Mónica Lozano: Interview #3

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: Mónica, I want to start today from about 1985, which is when we left off last time. That's when you first came to La Opinión. Your decision to come here, we talked about it a little bit, but I want to know more about that, why you decided to take this job after resisting it for so long.

Lozano: I had mentioned, the last time we talked, that it was a combination of factors, and everything seemed to come together just at that moment. The management of the company had been in the hands of my father, my brother, and my sister. Towards the end of '84, my sister left for good and moved to Italy, so it was my brother who was helping my father. My father had a medical condition that was quite serious. He was hospitalized, and my mother was very concerned. My brother was under pressure because he was running the paper by himself, no longer had my sister to help him, and my dad was quite serious at the time. So my family literally called me on the telephone, [and] asked me to come to Los Angeles so that we could talk, and asked me then to consider coming back.

I, at the time, had been in San Francisco for nine years. I had been doing a lot of different things on my own. As well as trying to learn a skill and get ahead professionally, I had also become involved in some of the community organizations in San Francisco, and saw a lot of different issues that I thought needed to be addressed and that weren't being dealt with properly. During the course of the years, I had conversed with a lot of friends who literally said to me, "If you really want to do something, why don't you consider going back to La Opinión where you have the ability to really make some changes. If you're concerned about issues, you have a vehicle in La Opinión that speaks to the population and that really has [the] ability to make some change."

So it was for those two reasons really, combined with some personal issues in my own life. My parents asking me to come back, my realizing that La Opinión was important in terms of the kinds of things that I wanted to do, and that I needed to consider that as an important professional opportunity, I decided that it might be the right time to come back.

I said yes. I came back, but I came back with reservations. I made it very clear to them that I wasn't sure if I wanted to, one, live in Los Angeles, and, two, whether or not it would appropriate for me to be at La Opinión, whether I would enjoy it and want to stay here, and also whether or not I would feel capable and qualified to come back into a newspaper, when I hadn't done daily newspaper work up until then.

Biagi: When you talk about issues that you felt were really important, what were some of the issues on your mind that you felt had been overlooked?

Lozano: I moved to San Francisco in 1977, and there was a new immigrant Latino population in San Francisco that was mostly a refugee population, people who had moved from both El Salvador and Nicaragua, as a result of civil wars in both countries. Since I was there at the time that there was this large influx of refugees, it was apparent that the city wasn't set up to accommodate them. Social services weren't being provided, the issue of language, the schools were substandard.

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Lozano: We had talked about this the last time also. I personally always have, and I think everybody reacts to their environment differently. I think I probably did more than my brother and sister. Psychologically, I don't know what it is the makes certain people behave different ways under different circumstances. We grew up in a neighborhood that wasn't a Latino neighborhood. We grew up in Newport Beach. I think we were probably the only Mexican family in the neighborhood. And yet for some reason we were able to maintain a strong sense of identity internally within my family. We had close ties to our immediate family in Mexico, and for some reason it was always very important to me, something I felt very strongly about.

Biagi: Did you visit family in Mexico any more than the rest of your family members, brother and sister?

Lozano: Yes, I did. We used to go down there as a family. My siblings and I would go to Mexico every summer until I was twelve or so. By then, my brother and sister decided they really would prefer not to go to Mexico, and I would continue to go down there by myself.

Biagi: So when you came here in 1985, what did you see yourself doing? How did you see yourself incorporating that change into what you were going to do? Was it a realistic picture of what happened, do you think, eventually?

Lozano: I came to Los Angeles with the title of managing editor, and I wasn't asked to get involved in the editorial product. I was asked to come to manage the editorial department. Essentially it was a management position. In that sense, I didn't doubt that I would be able to do it. I had worked on my own, and really worked myself up the ranks to management positions, had been a manager and supervisor for years prior to that, so I didn't doubt my capacity as a manager.

I was totally unfamiliar with the workings of a newsroom, so that was difficult for me. I went through a period where I wondered whether or not I was the right person to be here and doing this, how people would respond to me, and what the reaction would be. I realized, once I was here, that it was a fascinating job and that the editorial side of the newspaper was really what attracted me the most. So then it became more a question of, how do I get in? How do I develop a space for myself within the newsroom on the editorial side, not just on the management side?

Biagi: Was there resistance to you at first, do you think, in any way?

Lozano: I think people were torn. There were some people that saw it as natural that the daughter of the owner would get involved in the newspaper, and didn't resist at all, in fact, thought it was a good thing, and opened themselves up to me and welcomed me and saw me as part of the family. Because I was part of the family, it was important for me to be here, and so of course you would be working at La Opinión. Other people who I think had been at the paper less time and felt less of that family connection to the paper were much more skeptical and somewhat resistant to both my capacity and also my motivation. Was I here to take over, and what did that mean to them and their position and their ability to move up, and those issues.

Biagi: Do you remember any specific incidents of either people that told you how glad they were that you were here, or people who resisted your coming into the newsroom?

Lozano: I don't know if I can think of any specific incidents, but I did go through a period, probably six months after I'd come back, where I felt isolated, that I had been isolated. I literally thought then that I should leave, that I wasn't ever going to be able to do anything.

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Lozano: We've learned to work well. It's 1994, and I started nine years ago, so we've learned how to work together. It has been difficult, there's been times when it has been very difficult, and partly because we at times fall into the brother/sister relationship, as opposed to publisher/editor relationship. I'm quite willing to be publisher/editor when we're on the job. I would assume that that's the type of relationship that we should have. Certainly we're friends, we interact, and our kids do Easter egg hunts together and all of that, but when we're here I expect the same type of relationship with him that any editor would want with their publisher. We haven't found the way to sustain that. Every once in a while, we'll fall back into sibling behavior. [Laughter.]

I suppose from my perspective, at that time way back in '85, I wanted him to support me more. I felt like I was only here because they had asked me to come back. They had asked me to do certain things, and I was getting them done, and that I deserved his support. I didn't feel at the time that I was getting it.

Biagi: So you were in charge of hiring, you said. When you arrived here, I remember you telling me that the newsroom didn't have quite the look that it has today in terms of personnel. What effect did your being here have on the change in the newsroom, who's out there and the mix of people?

