JOANNE: So you raise a couple of questions there. I mean, one is simply the staffing issue. And it's interesting, when you came in a year ago, the L.A. Times, you went to the L.A. Times and said, "I have no intention of being the captain of the Titanic," and you also said that you didn't believe in kind of cutting your way to success. You, more than the other of your competitive set, have really made very, very deep cuts and particularly among the journalists. So how does that gel with providing the reader more and building on the papers to create a model of success?

SAM: Like everything else, we're dealing with process, we're dealing with changing methodologies of the way things were done before. If this gentleman over here is a reporter and he calls in and says, "I've got a story and you want to put it up on the Web," he talks to one copywriter, they put it all together, it's on the Web in 10 minutes. But if that same story with the same facts is going in the newspaper, then it goes to the copywriter, the section editor, the page editor, I mean, it goes to everybody. Okay? And you wonder why the newspapers can't financially compete.

JOANNE: But the newspaper is supposed to be giving you something more than the instant news that you get on the Web. Would you argue that your newspapers—after the year of cutting and attempting to fix the model—would you argue that the journalism is improved from when you purchased your newspapers?

SAM: Interestingly enough, my customers say yes. My customers say yes.

JOANNE: By what measure is that?

SAM: I've reformatted all eight newspapers—they're much louder; they've got more pictures; they have more color; they have easier navigation. I mean, simple things. I ride my motorcycle to work every morning…

JOANNE: Good for you.

SAM: I say goodbye to my wife as I walk out the door, and I used to ask her, "What's the temperature?" Because if it's bitter cold, there's a problem. And then I would see her go, "Argh!" as she tried to find where the weather is in the newspapers. And in the reformatted Chicago Tribune in the bottom left-hand corner it says, "64 today, 75 tomorrow, 83 the next day," in one quarter of an inch in the lower left-hand corner. Isn't that information that everybody wants?

JOANNE: But that customer…there's a couple of customers that you have. You're talking reader service. Another customer, obviously, is the advertiser, and your advertising has declined at a more rapid clip than some of your competitors, more so than he Times and USA Today…

SAM: Well, I think that's comparing leprosy to cancer. I mean, I beg to disagree with you, and I think Arthur Sulzberger is out here someplace, and I'm sure he would vie that his has gone down more than mine. [Editors note: In the third quarter of 2008, New York Times Co. ad revenue fell 14.4 percent, while Tribune Co. ad revenue fell 19 percent.] But the answer is everybody's advertising is dramatically down. We've seen literally the destruction of classified advertising. You know, not just in our paper, but in all the papers. There's somebody here, Mr. Craig, from Craigslist, who is responsible for that.

I think the answer is that we have to come up with a product that our customers want. In Chicago, we launched a product called RedEye. RedEye, which is delivered to the train stations and the bus stations every afternoon, is aimed to the 25-to-40-year-old. It's given away free. It has a higher circulation than the Tribune, and makes a profit. We launched a new paper in Chicago called Mash. It's delivered to 50,000 high schools free once a week, underwritten by Verizon and Nike, to reach perhaps the hardest demographic there is to reach. So these are paper products. They are successful.

JOANNE: And a lot of the products that you're talking about come as a result of focus grouping, and you've talked a lot about how you've done a lot of focus groups, and readers tell you they want short stories, and they want graphics, and they want big pictures. I find it curious that you are embracing focus groups because…and maybe this word has been tarnished now, but you've always been a maverick. Right? I mean, if you ran your business according to how focus groups told you you should run your business, you wouldn't be up here today.

SAM: Yeah, but the answer is you are acting like a journalist—okay?—because you grabbed the word focus group and, in effect, turned it from one element that's relevant in a hundred elements to somehow or another we're going to take one focus group and implement everything that they said, which is silly. One of the benefits of focus groups is you get a chance to listen to your customer. And all I'm saying is that there isn't a successful business out there that doesn't listen to their customer.