How a high-flying media executive with a $1 million annual paycheck and big plans to revamp the LA Times found himself out of a job after 5 months
- A year ago, Los Angeles Times publisher and CEO Ross Levinsohn was put on unpaid leave after the publication of an NPR article accusing him of "frat-house behavior" earlier in his career.
- He'd been hired to turn around one of the US's leading daily newspapers, but after he left that plan was abandoned and the paper sold.
- His story combines a few of the big media stories of the past two years: the decline of traditional news organizations, the unionization of a newsroom, and the fallout from #MeToo-type claims.
- Speaking on the record for the first time, Levinsohn told Business Insider he thought the NPR story was "full of inaccuracies."
- But he didn't directly deny in a deposition that he had discussed whether female employees were "hot" and whether one worked as a stripper.
The sun had just set when Ross Levinsohn returned to his room at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel.
The newly named CEO and publisher of the Los Angeles Times had just finished a day of high-stakes investor presentations at the January 2018 Needham Growth Conference, an annual meet-up where hundreds of companies from an array of industries make their pitches for funding.
There, he revealed a portion of an ambitious plan to transform the struggling newspaper into a digital powerhouse.
Yet Levinsohn felt uneasy as he opened his laptop. The prior evening, he had received an email from NPR reporter David Folkenflik. Folkenflik was investigating inappropriate workplace behavior allegations about Levinsohn that spanned his three-decade long career.
There it was, a link to Folkenflik's story, "Accusations of Frat House Behavior Trail LA Times Publisher's Career."
The article described "frat boy" activities by an executive who'd been named as one of the defendants in two separate legal proceedings involving sexual-harassment allegations. They stemmed from stints he had at the '90s-era search engine Alta Vista and Fox Interactive Media.
Folkenflik's article cited court documents, financial filings, and interviews with 26 of Levinsohn's former colleagues and associates. It reported accusations that he'd used homophobic language and made sexist comments, including rating the "hotness" of female colleagues.
This was bad, Levinsohn thought, possibly career-ending.
He packed his suitcase and caught the next flight to Los Angeles, a day earlier than planned.
The next morning Levinsohn was put on unpaid leave, which lasted nearly three weeks. The newly formed Los Angeles Times Guild called for his resignation. The paper's then parent company, Tronc (now Tribune Publishing), hired independent law firm Sidley Austin to investigate the claims brought against him. A Tribune spokesman declined to comment for this story.
To the outside world Levinsohn appeared to be the latest powerful executive brought down by the #MeToo movement. To Levinsohn it felt like revenge.
Levinsohn, speaking on the record for the first time since then, told Business Insider that the NPR story was "full of inaccuracies." The cases settled with no sexual-harassment findings against Levinsohn. For Levinsohn - whom Tronc would eventually clear of the charges after finding "no wrongdoing" - the article felt like punishment after a fraught LA Times tenure, which had been full of unpopular and controversial decisions.
Some of Levinsohn's claims of inaccuracies don't hold up. His deposition left questions, and he didn't directly deny in a deposition that he'd discussed whether female employees were "hot" and whether one was working as a stripper.
Folkenflik is a respected reporter, and NPR stands by its reporting.
This story is not an apology for Levinsohn, who protests his innocence. It combines a few of the big media stories of the past two years: the decline of traditional news organizations, the unionization of a newsroom, and the fallout from #MeToo-type claims. It's also a rare opportunity to have a high-profile figure answer our questions on the record about workplace-culture accusations. Accompanying this story is a Q&A with Levinsohn in which we asked more detailed questions about the claims made about him.
Business Insider interviewed more than three-dozen people at the LA Times; its former parent company, Tribune Publishing; the LA Times Guild; sources close to Levinsohn; and Levinsohn himself to find out what happened to the executive. We reviewed court documents, financial filings, tweets, emails, and text messages.
Ultimately, the NPR article was the final straw in a series of events that culminated in Levinsohn's downfall as publisher.
Tides turn in the LA Times newsroom
Ross Levinsohn was an unlikely savior for the beleaguered LA Times when he was named CEO and publisher of the paper in August 2017.
The paper, once a crown jewel of American journalism, had become another struggling big-city daily. Though Levinsohn had been on the board of Tronc and Freedom Communications, he had no newspaper operating experience.