Lozano: It seems that up through the 1970s, the mid-1970s, La Opinión was still operating as a small family operation. The number of employees was still relatively low, and the interaction was different. Everybody was family, everybody knew each other. Company-wide, I don't know if there were more than seventy employees, and some of them had been here with my grandfather. Some of them literally started the newspaper and had watched it grow and knew everybody, knew their children and were godparents to each other. In the mid-eighties, when I came in, it had expanded, but not a lot. As it was growing, as more and more were being hired, there was a sentiment that La Opinión was getting too big. We were losing our closeness, we were no longer family. You would go into the lunchroom and you might not have met somebody that was at the table before.

So I think people were feeling a little reluctant to let it change as much as it was changing. It was also getting younger. The new hires, for the most part, were much younger, very multi-ethnic, people from different countries, from all over Latin America. Up until then, I don't know if it was literally 100 percent Mexican, but it was almost all Mexicans who worked here, and we started hiring people from South America and Central America. All of those changes were difficult at the time for people. There were more women, younger people, and people from other countries. Like any place where you deal with differences and diversity, whatever you want to call it, we went through our own growing pains trying to expand.

Biagi: When you talk about diversity within Latino population, were you conscious, as you were hiring, that you wanted to do that?

Lozano: No. I wasn't really paying much attention at the time to diversity issues. I don't think many people were. What I was looking for was competence in certain areas. We were very weak in political reporting; we did almost zero of it. We had one individual who was on staff who is from northern Mexico but had come to L.A. relatively young, got his journalism degree at Cal State-L.A., and so he really learned his journalism here, having gone through a program here. He was the only one on staff who had really any inkling about how things worked here. So as we decided to reorganize the department and looked at our weaknesses and where we needed to strengthen our coverage, we needed to strengthen just about everything.

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department came to the third floor, and I literally and physically left. Most of my activity was directly related to the running of the weekly that we had in the San Fernando Valley.

Biagi: Which was, you said, quite successful in terms of editorial product, but not as financially successful as you would have liked.

Lozano: Yes.

Biagi: So then at what point did you come back down to the third floor? And did your title change, or did they keep calling you associate publisher?

Lozano: I came back down to the third floor because the editor left, and took another job.

Biagi: What year was that?

Lozano: It must have been the very end of 1991. I was asked to take on the responsibility of redesigning La Opinión in 1991. In the middle of the year, we decided that we needed to raise the cover price of the newspaper from 25¢ to 35¢ daily, and from 50¢ to 75¢ on Sundays. We felt that our market could withstand the raise in rates for the daily, but that for Sunday, 75¢ was probably more than the perceived value of the paper. So we decided that we needed to redo our Sunday product altogether, as well as redesign the entire publication.

We had been working on redesigning for quite some time, but it had gotten shoved onto the back burner because of the physical move of our installation, and different things that complicated everything, but we gave ourselves a specific day where we wanted to launch our redesign as well as our new Sunday product, and hopefully convince people that it was worth spending more money now to buy us. So I took over that project.

We looked at the Sunday product. We came up with some fabulous ideas. [Laughter.] I laugh, because little by little, we've slowly but surely ended up discontinuing almost all of them just because we couldn't sustain the costs of producing them.

Biagi: Such as? What were some of your ideas?

Lozano: Well, I'll tell you, because the phenomenon is very unique to La Opinión. We had the redesigned main jacket. Our sports section stayed intact, but we added to it our Sunday sports special. Our Sunday sports special was full color, with in-depth interviews, analysis of games, looking at coaches. It was more of an in-depth magazine style approach to our sports coverage, with full color. That was called "Tiempo Extra." We also launched, for the first time, a standalone travel section預gain full color, with all of the travel content that you would expect to find in a travel section, but geared to our market, local getaways, inexpensive trips, going back home, this is what you need to know about customs, etc. Both travel and some service information in there.

We redesigned our entertainment section to have included a full page "Super Reportaje," a super interview with big-name stars. The front page would be full color, and it would be this huge picture of your favorite singer. It would have little biographical facts and an interview with some great catchy facts of, you know, favorite food, favorite this, how you got started, and what's your relationship to your mother. It was very fluff, kind of light, gossipy stuff, but we thought that it would work very well, especially if we could combine it with people who are coming to town. If next week or in two weeks there's going to be a concert, this would run two weeks in advance. The reader would hold on dearly to that copy, take it with him to the concert and get it

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Lozano: It means your main headline runs the full width of the newspaper.

Biagi: And it's large.

Lozano: And it's very large. You might have a story that is mediocre in terms of its value, its news value, and we were still running it as if it was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Every day!

Lozano: Every day. And that's a good point, because it becomes so redundant that it doesn't have the same impact as when you use it occasionally. So we decided that when we redesigned the newspaper, our headline needed to be the type size and the width that corresponded to the weight and the substance of that article. We would have, some days, a newspaper that appeared with four-column headlines or three-column headlines or some days just a one-column story on the right-hand side, and that doesn't work for street sales. If you're walking down the street or you're driving by in your car and you pass a rack, and what you see in there is nothing but grey type on grey paper, newsprint, and something doesn't jump out at you, there's no reason to pull over and drop your quarter in. There's absolutely nothing that entices you to stop and take a look.

In 1991, even though we had redesigned the paper and thought we were offering a much better product, we had raised the cover price and were asking people to plunk down more money, we weren't convincing them to do it. We weren't helping them to see the value in purchasing La Opinión. And in July of 1991, two weeks after we'd raised our cover price, the state of California passed a law that imposed a sales tax on newspapers. So in two weeks, we went from 25¢ to 38¢, which is very close to 40¢. It felt like, for most of our readers, too much money, and our circulation just plummeted. We dropped circulation. We had been averaging, prior to then葉his again, after the Persian Gulf War and a number of big news events that had really pushed our circulation up. After the Persian Gulf War, we were at 120, 130 average. Our highest we had ever gotten was to 140, 140,000, right during the war, and we were able to keep it up when were averaging about 120,000. After the sales tax and the price increase, we dropped to below 100,000, and we weren't able to recoup our lost circulation.

