In late June 2007, Doug Frantz announced he was leaving the Los Angeles Times, where he had served as managing editor under Dean Baquet. He had taken the job at Baquet’s request and was widely understood to be a Baquet loyalist. After Baquet’s ouster in late 2006, the assumption around the newsroom was that Frantz would not stay much longer.
Then
Editor Jim O’Shea’s farewell memo praised Frantz as having “been a huge help to me, convincing people to give me a chance at a time of uncertainty and turmoil,” and credited him with “wisdom, candor, professionalism and solid news judgment.” Frantz’s final day was scheduled for July 6, 2007. O’Shea announced he would begin a process to select Frantz’s replacement.
The departure left open the obvious question that LA Observed and FishbowlLA had been tracking for months: would John Montorio — also part of what the LA-media press had nicknamed the Baquet boys — be next out, or would he stay and take Frantz’s slot?
Now
Frantz left the Times for the New York Times, where he served as deputy foreign editor and later as an investigative reporter. He subsequently moved to the U.S. State Department under the Obama administration, then to a senior role at the United Nations Foundation, and has continued in non-newsroom investigative and policy work into the 2020s. He co-authored the Pulitzer-finalist 2017 book The Outpost, drawing on his earlier reporting.
The broader LA Times trajectory the column was tracking moved past the Baquet generation entirely. Dean Baquet himself went to the New York Times, where he served as executive editor from 2014 to 2022. James O’Shea was fired by Hiller in early 2008 over budget disputes that proved to be the first of many. The “process of selecting a replacement” for Frantz folded into the much larger churn of the Sam Zell era and the eventual 2008 bankruptcy of the Tribune parent company. Within five years the masthead memo template the original FBLA post quoted had been replaced by layoff notices.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: June 2007 snapshot