Five years ago, Paul Pringle and Matthew Doig were on the same team. Mr. Pringle, a veteran reporter at The Los Angeles Times, and Mr. Doig, an editor at the paper, worked on an article that would eventually reveal the drug abuse from a powerful former dean at the University of Southern California.
That report would lead to a series of other investigations involving USC, culminating in a Pulitzer Prize for Mr Pringle and two other reporters in 2019.
Behind the scenes, however, there was bad blood. Last week, Mr. Pringle a book, “Bad City”, who, in part, claimed that top editors of The Times, including Mr. Doig, attempted to delay and invalidate the original groundbreaking article, which described how the USC medical school dean used drugs on young people, including a woman rushed to hospital after an overdose.
mr. Doig, currently a research editor at USA Today, snapped back last week on mediumand called Mr Pringle “a fabulist who grossly misrepresents the facts to support his false narrative.”
Just as there is reliably a song of the summer or a must-see blockbuster, the journalism industry now has a top contender for the season’s media controversy. For the past two weeks, reporters and editors from New York, Washington and Los Angeles have exchanged notes and debated who was right and who was wrong.
Were The Times editors scrupulous, or were they cowards intimidated by a major urban institution that had also collaborated with the paper, including at a campus book festival? Had an investigative reporter stubbornly overcome hurdles his own newspaper had raised, or did he go too far in throwing blame? The New York Times even got involved in the controversy when the newspaper’s positive review of Mr. Pringle’s book received criticism from Mr. Doig and others.
“I mean, it’s fun gossip, right?” said Maer Roshan, the editor-in-chief of Los Angeles Magazine, who published: Mr Pringle .’s rebuttal on the Medium post of Mr. Doig on Monday afternoon.
Or, as Janice Min, the chief executive of The Ankler and former editor of Us Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter, put it: “It’s definitely summer, it’s definitely slow, and this has definitely risen to something people are talking about. “
Media controversies in Los Angeles often fail to attract the attention of a city where the entertainment industry is prevalent. But this vacuuming is different.
“I think part of the reason it’s stuck here in LA is that you can almost see it on screen in that story of heroic crusader versus one institution versus another institution that kind of has echoes of great editorial dramas that have been previously run by Hollywood were made,” said Ms. Min, whose newsletter and podcasting network Ankler covers about entertainment. “And in that sense, I think the story has really become appealing to people in LA because it has a cinematic quality to it.”
For journalists specifically, it also offered a rare look at the often messy business of putting together an investigative article. When Mr. Doig published his Medium post, he also posted primary documents. He published the first drafts of the article, along with his red-colored, handwritten notes in the margins.
Often, news stories that get extensive post-publication are the ones where something has gone horribly wrong. But this was the rare instance that I got a glimpse into drafts of an article that would eventually be published, and turned out to be bulletproof.
“I was intrigued because it’s not often you see an editor do everything and give up drafts of stories,” said Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia University School of Journalism, and a former editor at Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal. and The Miami Herald. “I teach a news editorial class, and that concept with all its markings becomes a great class exercise. It’s unusual to see an unpublished draft and then hold it up to a published, polished story and see what has changed, what has been brought forward and what has been taken out.”
Mr Pringle objected to how long it took for the article to be published — he and his colleagues had submitted a draft months earlier — saying the final draft didn’t “comply with” an earlier one, before the editors intervened. Mr Doig pointed out that the newspaper had published the article on its front page and it had an immediate impact.
The storm also hits an age-old nerve in journalism: the tensions in the editor-reporter relationship. While the goals of both are the same – to publish a story that has impact – their prerogatives and approach may differ.
“As an editor, you deal with writers, and writers have opinions about what should be news and how things are done,” said Mr. Roshan. “As an editor you have responsibilities towards your institution, the reputation of your institution and things like that.
“If you get sued, the magazine will pay the legal bills and cover the writer,” he continued. “As an editor, you have an extra obligation to make sure it works out. It’s a different kind of lens in which you approach stories.”
A month after that first article was published in July 2017, Mr Doig . said was fired, along with other top editors of The Times, Davan Maharaj and Marc Duvoisin. The company said at the time – The Times is now under different ownership – that the moves were part of a restructuring. Mr Pringle said it was because of an investigation into how they handled his USC article. Mr Doig said he never received an explanation as to why he was fired. Mr Maharaj, who has also objected to Mr Pringle’s claims, said he was told his resignation was part of a reorganization of the newsroom.
“We have done nothing wrong,” said Mr Maharaj, the former editor of The Times. “We challenged him to tell a much better story.”
mr. Duvoisin, editor-in-chief of The Times, said of Mr. Pringle: “There is no basis whatsoever for his claims.”
In interviews, both Mr. Pringle and Mr. Doig said they were encouraged to receive many messages of support from their colleagues. But both men are still not happy with how it all turned out – and are very confident that they are right.
Mr Pringle said: “Handling this gaslighting in my own profession. Is that nice? No, but it’s important work. I have to do it for the reader.”
Mr. Doig said in an interview that the experience was not one that he really enjoyed.
“I hate it,” he said. “I wish I was talking to you about anything else media related other than this.”
Mr Doig said he was considering whether to write a follow-up to his first Medium post.
“It’s an uncomfortable position to be in, but it’s better now that I’ve been getting emails from all corners of journalism,” he said. ‘That helped. But I don’t like this, and I’d rather do other things.”