Biagi: Does that mean at the newsstand, somebody had to put in 40¢, because it can't take 38¢?

Lozano: Well, our racks take 35¢. Racks don't get taxed. But at a store, either you played with pennies trying to find change, or you put down 40¢. And so to you, you were paying 40¢. Even though you got two pennies back, it essentially felt like 40¢ at a store.

Biagi: So you lost at least twenty thousand?

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Biagi: You say that you lost so much circulation, how long did that take?

Lozano: It was a matter of months.

Biagi: Less than six months, would you say?

Lozano: Yes, less than six months. Like all newspapers, when you raise your cover price, you plan on a loss of revenues. Most newspapers are able to recover within a year. It takes no longer

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know, now newsprint is the most expensive item other than personnel expenses, payroll, in any newspaper.

Biagi: In the '91 period, was there ever a point at which you felt you would have to lay off people at the paper?

Lozano: Yes, we certainly talked about laying people off, and whether or not that was going to be necessary. We froze hiring. In the heyday, the scale for salary increases could be on the low end, at 8 percent, and on the high end, 12 to 15 percent. Now it's cost of living, so it could be 2 or 3 percent, if anything, and only if the paper feels that it can continue to pay salary increases. All we can say to employees is that even though we understand how hard it is, at least we're not laying people off.

Biagi: I bring it up only because of the family idea.

Lozano: Oh, no, it's been terrible, everything combined, you're absolutely right. People felt like there were so many things that we used to do for our employees, and now not only have we gotten bigger and more impersonal, but we stopped doing things for them. We've cut out the company picnic. We used to have big parties two or three times a year for all of the employees, Christmas bonuses, turkey giveaways. I mean, we would do things that were very generous for the employees. But as we watched revenues shrinking and expenses continuing to go up, we had to stop doing a lot of that, and people resented it. [Tape interruption.]

Biagi: So let's begin again our discussion of what happened in the early nineties at the newspaper because of finances, because of the family feeling that everybody had, and then you said it was pretty bad, people coming to you and talking about things the way it used to be.

Lozano: Right. La Opinión, up until then, had been able to provide a lot of bonuses for their employees, whether it was the company picnic or the big parties that we would have for the employees, days off that other companies wouldn't offer, Christmas bonuses, etc. And we were unable to continue it. As our revenues started to shrink and expenses increased, we found out we weren't able to do what we had been able to do up through the eighties. So we discontinued the picnic, we only had one big party a year instead of the two, and we currently don't even have that. We finally reinstated it and cut elsewhere, because employees were upset that they weren't at least having one occasion when everybody could get together and socialize, as opposed to just being in a working environment.

But, for example, when we discontinued the food coupons that we offer people for Christmas謡e would offer them a coupon for redemption at a big supermarket悠 literally had a group of women come into my office and say, "We depend on that every year for our Christmas meal, and where's our food coupon?" And having to say, "You're just not going to get it this year." I think that the only saving grace in all of this is that we literally did not lay anybody off, and we still have not had to lay anybody off. We seem to be coming out of the recession, revenues are catching up with projections, and circulation has certainly recuperated. So we're doing better, but we've passed a couple of very critical years in the last two years, very difficult.

Biagi: It was interesting that it happened at a time you redesigned the paper and everything.

Lozano: Yes. The other thing that had happened is that as both an institution and a news product, we have, I think, advanced tremendously. The newspaper is much more complete, it's much more ours. The stories are bylined. Our reliance on wire services is limited to international

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When the announcement was made, we, as a family, the Lozano family and as La Opinión, had already talked with a number of close friends and community leaders within the Hispanic community, to let them know of the impending sale and to explain to them, from our perspective, what it meant and what it didn't mean. We explained to them that the Lozano family still retained control of the newspaper, we still retained control of the board of directors, that the sale wasn't to the Los Angeles Times, but to the parent company, Times-Mirror, and that it really was a relationship at the corporate level and not at the operational level. Because of course, in this market, there's a lot of skepticism as to the L.A. Times' ability to service the Hispanic market. They've been trying to, I think, for a number of years and have gone about it different ways, and I think are still trying to. The community is, I think, quite skeptical.

So it was important to us for the community to understand what this association meant and what it meant to us to sell 50 percent of the company, especially since it's so steeped in tradition. It depends so much on the notion that it was born out of struggle and it continues to struggle, and the dedication with which it was founded. The community responds to that. They understand what La Opinión is as an institution, and the fear was that we were selling off to a big corporation and that we would become less interested in their needs, more commercial and more institutional, like you said.

Biagi: So it all kind of congealed at the same point?

Lozano: Yes, those were very difficult years.

Biagi: You talk about La Opinión as if it's not only just a newspaper. People who don't know it, from any other part of the country, would think, well, it's just another newspaper. What would you tell them about it? Is it just another newspaper?

Lozano: I don't think so, and I think that most of our readers don't think so. Certainly even those who are not our current readers, but who have lived and grown up with La Opinión in Los Angeles, don't think so. Again, it goes back to its roots, and to the decade of publishing under very adverse circumstances, and in a population� [Tape interruption.]

Biagi: We were talking about the relationship of Times-Mirror and the Lozano family, and the newspaper, is it just another newspaper?

Lozano: I don't think it is. You always want to think that you have a more direct relationship with your audience than you may have. You aspire to have that type of a relationship. At least we do. Now, maybe that's the difference. Maybe most newspapers don't aspire to have a direct and intimate relationship with their readers, but we do. We always have, since my grandfather started the paper, throughout its sixty-seven, sixty-eight years, and that gets played out in different ways. It used to be, for example, when I said that the newspaper was founded by my grandfather as a Mexican newspaper, the paper was very involved in the Mexican community, its cultural events, the beauty pageants, the young women's leagues, the money drives for orphanages in Mexico, and all of those charitable activities. They were not charitable, they were almost more familial. It was a different sort of relationship.

We've always tried to maintain that. The difference now, 1994, is that the population in Los Angeles is so huge, that there's no way that we can have that type of relationship any longer with "the community." There's no such thing anymore as "the community" in L.A. It's very large and very complex and very diverse, and there are segments and sectors and different populations, and there's newcomers, and there's residents who are third, fourth, fifth generations.