His career had taken off at the proto search engine Alta Vista. From there he moved through high-ranking positions at CBS Sportsline and Fox Interactive Media, where he orchestrated the purchase of MySpace.
In mid-2012, Levinsohn served as interim CEO of Yahoo and was succeeded by a splashy Googler named Marissa Mayer. He later became CEO of Guggenheim Digital Media, parent of The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and Adweek.
It was this unconventional résumé that impressed Levinsohn's new bosses. "Ross is pretty unique in the market," Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn told The Wall Street Journal when Levinsohn was appointed. "He has the background and history of executing digital transformation."
Levinsohn's job wasn't just to revive the newspaper, but to essentially reinvent it. The reward was a handsome $1 million guaranteed - a $600,000 base with a $100,000 bonus per quarter - plus an annual cash bonus that came with lofty expectations and stock options.
He inherited a dispirited newsroom. Fifteen years earlier, it had employed more than 1,200 reporters with bureaus all over the world and had won 44 Pulitzer Prizes. By August 2017 two-thirds of the staff had been slashed.
Levinsohn was not the first executive hired to fix things. A number of leaders with similar, highly touted reorganization strategies had come and gone, and staff was wary of its new leader.
"None of these ideas was new, and each successive leadership team presented them as if they had dreamt it up themselves," one editor said.
Another former newsroom staffer said, "We were not in a position to welcome [Ross'] message, no matter how it was delivered."
Lingering resentment and mounting mistrust of management hardened into calls for action during Levinsohn's tenure.
Before his arrival, the LA Times newsroom had considered joining a union. Talks had begun in December 2016, according to the LA Times Guild.
They were prompted by an arbitrary change to the LA Times' vacation policy, which effectively eliminated accrued vacation days. This was taken as an insult by many staffers, most of whom had not received raises in years.
Many big daily newsrooms, including those of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, are represented by unions, which are seen by proponents as efficient tools for collective bargaining, a means for pushing for better pay, newsroom transparency, and job security.
Unions like the NewsGuild or Writers Guild of America typically kick-start a campaign by identifying a workplace ripe for organizing, then assemble an organizing committee from within its ranks.
The union organizers then begin gathering information about the workplace in secret, as well as having one-on-one conversations with coworkers. It is not unusual to leak the findings to outside reporters either - as the Writers Guild of America did by reaching out to Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan when it wanted to fuel support among Vice Media employees - if they feel that it might help further the cause and swell support.
Newsroom interest in the union was divided until Levinsohn made a decision that turned the union drive into an all-out war against management.
"I remember somebody calling me during that whole period and saying, 'Well, what's work like right now?'" arts-and-culture columnist and guild cochair Carolina Miranda said on a panel in April 2018. "And I was like, 'It's like hand-to-hand combat every day.'"
The Disney debacle
Levinsohn's first order of business was to hire a lead editor for the paper. After considering 26 candidates and interviewing half a dozen of them, Levinsohn settled on Lewis D'Vorkin. In hiring D'Vorkin, Levinsohn called out his deep journalism and digital experience.
"This was as important of a hire as I could make," Levinsohn told the LA Times. "It was important to find someone who had deep experience in journalism ... and also who had deep digital chops. He really remade Forbes and he has grown it dramatically."
Unlike Levinsohn, D'Vorkin was a career newsman. He had appeared on the mastheads of The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and The New York Times. But it was his latest job as chief product officer at Forbes that raised eyebrows in the LA Times newsroom.
"Ross had a completely fair chance walking in the door," one newsroom source said. "But Lewis' reputation preceded him."
At Forbes, D'Vorkin had overseen a digital transformation of the venerable title, building it into one of the most visited business publications online. But the methods he used to grow traffic numbers were controversial to many traditional journalists.
D'Vorkin created Forbes' first digital branded-content efforts, which blurred lines between advertising and editorial content. He brought in outside contributors to write for the site and paid them based on clicks.
Journalism professor and media critic Jeff Jarvis called D'Vorkin's remodeled Forbes "the definition of a diluted media brand." According to Jarvis, D'Vorkin used Forbes' good name "as candy to attract more than a thousand contributors to supplement a few score editorial staffers." While this greatly reduced the cost of content creation, it also tanked the publication's credibility.
