The OFS

Hard to Feel Good About Times’ Future, Editor Says

By Bob Rawitch

Alice Short, the Times Special Projects Editor who has held more than half a dozen editing positions over two stints and 30 years at the paper, told the OFS group of retirees by Zoom on May 27 that “it’s not always easy to feel good about the future and the direction of the paper.”

Expressing similar frustration to other recent OFS Times speakers over declining revenues and circulation, staff layoffs and buyouts, as well as controversial actions taken by owner Dr. Patrick Soon Shiong, she said “I’m not being snarky…I just wish I had an idea what will happen by the end of the year. But I’m clueless.”

The paper is going through yet another, smaller round of layoffs and buyouts, but she said that she still enjoys working on longer narrative stories and special projects.

A graduate of UCLA and former Daily Bruin editor, Short started her career in the Valley Edition of The Times in the 1980s, on the then-new Valley Life section.  She has been editor of the L.A. Times Magazine as well as holding a variety of positions in the old Calendar section and serving a stint as a Metro reporter when she was looking for a change of pace.

Editing the magazine was the job she enjoyed the most, she said, because of the deep resources she had in both talent and money to invest in stories, she told the group. But when she decided to leave features for a Metro reporting job, she said, it was a great experience.

Sitting next to then-reporters Steve Padilla and Stephanie Chavez, two former Valley Edition colleagues who are now editors at the paper, “I learned stuff I never knew, and stuff I’d forgotten, but it was awesome,” Short said. “We helped one another out a lot, and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

For most of her career, though, Short worked in features sections, and in 2008 was named assistant managing editor overseeing travel, books, fashion, food, home and health content.

She left the paper as part of a 100-person 2015-2016 buyout, and became a freelance writer and editor, including work for The Times. But she found it lonely and returned to the paper in 2019 as special projects editor, helping Steve Padilla edit Column One features and other ambitious efforts.

She acknowledged that her second stint at The Times has been a different experience, in part because she is working with a younger and much smaller staff. Recent personnel actions have reduced editorial staffing to close to 250 from a one-time peak of 1,200.

“There are still people doing amazing work – not all of it, but a lot of it,” she said. Some of the staffers in their 20s and 30s are “spectacular,” she said. “They are amazing. But not everyone is that way.”

Short was asked about the perception among veteran journalists that younger reporters want to be more opinionated in their stories. She said that she has seen that, but not among all younger staffers. Because of their youth, some lack context for the stories they are covering, and she sometimes has to effectively tell them –not literally – to check the clips and rewrite the story.

When there is too much opinion in a story she is editing, “I gently excise it when I think it is the right thing to do.” She does this in a non-confrontational way, she said, and most reporters accept her changes without a fight.

As the staff has been reduced over the last three years or so, among the areas severely cut were digital staffers and those charged with “audience engagement.” The audience engagement team at one point had representatives to each section and worked with reporters and editors to better understand the audience they were writing for, with the goal of helping make stories more relevant to readers’ lives.

Short said some of these people were very good, while others were “goofy.”  They particularly helped the 2024 political reporting teams and the entertainment coverage. But building trust between the engagement staff and sometimes resistant reporters and editors was a slow process.

At times, she said, “we felt like we were like we were taken to the woodshed and spanked, rather than having a deep conversation about content, headlines and presentation.” Overall, however, Short found the good members of the engagement team valuable, and she wished there were more currently employed.

Short said she knows of no new initiatives to try to attract more people of color as readers of the paper or digital product, but she said the highly diversified staff continues to do a good job of story topic selection and using diverse sources, “as it should be.”

Asked her thoughts about some of the actions or statements about the paper made by its owner, she said it can be hard to figure out what he is doing or why he criticizes by name people who work on the paper. But ultimately, she said, as Managing Editor Hector Becerra (our last OFS speaker) told a recent meeting of senior editors, the answer is to “just go out and do great work.”

In response to how women are treated in the newsroom today, Short praised some of the female mentors she had in her early years, such as Narda Zachinno and Linda Matthews, as well as some of the men. The big issue in the newsroom today is not the role of women, she said, “but what the hell is going to happen.”

An unedited video of the Zoom call can be viewed at https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/1c_iI3loPC3ELXq0gJ9KDpnWvFHbCYgxrU2I589qaca3RAGO3cyUwf8-cOlfUII.5Tv5kPj2BuWQ4Spe?startTime=1748372553000. Use the Passcode: OFSLA525!