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Lozano: Yes, definitely. That's certainly the case.

Biagi: Which would differentiate you, I think, from an institutional newspaper, do you think?

Lozano: Probably. I don't know if the readers of the L.A. Times would expect them to be involved in certain causes or certain charities. I think that the readers of our paper and the viewers of Spanish-language TV and those that listen to Spanish-language radio probably do have that expectation. There are organizations that are watchdog organizations, that make sure that media puts back into the community. Spanish-language television, which is where Danny Villanueva comes from, has really been taken to task for its contribution back to the community more so than we ever have.

Biagi: But if it were true here, and if it is in some way, what would those organizations be expecting you to participate in and help or support? Do you do that?

Lozano: Oh, yes. We now have a department, a community affairs department. Community affairs wasn't born out of anybody saying, "You do this," or, "You do that." It became a way of us streamlining what we were already doing a lot of. If you'll recall, in fact, the relationship of La Opinión to the Los Angeles Hispanic community has always been a direct one, and we've certainly always donated both time and money and resources to a lot of nonprofits in this city. It just became a way of deciding the priorities of the company for the community and organizing it in a way that was much more manageable than it had been before, but we do a lot of that.

Biagi: Would you say in any way that that affects your point of view, the point of view of the newspaper? That might be an ethical question, for instance, for the newspaper to be involved in community organizations and then cover the issues.

Lozano: I wouldn't allow a reporter to be involved in an organization that he was being asked to cover. I do think that that becomes a problem. We do have, as an institution, for example, very good relationships with organizations which are primary sources for some of our reporters. I don't know how that affects the source's perspective when they get a call from us, and I wouldn't even care to speculate, but I don't think it affects our ability to be objective and critical if we need to be objective and critical. I do think, though, that as an institution, we do become involved in causes, and we don't have a problem with that. We think it's absolutely appropriate as an institution to have a social agenda.

Our social agenda, if you want to call it that, has prioritized some issues that we perceive to be the most important, and get involved in activities based on those priorities. The first one is education. Everything starts there, and the newspaper knows that, most corporate citizens understand that, parents understand that, everybody understands that education has to be a primary concern. And so La Opinión does a lot of things involving education. I also have an education reporter. I don't think our involvement in newspapers and education, for example, in any way sways his ability to report on the board of education.

Biagi: Newspapers In Education (NIE), which is the program that brings newspapers into the classroom.

Lozano: Exactly. Newspapers In Education has become almost a full-time job at La Opinión. Newspapers In Education essentially takes the newspapers into the classroom. It's an organized relationship between this newspaper and the school district and individual schools who want to use the paper as a teaching vehicle. As far back as I can recall, there have always been solicitations

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Biagi: You say that the newspaper represents struggle. Have you had cultural struggles with people saying to you, "You're Latino so you don't belong here"? Or have people made that identification with you throughout your life, or have you made that identification?

Lozano: No, I was born here. My dad grew up in San Antonio, Texas, when San Antonio was a very segregated city, Mexicans lived on one side and non-Mexicans lived on the other side, that he literally went through the period where kids were punished for speaking Spanish and for being here. But that sense of oppression I never dealt with. I was never personally affected by it, and I certainly never internalized it.

Biagi: Has the newspaper ever been criticized by its readers for not being aggressive enough? And if so, for which issues, do you think?

Lozano: The paper was criticized by certain segments of the population during the seventies, late sixties, mid-seventies, when it was just seen as not radical enough. There were radical movements, the Brown Berets, the Raza Unida party, and a lot of very aggressive Chicano organizations. La Opinión was seen as not radical enough. And it's true. [Laughter.] Definitely we're not radical, by the way.

Biagi: Why do you think your father wouldn't wear a brown beret, do you think? For you?

Lozano: There are a lot of reasons, but essentially it's because he didn't share those values. He was not of that way of thinking at all. To see my dad in a brown beret is comical.

In the time since I came back to La Opinión, I can't recall that we've ever been really criticized for what I would call important reasons. You always have people who don't agree with you or think that you haven't done enough, who threaten to boycott or refuse to buy your paper again. But the sense that the community felt that we had turned on them or that we had abandoned them, I can't recall.

Biagi: Let's stop and we'll get a new tape.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Biagi: We were talking about cultural changes that happened in the newsroom.

Lozano: Right, and the relationship with the community.

Biagi: How does it enhance what goes on in the newsroom? For instance, if you not only have a culturally diverse, but you have a gender diverse newsroom, what changes, do you think?

Lozano: Gender diversity certainly brings a different perspective to what we cover and how we cover it. I haven't quite decided whether or not it really is that women perceive things differently and so our approach to it as we report on it is different, or whether it's not a combination of things which have to do with how editors perceive women and what they assign to them, which I think is also a big part of it.

For example, on our staff, our metro desk, our reporters, we have probably more women than men right now. It's a very small staff, it's only ten people, but I know at least five are women. I would expect them to cover things as well as anybody else. I mean, there's no differentiation in our expectations. On our features desk, there is a difference. I have a woman

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over fifty. I'm talking about the circulation director, the advertising director, our production manager. Everybody at the top in this company is relatively young.

My brother and I are relatively young. I'm thirty-seven right now, and my brother is thirty-nine. We are very aware of our personalities, of our qualities, and our way of thinking, and how different it is from how it was ten years ago with my father for example. You know, we're young, we're much more contemporary, very modern, and want the paper to be young and contemporary and modern, and our readers should get that. We've done a lot of reader studies, market studies. The most interesting thing about them is that the perception of the newspaper, up until a couple of years ago, was that the paper was very conservative. Editorially speaking, its line and its perspective was very conservative, very traditional. It was written for older people. It didn't have anything to do with me and my life.

We were disconcerted, to say the least, because we didn't think that we were any of those things. We thought we were young and "with it," and talking about contemporary issues, and your life, your lifestyles, and your problems. But the perception was one of La Opinión that was stuck in the fifties, that had just not moved forward. That was one of the reasons why we redesigned and we changed the logo, put more color, and launched the new product. Part of it was the same material that you would have found in the paper two years ago, but packaged differently so the people would say "Aha! Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is something in there for me, mother in my twenties."