D'Vorkin didn't rule out using a similar digital strategy at the Times, which made reporters skeptical of his commitment to quality journalism.
"I have never seen an editor as loathed as he was," one newsroom staffer said. "He was completely unqualified and had no communication skills whatsoever."
One person recalled a meeting between D'Vorkin and the Times' social-media team. It started off well with D'Vorkin cracking jokes. But the team was left slack-jawed when D'Vorkin told them what happened to Forbes' social team: The company had decided to automate tweets and all eight members were fired.
"We all let out a trepidatious laugh," the employee said. "But imagine saying that to a newsroom already on edge."
But D'Vorkin recalled telling the team something entirely different when Business Insider reached out to him for comment. He said that Forbes had developed automated bots that were efficient in distributing both current and archival content and increasing pageviews. And that members of the team were not fired, but all went on to become social-media producers.
"They went from distributing to actually producing content; no one was fired from their job," D'Vorkin told Business Insider. "Actually, they got better jobs."
But the real moment D'Vorkin ruffled the LA Times newsroom occurred two weeks into his job, when he appeared to side with another company over his own journalists.
Just before D'Vorkin's arrival, the Times had published an investigative series exploring Disney's business ties with the city of Anaheim in September 2017. It reported that Disney had made campaign contributions to political-action committees, or PACs, in an effort to exert control over the city.
After the unfavorable coverage, Disney barred LA Times journalists from its movie screenings.
Disney's apparent reaction felt newsworthy to many Times journalists, who wanted to cover it. Other publications had been writing about the saga. But when this was suggested to D'Vorkin, he shot it down. Several employees told Business Insider that they were instructed not to tweet anything related to the topic.
For D'Vorkin, that the Times had run a note to readers explaining that Disney had declined to offer the paper advance screenings on November 3 was more than enough. He said that the Times "put the facts as they were" and that he wasn't interested in "getting into spats."
D'Vorkin added that he stands behind his no-tweeting diktat.
"It's the journalists' job to bring the same objectivity to tweeting as they bring to stories," he said. "And that meant tweets should be limited to reported facts, not opinions."
But among staffers the feeling was "we need to stand up for our own journalism," Carolina Miranda, the cochair of the LA Times Guild, said. "We were told not to tweet, and everyone tweeted anyway. It was a full-on insurrection."
D'Vorkin met with top Disney executives, and the company reversed its decision to bar the Times from screenings. Disney publicly attributed its change of heart to "productive discussions with the newly installed Times leadership."
D'Vorkin said "no kind of deal" was made.
In an all-staff meeting the following day, agitated staffers questioned D'Vorkin about the no-tweeting policy and demanded to know what had been said to Disney's executives.
"He gave very vague answers to very direct questions," a newsroom insider said. "He was very passive and kept saying that he did not believe in having an adversarial stance."
Ten days later, in November 2017, The New York Times ran a story by Sydney Ember about the LA Times newsroom meeting based on a recording it had obtained. This prompted D'Vorkin to call another all-hands meeting, where staffers say he called the leaks "unethical" and whoever did it "morally bankrupt."
D'Vorkin agreed he used the words "morally bankrupt," but said that "the person who tape-recorded a conversation without asking me first, in my opinion, was morally bankrupt."
"For our editor-in-chief to be calling somebody in the newsroom morally bankrupt to kind of do what we do was seriously off-putting," Miranda said.
Eventually, there was an investigation into who leaked the audio. In January 2018, Tronc accessed call and text logs made by employees on company-provided phones and narrowed in on business editor Kimi Yoshino.
When Yoshino was called in, she denied sharing any recording, but was promptly suspended anyway. The suspension came into effect on January 24, 2018, and Yoshino returned to work a week later.
Asked by Business Insider to comment on her reported suspension, Yoshino didn't answer directly, saying she preferred to move forward.
Some newsroom sources said they saw the Disney debacle as a tipping point for the paper, and a rallying cry for the union.
Today, Levinsohn stands by his choice of D'Vorkin, telling Business Insider, "Lewis had a successful career in newspapers (including The New York Times and Wall Street Journal) and is credited with turning around Forbes."
