN: Ah, well, I have advice for journalists. My advice for journalists or those who want to go into journalism is, is to write, and to write with an editor if possible, because I think there’s so much learning that happens in the work with an editor. And therefore, writing to blog or on social media is better than not writing at all, but it doesn’t have the same learning value that working with an editor does. So I, my advice to young journalists is always pretty much find something where you can write and be edited. Beyond that, I’m not really sure that I’m the best person to ask life advice for, I’m not sure that I have any particular expertise in it. I will say this, the, the people I know who are happiest in life are those who have found the thing that matters to them and really devoted themselves to pursue it. I used to cover Dick Riordan and it was, the mayor of LA, was a very different person than I am. He was very rich and he came from a different kind of background than I did. But I, and I always assumed that he was rich because he set out to be rich. And one of the things he said to me, the matter that landed with me, is that he felt that he had gotten rich because he had done what really spoke to him, and that the money followed – and that people who start by following the money end up, may end up with money, but end up not particularly enjoying it. I don’t know if he’s right about that or not, I don’t have enough money to really truly testify on that, on that front. But I think there’s truth to that. I hope there is. I have been really lucky in my life that I wanted to write, I wanted to be in the realm of public policy and the ways in which people come together as a society, and journalism has let me do that. And I, I feel like I sort of…couldn’t have anticipated how rewarding it would be when I started doing it when I was only 16 years old. But I feel lucky that it did and I hope that others find the same kind of satisfaction in their work and in their life that I really feel fortunate to have found.

KH: That’s both beautiful and reassuring to hear, because I think, hard to believe sometimes, when we’re, when we’re in undergrad. Everybody always says all the money will come, the money will come, and I think it’s really important to remember what is important to you, and things that matter and bring you joy. So with that, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Bruin to Bruin. It is always a pleasure, Professor Newton. I wish I could take more classes with you – I think I’ve literally taken the only two that are available. But it’s always nice to pick your brain and I’m so glad listeners who may not get the chance to take any one of those classes got to hear a little bit about what might be discussed in them. So thank you again.

JN: Well, it’s my pleasure, and I’m delighted to be associated with you and I wish you all the best.

KH: Thank you.

JN: Take care.

KH: Bruin to Bruin is brought to you by Daily Bruin Podcasts. You can listen to this show and all Daily Bruin podcasts on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and the audio and transcript is available at dailybruin.com I’m Kayla Hayempour, thanks for listening.