Biagi: What went into your thinking in redesigning the paper of competing with Spanish language media? Did you feel like you had to compete with broadcast journalism?

Lozano: We had started talking about the redesign years ago, towards the end of the eighties, early nineties, mostly because the paper had just never changed. We still had an old-type face, the layout was very disorganized. You couldn't follow a story. It would start on the third column, then drop down the second column, and then go back across to the first column. It wasn't organized, it wasn't helpful, and it looked like things were just thrown in there. We had a method of diagramming pages, where six or seven different people would be working on different pages, and there was no consistency. You could have page two in one typeface, and page three would be completely different because somebody else had done it and was just using their creative imagination. [Laughter.]

Of course we had rules, you know, only certain typefaces and only certain headlines, etc., but if you were to go page to page, you would think you were reading seven different newspapers. It was very strange. And it was unexciting. It was a very blasé newspaper. So we wanted to organize things, we wanted to make it more modular and easier to read, more helpful in terms of how you could [move] to other parts of the paper, things that would draw you in and help you to turn the page and move from story to story. So that was really what had driven us.

We also [were] learning about our market through market research. If you recall, we had only started doing market research. We had just developed a marketing department right around that time when we had lost circulation. We felt like we needed to do something to entice them back to the paper.

We weren't necessarily competing with broadcast, we were just looking for ways to improve the product and convincing people that you need us. In that sense, maybe we were competing with broadcast because we've always used the argument that you don't get the depths

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up through the seventies. It really didn't have a large circulation, and so its impact was almost more symbolic than real.

The Lozano family, I think, probably played a more important role as leaders within the community. Certainly my grandfather was one, and my father was a leader in two communities, really bridged the two communities, the Mexican community and the Anglo business community. He became quite well respected. I think that the impact that we have now is much greater, and so people would say in the last decade, La Opinión really has taken off and has come into its own. It's much more important now than it has been, partly because of the numbers and partly because of these outreach campaigns that we've developed, and partly because of our own personal relations.

L.A. has changed. L.A. now has a very strong network of Latinos that are in very high positions, well-placed positions. I think my brother and I are more apt to be in those circles, so that the paper is perceived as being in those circles.

Biagi: Political circles, would you say?

Lozano: Well, many circles葉hey're political, commercial, and social. They could be anything, whether it's the Central City Association and the Chambers of Commerce. La Opinión is a big business. It employs five hundred people, it's got very substantial revenues, and my brother interacts with the business community quite a bit.

Biagi: What do you do?

Lozano: I have less of a direct relationship with the business community. I'm much more involved in the issues that we cover. So in terms of interacting with politicians and community groups, etc., I do much more of that.

Biagi: So if we had to place you in this picture, and we're writing it in the year 2050, how would you write the history so far of your role in the Lozano family and certainly in La Opinión. How would you characterize it?

Lozano: I've been told, so it's partly what I think and partly what others think, that I'm the conscience of the paper, that the paper has really become involved in the issues because I wanted to get the paper involved in those issues. I think I have the soul of the company and it's reflected in what we're doing and what we're covering. My brother is good at the business side of publishing the newspaper. He's the publisher, and he's good at being the publisher. I'm drawn to the content of the paper, the coverage, the issues, the special reports. I like being the editor, and that I'm good at being the editor, and I've found a way to do it so that it's really reflective of our community. You can't publish a newspaper and be successful if you stop being relevant. So the ability of La Opinión to continue to be in touch is something I think that I've brought to the table.

Biagi: In those issues, we talked last time about immigration was one issue, and you'd done a special supplement, hadn't you recently, about that?

Lozano: Recently what we just did is a ten-part series on immigrants and the contributions of immigrants. We debated back and forth about how legitimate was it to do a series that looked at the contributions of immigrants to society, and to label it as such.

Biagi: Was that your idea, or where did the idea come from?

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burden. So we wanted to be able to get this into the hands of everybody who's talking about immigration as an issue and who probably isn't reading our newspaper. It could be elected officials in Washington or it could be teachers in the central valley. There are huge numbers of people that we would like to have this information and aren't going to get it if we just leave it in La Opinión.

Biagi: Another issue that might be a difficult one, and it hasn't come up in the last few years but it continues to rise up again like immigration, would be abortion. How is the paper positioned on that issue?

Lozano: The publisher had changed. When my father was the publisher, the paper was against abortion. But we tried not to editorialize a lot, because there was real division among the editorial board over the issue. When the publisher changed, so did our public position on abortion. We currently believe in, and defend, a woman's right to choose.

We are independent enough to challenge certain institutions in our community, including the church, and especially knowing how strong the Catholic Church is among Hispanics. And yet just like on abortion and our position that a woman has the right to choose, we've always been for the prevention of AIDS through the use of condoms, for example, which the church has been against. We've been for needle-exchange programs as a method of reducing the incidence of AIDS, for example, which the church has always been against. I think that on certain issues we're willing to stand up to traditional institutions in our community and say, "That's not what we believe." And we think that we should speak out about it.

Biagi: Have there been some arguments over that at all?

Lozano: There are certainly arguments among the editorial board, but the dissenting voice has always been outnumbered.

Biagi: Has your father and your brother and you had discussions about this, too, about the editorial policy of the paper?

Lozano: Yes. Oh, yes. But we have discussions about預t least we used to. Now my brother and I really don't consult unless there's a real question, because we're pretty clear on what his position is, and it's relatively consistent with the rest of the editorial board's, and so we don't need to consult with him often. But there have always been some areas of discussion and disagreement.

Biagi: With your father still in position here or still active and around, there might be a feeling that you would defer to your father's point of view on editorial issues. But there's not here? He seems willing to let you run the paper.

Lozano: He is now. It took a long time for that to happen, though. When he initially retired as publisher and named by brother publisher, that was in 1986, and my dad still maintained an office and came in almost every day, and ran it as if he was running it. It was very hard for him to let go and for him to let my brother make decisions without those decisions being questioned. But he's stopped being so directly involved in the newspaper and has certainly recognized, I think, my brother's capacity to manage the paper. And like I said, our greatest periods of growth, not as a reflection of my father but just as a reality, the greatest periods of growth have been under my brother's management, and I think we've done well.