Digging up 'opposition research' on the bosses
After the Disney debacle, union efforts at the LA Times kicked into high gear, leading it to raise concerns about not just newsroom but corporate policies and restructuring plans under Levinsohn.
"Disney's blackout was one of many issues that concerned the newsroom - along with stagnant wages, pay equity, diversity, bloated executive pay, and accrued vacation (which the company had unilaterally taken away)," a spokeswoman for the guild told Business Insider.
The leaders of the union drive began reporting on management excesses and posting the stories on the guild's site. Miranda called these "the most spectacular pieces of journalism that the LA Times has done."
Another organizer described it as "opposition research" against their own bosses.
One of the first posts, from November 2017 and headlined "Private Jets and Golden Parachutes," questioned the disproportionate amount of money and perks given to Tronc executives. The company had spent $4.6 million leasing a private jet for chairman Michael Ferro.
"Executives with multimillion-dollar paychecks are saying, 'It's time to cut costs; it's time to tighten the belt,'" Pesce said at the same panel as Miranda in April 2018. "Their balance goes up, they get more jet money, and then we're told, 'You can't have vacation.' It's crazy."
The union's own reporting also led it to discover new, big editorial hires that Tronc had made but not yet announced as part of Levinsohn's planned restructuring. This list included former New York Times reporter Louise Story, The Washington Post's Sylvester Monroe, Will Tacy of Good Media, and former Forbes managing editor Bruce Upbin.
Staffers feared that these new hires meant Tronc management was building a "shadow newsroom," which would duplicate parts of the LA Times and lead to further layoffs.
"There were some really dark days there toward the end," national correspondent and union vice-chair Matt Pearce said during the April 2018 panel. "It looked like they really wanted to destroy the newsroom."
To some, these fears seemed confirmed when some of the management's plans eventually came to light.
On November 29, 2017, LA Times' then president, Mickie Rosen, sent a memo to Levinsohn laying out their next steps. The memo - which Levinsohn believes was intercepted by the union (some newsroom members say they knew of but declined to reveal how) - laid out a massive newsroom reorganization that Levinsohn and other top managers had been quietly working on.
According to this grand vision, which had already been approved by the board and would go into effect the following week, Tronc planned to cut $15 million from LA Times newsroom budget and invest $30 million in a new initiative called "Los Angeles Times Global."
LA Times Global would be a combination of editorial content, contributor content, and partner content. It would be organized around national verticals, then distributed across Tronc's other newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. It was essentially what D'Vorkin had done at Forbes, using the LA Times brand to create one central content network for all of Tronc.
Between 120 and 150 newsroom jobs would be eliminated, with marketing, finance, product, and engineering scheduled for further cuts. The paper's iconic downtown headquarters, home to the LA Times since 1935, was to be traded for new digs in suburban Playa Vista on the city's west side. Tronc also planned to centralize print production, form partnerships with publications such as Axios, and set up an East Coast bureau in New York.
Levinsohn told Business Insider that he had a goal of increasing, not cutting, jobs, and that the unannounced hires were part of his case to investors to hire top journalists to dramatically expand the LA Times brand and geographic footprint. He said he'd met with employees from across the company and sent company-wide emails to communicate his overall thinking.
"The reorganization was part of a bigger investment plan to compete in the evolving consumer landscape," Levinsohn said. "We wanted to expand the brand globally, using any and all resources we could."
Four days later, the guild's organizing committee filed to unionize and petitioned for NewsGuild-CWA representation.
The move was designed to effectively bring to a halt any plans that the new leadership had for the paper's digital turnaround, sources close to Levinsohn said. That's because once a union files to go public, the company must maintain the status quo.
"Unfortunately, we never had the chance to communicate our broader plan once the union filed," Levinsohn said. "We needed to pause any plans, including hiring new people as well as communications of our plans for the future."
The guild, however, denies intercepting management's plans.
"There were rumors in the newsroom about layoffs, but we never saw or heard anything concrete; if we had firm information about layoffs, we would have published it," a spokeswoman told Business Insider.
The guild said that it got confirmation of the layoff rumors only after the LA-based healthcare tycoon Patrick Soon-Shiong completed his acquisition of the paper in February 2018 and said publicly that Tronc had planned the cuts.