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unionization and collective bargaining. It's not that. I think really literally it was an issue of, "Do I feel like I'm being treated fairly?"

Biagi: As an employee?

Lozano: As an employee. And I don't think that there was any perceived inconsistency there.

Biagi: Are there any other issues that I've overlooked, where the paper has had discussions, strong issues for the paper, internally has had discussions on issues that are really important to the paper, that you would say you consistently followed, that maybe have been overlooked by other media in town? You brought up immigration, education, I thought of abortion.

Lozano: Health care, in general, has been a big issue of ours. The problem is not that we've done something more consistently than other media, it's really that other media, for the most part, ignores this population. You just don't get good consistent coverage about Latinos and Latino issues in most media that's available in Los Angeles. So really we almost become mandatory reading for anybody that wants to know about what's going on in the Hispanic community. And even then, if you want to know about just general interest topics, you could read us and you could read the L.A. Times, and you would think we were covering two different stories because the angles are really so distinct.

Biagi: Can you think of a specific example where that happened?

Lozano: Well, just about everything. You know, we could go into a city council meeting, and we've got reporters there who are assigned to city council just like everybody else, and what we'll walk out of and report on is going to be item X, and they walked out and reported on item Y. For example, it was Tuesday of this week, which is the day that the board of supervisors regularly meets, and the board of supervisors has a long agenda, and you know they deal with a lot of different issues. There were two items that were addressed at that board of supervisors' meeting, and the L.A. Times covered one of them, and we covered something completely different.

The board of supervisors voted on more funding for the district attorney's office, and we reported on a major debate over the future of county hospital. We ran ours on page one, and they didn't even mention it. The issue with county hospital is that it's located in east L.A., it's in Boyle Heights, it services 75 percent Latinos, it's not only an emergency and trauma care hospital, but it's primary care for all of the uninsured. So for a lot of different reasons, but anything that has to do with county hospital for us is of utmost importance. They didn't even mention the fact that there was an issue voted on that could literally have moved the process forward to close down county hospital. I mean, this is very important stuff.

One of the supervisors, one Latina supervisor, Gloria Molina, had brought 400 people and packed the board of supervisors' hall that morning, and 284 of them spoke out in favor of keeping it open. I mean, it really was a show of force. I was really quite impressed. And like I said, we ran it on page one, and we editorialized on it the next day, and the L.A. Times didn't mention it. You would think it never happened.

Biagi: So in that case, you're saying you�

Lozano: So in that case, I'm saying it feels like we cover two different cities, and we really are mandatory reading if you want to know not only what's going on in the Latino community,

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fifty people collaborated on this special coverage," and we look around and everybody "high-fives" each other, because there's thirteen of us doing what 450 people have to do in another newspaper. And we can do that over and over and over again. So under those types of circumstances, we're on par. I don't think we're any less good than anybody else. So in terms of our journalistic objectives, we're way up there. I don't have any doubt, I think we're fantastic, but we can't sustain that. You can't ask that same group of ten individuals to go out there every single day and keep it up with that sort of pump and enthusiasm. It's just not possible.

I know we can do it, but I need more bodies. I can't do it every single day. We can do special reports galore, but what I want is, for my newspaper, every single day, to be topnotch, and I know that we're not. For me, that's very frustrating.

Biagi: You sound like you're going to go and argue for more staff.

Lozano: Well, I'm always arguing for more staff. [Laughter.] Remember, we've got a freeze on, we've had a freeze on for years. I understand newspapers have to allocate resources and look at the big picture. Right now what the paper needs is more money, we need more revenues, and I can't do anything unless there is more revenue, so when there's a lift on the hiring freeze I know my department won't be the one to get it, because I don't generate revenues, I just spend money. You know, that's all I do, is spend money. So from the paper's priorities, I know I'm not number one. I wish we were, and I suppose this is the traditional battle within the newspaper. Editorial always thinks they're the most important, and I've come to agree. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Even though you're 40 percent of the paper? [Laughter.] Spoken like a true editor.

Lozano: But if you don't have a good product, what are you trying to sell? When you go to an advertiser and talk numbers, you're not just talking numbers, you need to convince people every single day to buy the paper. With all due respect to our advertising department, people buy a paper primarily for news. I know they buy it for the classifieds and the help-wanted ads. I know that that's part of it. I would like to think that what's compelling them to buy it is because they care about the news that we're offering. What are we writing about? What are the issues?

Biagi: You said, "I couldn't leave yet, because my work is undone." Have you given thought to that? Have you ever given thought to leaving? Or is this the place you're going to be?

Lozano: Well, I don't know. I suppose at some point I'm always going to have to be open to doing something else, and I think I might be. In other words, I have thought about leaving, but I certainly wouldn't leave now. I love what I'm doing, I really do. There are certain things that frustrate me, obviously, like the lack of resources and our inability to get our paper into the hands of some people who I really think should read it. But I can't see myself doing anything else. I really like what I'm doing. And it offers me all of the support that I need and that I needed to learn my job. I could never have done this anywhere else. There is no learning curve when you go in as a managing editor, or the editor of a paper, after you haven't even been in a newsroom. Remember, I literally had been sent up to a different floor. I wasn't even part of the editorial department when I got asked to assume responsibility. That wouldn't have happened anywhere else but here, and I recognize that. So I am going to make the most out of that opportunity, you know, to learn. And maybe if certain circumstances change and I would want to go elsewhere, I would need to know that I could transfer my skills to another newspaper. I still feel like I have a lot more that I can do.

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Lozano: No. More, I think, people have seen me as being too liberal or too left wing, you know, it's because of your ideology. It's more that than because you're a woman. And it's the issues that we talked about before擁t's reporting on AIDS in the newspaper, our position on abortion, the military invasion of Panama, things that we've had some very serious discussions about whether or not we think they're right or wrong. And it's not that people say it's just because you're a woman, it is more a question of ideology.

But I do think that there was a moment when, not that it was a problem, but I was hindered by my pregnancy. Having gotten married, then being pregnant and having to take off on maternity leave, the issues of taking care of children and all the hours that you're supposed to put in, and whether or not you do put them in, those do become issues. Referring back to my comments about how lucky I've been to be doing what I'm doing at this particular place, that also includes the time that I've needed to take care of myself during pregnancy, childbirth, and all of that, and raising young children.

Biagi: Now alone, raising young children.

Lozano: Right. Now alone. As you well know, these jobs are very time-consuming and the demands are enormous. They can be regularly twelve-hour days. It's not unusual to work twelve-hour days regularly. And when you are doing these special coverages or the city's burning or the earthquake葉he earthquake happened in the very early morning. Running upstairs, getting the kids, getting them in bed, wondering when it's going to stop shaking. They're crying, and I'm on the phone trying to find out whether or not we've got power at the building and what are we going to do to mobilize reporters, with these two shaking kids in the bed, and knowing that I'm the one responsible for our editorial coverage and getting everybody out there. We didn't know if the building was even standing at the time.

Biagi: But you're also responsible for the two shaking kids.

Lozano: Exactly. So I ended up getting them in the car after sunrise, driving them to my parents' house, which is about an hour away from here. Luckily, my parents were there. I dropped them off, and by seven-something I was at work. Because they were with my parents, I was able to work all night and be here the next morning, and we were able to do our specials and all of that. But it's very difficult, it's very difficult. Like I said, under normal circumstances, for a woman who has to report to a boss, I think that it could be quite stressful, terribly stressful. I have a lot of latitude here, because not only am I part owner and in charge of the company when my brother is not here, but I am the editor, which means there is nobody else above me and I can essentially make my own hours, or whatever. Most people don't have that capacity.

Biagi: Can you remember a time, or has there been more than one time, when you felt being a woman was an advantage to you here, professionally?

Lozano: I don't know if I would say it was an advantage. My brother and I laugh about this a lot, because both of us have a pretty full public agenda. We sit on boards of directors and are involved in different organizations.

Biagi: Which boards do you sit on, for instance?

Lozano: I think I've been on the board of trustees of the University of Southern California for three years now. I was just appointed to the board of First Interstate Bank of California, which is the first corporate board that I've ever been on. Then I sit on the boards of some nonprofits in

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social contacts and a lot of acquaintances, but friends, it's true, I have very few. Most of my life really is either my work or my family.

Biagi: You bring up ethics, the issue of ethics and separating yourself in a professional sense from the people that you have friendships with. Has there ever been a specific incident you can remember where there was an ethical debate in your mind about whether editorially the newspaper should cover an issue about a friend or somebody you were friends with in the corporate or business world?

Lozano: No, and I bet you if you asked my staff, they wouldn't know who I was friends with. And so that's very helpful. We meet so many interesting people that come through the paper that I may develop a relationship with, that we also cover as a newsmaker. We might have somebody assigned to them, and I don't think the person assigned to them would know it. So that's good. I think, in general, my staff knows what my interests are or where my sympathies lie, but specifically I can't think of a time where we've ever said, "Kill it. I don't want to do that to them."

Biagi: Have there been appeals made to you sometimes, at an editorial level, to kill a story or something, that was a tough personal decision for you to make to run the story?

Lozano: No, no. I know there have been in the past, but not with me.

Biagi: There have to be ethical dilemmas, though, in the running of a newspaper.

Lozano: Let me say, though, for example, when the paper has endorsed somebody for an elected office, I have had friends call and say, "Thanks for the endorsement," and I have to say it has nothing to do with you and me knowing each other outside of this, and people need to know that. I mean, it has to be very clear that I'd just as soon you not call and thank me for an endorsement. It does make me feel very uncomfortable.

Biagi: Have there been calls made to get an endorsement that the paper didn't make, for instance?

Lozano: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, that happens all the time. Today is a perfect example. The Democratic party is in town having their convention, their endorsing convention, their annual convention. I got a call yesterday to sit at somebody's table at lunch, and we both know perfectly well that they're going to come in here in a couple of weeks for an editorial board meeting, to get our endorsement. I am not about to be seated with them at their table as their guest, at the Democratic party luncheon, when two weeks from now I've got to question them and appear to make a decision based on fairness and qualifications. That happens all the time. People think that they can get close to you this way and that way, and maneuver personal relations, and that it might help everybody to get the paper's endorsement. That does happen all the time.

Biagi: But it doesn't bother you that you're able to split the two?

Lozano: No.

Biagi: Is there a written code of ethics for the paper?

Lozano: No, unfortunately, there is not. I say unfortunately because we've actually worked on it over the years. It would be much more helpful if everything was written down. I think the reason we haven't finished it is because it's very complicated, the issues of conflict, integrity, and

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Biagi: I wanted to go back to the idea of people helping you along the way. Have you felt like you've made it on your own, or have you felt like you've had help from people along the way that have made this possible?

Lozano: Well, that have made this possible, I couldn't have done it without my family. Literally, I wouldn't be here without the support and the confidence of my family. In terms of learning to do this�

Biagi: To do this, meaning run the newspaper?

Lozano: Yes, in terms of learning to run the newspaper. There are only a couple of people who I think were really critical, and I mentioned them the last time that we had spoken. One is David Hamilton at Newsday, who I met when I was about two months into my job, and really offered not just a lot of help and a lot of support, but built my confidence, let me know that my instincts were right. But, in general, really it's just been sort of hit and miss, a lot of learning on my own.

Biagi: So David was the first one, and the second one was? There were a couple of people, or just David?

Lozano: Right. There are a lot of people that I've met and interacted with that I think were valuable, but none of them that I would say that really marked my career.

Biagi: Some other women in these interviews say that it's pretty lonesome. Have you felt that?

Lozano: Yes, it is. You really have to have a strong character to do this every day, because at some point you always feel like you're hitting another wall, that you're still trying to do things that there's resistance and there's not a lot of support. You don't have large networks of people who pave the way before you. So it is quite difficult.