NPR publishes #MeToo allegations
On January 19, 2018, the results of a January 4 vote were in: 248 Los Angeles Times staffers had voted in favor of joining the NewsGuild union.
That same day, Levinsohn was put on unpaid leave as the company sought to investigate allegations of inappropriate conduct while he was an executive at other companies outlined in NPR's report.
On February 7, 2018, Sidley Austin - the firm hired to investigate the claims against Levinsohn - cleared him of the accusations of inappropriate behavior described in Folkenflik's NPR story and presented its findings to the board. These findings were presented orally, in person, and not detailed in a formal written report, a source familiar with the situation told Business Insider. Tribune Publishing did not release the findings.
Business Insider obtained documents from the two legal proceedings cited by NPR: the docket and an arbitration award from the Alta Vista case; and documents from the Fox Sports Networks lawsuit, which also named its parent company, News Corp., and its other subsidiaries.
While Levinsohn was named as one of the defendants in each proceeding, the NPR story didn't report on the outcome of these cases.
Court records show that the original complaint from the Alta Vista plaintiff, Christine Fox, who alleged sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, was referred to arbitration in late 2001.
The attorney arbitrator, as part of a court-alternative resolution, issued an award for $147,000-plus in Fox's favor against Alta Vista alone stemming from her allegation that she didn't get a big enough raise to reflect her moving to a more expensive city - but not on the claims for harassment, discrimination, or retaliation.
The award was not accepted by the parties, and the case continued before the court, where it was settled and ultimately dismissed against all parties in December 2002 following a settlement, according to the court docket.
In other words, neither the Alta Vista arbitrator nor court ever made a finding that Levinsohn engaged in sexual harassment. In fact, the arbitrator found as to all defendants that "there simply does not appear to be sexually explicitly conduct of such a[n] egregious nature to meet the requirement set by law in light of [Fox's] sophistication and worldliness."
NPR stood by its reporting that "Levinsohn conceded under oath that he had assessed the 'hotness' and bodies of female subordinates," and that "he also testified that he had discussed whether a female subordinate was working as a stripper on the side and that he engaged in speculation about whether she had slept with a co-worker."
The record supports that part of the NPR story. According to a portion of the deposition transcript in the Alta Vista case from August 8, 2001, viewed by Business Insider, Levinsohn, asked if he ever discussed with any other employees during business hours while at work "whether or not a female employee of Alta Vista was hot," responded, "Yes."
Later in the deposition, according to another portion of the same transcript viewed by Business Insider, Levinsohn is asked, "Did you ever discuss with any male Alta Vista employee the idea that Chris was working as a stripper?" His response: "Yes."
For weeks, people close to Levinsohn have denied he said those things. But when Business Insider told Levinsohn it had viewed those portions of the deposition transcript and asked him about them, Levinsohn said, "I don't remember saying this, but if I did say anything of this nature, it is unacceptable."
In the second lawsuit detailed in the NPR story, Amber Tribble alleged in an amended complaint against Fox Sports Networks, its parent, News Corp., and its subsidiaries that while working there she was sexually harassed by a subordinate of Levinsohn. Tribble's suit alleges that several executives were informed about it, but Levinsohn is not identified in that group of executives.
In the complaint there are no allegations that Levinsohn made any sexual advances or romantic or sexual overtures toward Tribble. But it does allege that when Tribble asked Levinsohn for a promotion, he pointed to a Fox Sports sideline reporter, who was a former pinup model, as a template for success, saying she "learned how to work her way to the top."
When asked by Business Insider for comment, Levinsohn said that he was referring to an employee "who was known for her drive and work ethic, and achieved success as a reporter for Fox Sports and later as a host of several television series."
Tribble had filed her amended complaint in January 2008 after withdrawing a lawsuit in December 2006, and refiling in June 2007. The case ultimately settled in April 2008, according to court documents. The docket shows that Tribble filed a "request for dismissal with prejudice" as relates to Levinsohn - or in other words, a request to dismiss him from her claims permanently - shortly before filing a notice of settlement of the entire case. There was again no finding that Levinsohn engaged in sexual harassment.
Business Insider couldn't reach Christine Fox for comment. Amber Tribble declined to comment for this story.