My circumstances are different in the sense that the newspaper is different. La Opinión may be now perceived more as a "valid" daily publication, but it hasn't always been. It wasn't just an issue of being a woman at the top, it was really sitting down at the table and not having people look at you and think, "La Opinión? What's that?" and really not having a clue, not knowing if you're a daily, if you're a weekly, or if you're published in Timbuktu.

I could list five hundred newspapers that seem to be much more well respected and have less circulation that we do, less readership than we do, lower revenues than we do, smaller page count, and all of that, and yet for some reason, it's always a struggle to sit down and say, "I'm with La Opinión," and have people just sort of look at you with blank faces. So in that sense, it's also lonely. It's very difficult.

[End Tape 2, Side B; Begin Tape 3, Side A]

Lozano: So anyway, what I was saying is, that sometimes it's lonely just being at the table as a representative of La Opinión. I had been invited to be on this committee organized by the Newspapers Association of America, and I found it fascinating and I was so excited to be there. There's been a number of occasions where you're sitting at the table with both large and small publications and you feel like you're still treated as the stepchild in the group. That's one of my big issues in life, to get that mentality turned around, to have people understand what La Opinión is all about and how well we do what we do.

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change their rules, and they say that they can't find the judges. So we won't win writing awards, for the most part.

We do win a lot of awards. We submit awards for design and advertising, marketing promotions. We regularly are recognized for the things that we do in other parts of the newspaper. But I can't get my spot reporting to be considered for a prize, unless it's an organization like the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which will take bilingual submissions or submissions in Spanish. They are about the only ones.

Biagi: So in an institutional sense, you still have battles to win, or to fight, anyway?

Lozano: Yes. For some reason, this again is something I've had on my mind a lot, because the publications, the large English-language newspapers that have started to do things in Spanish have caught the eye of everybody. The New York Times has done things for the newly discovered Hispanic market. The Chicago Tribune has been doing this, the Florida papers are doing that, and the Orange County Register is doing something. I sit back and I think, well, we're not in the circle of daily newspapers and we're not in the circle of Spanish-language press, because we're not a new product of the Chicago Tribune or a new product of the Los Angeles Times. It feels like, "Guys, the oldest, largest, most successful Spanish-language daily newspaper is La Opinión." I feel like we've just been completely overlooked because we're not viewed as a member of the dailies, and the Spanish-language publications that right now seem to be so interesting to everybody are weeklies put out by the major media companies.

Biagi: Why do you think that is?

Lozano: Because it's innovative. It's this attempt on the part of companies to be diverse and to meet the needs of their populations, etc., which I think is absolutely fine. I'm not saying that as a trend and as a strategy there's anything wrong with it, but it's a little frustrating, because you feel like you're always battling to be recognized, and you would think that we wouldn't have to do that any longer.

Biagi: Ironically, it's not the editorial product that you think is so important, it's being recognized, do you think? You're battling for editorial, in a sense is what you're battling. Because you say that your graphics gets recognized and photography, make-up, design, marketing, and other things. So the argument you're making is for the editorial product to be recognized.

Lozano: Right.

Biagi: What do you think is the solution, besides getting organized to be part of those groups? Should they hire Spanish language judges to judge Spanish-language publications? Should they ask for that so that you can participate? Should they pay for the translations?

Lozano: Yes, I think that they should at least make an attempt to allow us to submit our entry in its original form. You're always being asked to do things because they don't know how or they can't do it. Well, get somebody who can, and if you can't, hire out. I mean, this is not a novel idea that you can pay to have something translated. But why should I? If I'm the one who wants to submit, why do I have to also pay to have you be able to read it? So, yes, I do think that they should. I think that if they feel like they can't find enough judges to judge multilingual or other than English entries, then they should at least allow me to submit it, and find a way to judge it.

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Biagi: Why?

Lozano: Because even City News, I can't tell you how many times I've talked to the director of City News Service and said, "How can you run, two days later, a story that cites the L.A. Times when we ran it three days before?" It's the same issue, whether or not they have staff that can clip and read at La Opinión.

Biagi: Has there ever been a discussion about you providing an English language news service?

Lozano: Yes, we've talked about it. We've even talked about ways of translating our material and getting it to City News so they can run it. We don't have the time, we don't have the bodies, we don't have the resources, and we think it's their responsibility, not ours.

Biagi: They haven't seen that it's useful enough to them yet to provide translation services?

Lozano: I don't know, I really don't know.

Biagi: They haven't approached you about doing it yet?

Lozano: We've had many conversations with them. The other times, for example, that we've been able to make a difference is when we've uncovered an issue or been aggressive enough in our reporting that some elected official or somebody picks it up and uses it to promote new legislation.

For example, probably the example that most readily comes to mind was a series that we did on check-cashing and money-transferring facilities that are so prevalent in Los Angeles, and that so many of our readers and community rely upon. We uncovered tremendous fraud and abuse, found out that as an industry it wasn't regulated, people would drop their $100 there and expected it to be wired to Mexico and it never got anywhere, and there was no recourse. The issue was picked up by somebody on staff on one of the assemblyperson's office, who then pushed forward legislation and passed a bill. Now the whole industry is regulated thanks to something that La Opinión had done, but it was only because that person had somebody on staff who was reading La Opinión, and came to us afterwards and said, "This is an issue we want to know about," and we were their source for it. But it doesn't happen often enough.

Biagi: Is there anything that I've forgotten to ask about you or about the paper that you think would be important for people to know about, that they shouldn't forget from this interview?

Lozano: No, I think you've pretty much covered all the big issues.

Biagi: What is it that's important about you in this job that women should know about? If they were to take a job like this, what should they know about it, most importantly?

Lozano: Well, you have to be really committed, and if you're not committed you'll never last, because the barriers are very high. It can be frustrating on a lot of different levels. It can be frustrating because you don't think you have the support of the company and the resources that you need. It's frustrating because you feel like the outside world doesn't pay attention to what you're doing. It's frustrating because there's still sexism and all of those things that prevail. I think that different women probably respond differently. I'm probably way too serious about my work, definitely way too serious about my work. I don't know if that's helpful. I think that what it is, it drives you. You feel like you're never there, you've never finished, and probably will never finish. I would hate to have to work around me every single day. [Laughter.]