Levinsohn denies other accusations
The NPR story also went on to describe two 2013 incidents involving Levinsohn after he arrived at Guggenheim Partners that associate him with workplace-culture issues.
According to the article, Levinsohn told an executive at Guggenheim's Hollywood Reporter that he wouldn't stay at a lunch thrown by the publication to honor the entertainment business's most influential fashion stylists because he would have to be surrounded by gay people - using a vulgar epithet for them. The story went on to say that the THR executive reported the incident to Guggenheim's human-resources department.
Levinsohn denied to Business Insider that he made such a comment. He went on to say that such a claim would have to be investigated, and no such claim was reported to the company.
"I've supported all types of situations and people and been a big supporter of a person's right to choose," he told Business Insider. "If you look at my career history, I've had all types of people on my staff."
Rob Schoorl, who headed human resources for THR's parent company at the time and is now in the same role at Business Insider and INSIDER, told Business Insider he didn't remember getting such a report about Levinsohn.
The second incident involved a dinner and party thrown that same year in Las Vegas by THR sister publication Billboard. NPR reported that two eyewitnesses at the event said Levinsohn "aggressively kissed a woman, his hands ranging over her body, in open sight of others present, including his own employees."
Levinsohn denied this happened. He said a companion who was with him throughout the evening would corroborate his version of events, but declined to immediately identify her. However, NPR reported that in addition to the two eyewitnesses, it spoke to a third person to whom one of the eyewitnesses relayed the incident soon after.
Sources in Levinsohn's camp said he believed the NPR story was planted by disgruntled newsroom colleagues, without providing concrete evidence.
But Levinsohn has offered different opinions about the story's origin in speaking with Business Insider. Initially, he said he didn't know where the story came from or what motivated NPR. Then he accused NPR of being motivated by a desire to help the union succeed. He also said he became aware of the story less than 24 hours before it was published.
But newsroom insiders vehemently deny feeding any information to outside reporters. They also point out that, by the time NPR's story published, on January 18, 2018, the union vote was in with the exception of some mail-in ballots. The voting took place on January 4.
"He was so irrelevant to the union movement - the union movement is about our newsroom and the Los Angeles Times it's not about one figurehead who isn't going to be around," said an insider. "Ross was just so minuscule in it all."
Levinsohn said he's focused on moving forward after the article.
"It damaged my career and created tremendous pain for my family and me," he told Business Insider. "In effect, it was a character assassination using the societally important #MeToo movement. Thankfully, the truth prevailed, and I was cleared."
Folkenflik said NPR's aim was to report new and newsworthy information about the leader of one of America's most important news organizations. As for Levinsohn's denials of the accusations listed in the NPR story, he said the denials are just that, denials. "They are not proof."
Asked if it leaked information to NPR, the LA Times Guild spokeswoman said it was not in a position to comment on the sources of another news organization.
Either way, the months of turmoil took its toll on Tronc.
The company decided to abandon Levinsohn's turnaround plan. It sold the paper to Patrick Soon-Shiong, the healthcare tycoon, in February 2018.
Tronc chairman Michael Ferro resigned in March 2018, just before Fortune published a story in which two women accused Ferro of unwanted sexual advances.
Lewis D'Vorkin left in April 2018. He is now the CEO of the London-based tech company Newsroom AI.
Former Time Inc., Bloomberg, and Wall Street Journal exec Norman Pearlstine is now the LA Times' top editor, and Yoshino has been promoted to deputy managing editor, overseeing sports, business, arts, entertainment, and lifestyle coverage.
Levinsohn's career was stalled but not destroyed. After the paper's sale to Soon-Shiong, Levinsohn returned from his unpaid leave and was named chief executive of Tronc's digital arm, Tribune Interactive. On January 17, 2019, he and Tronc CEO Dearborn left the company along with Rosen, Levinsohn's deputy during his tenure as the LA Times' publisher. It's unclear how the NPR article will influence Levinsohn's future.
The LA Times newsroom has managed to stay intact. It has skirted brutal layoffs endured by other Tronc publications, such as The Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News, where half the editorial team was fired.
"We talked to a lot of people at the LA Times about their experiences over the last year," union vice-chair Pearce said. "They say that the union saved the paper."