Tribune Company tightens its grip on the L.A. Times.

Few companies grapple with a middle management squeeze as fight as the one at Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times.

The pressure reached a breaking point for Jeff Johnson, who resigned Oct. 5 as publisher of the Times. Johnson had worked at Tribune since 1984.

The ex-publisher suffered from a classic case of middle-management squeeze, where the work force below pushes for one agenda and the corporate executives above impose another. Those agendas would be job security and rising profitability, respectively. With the daily newspaper business in a cycle of declining circulation, stagnant ad revenues and job cuts, something had to give.

But confrontational attitudes make the Tribune's squeeze particularly discomforting. For example, Johnson took some heat when he fired liberal columnist Robert Scheer and conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez last year, but when he resisted more newsroom cuts, the staff signed a support petition and sent it to the Tribune shareholder meeting last month.

Likewise, competing filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission have revealed a deep divide in the Tribune boardroom. The Chandler family, which originally owned the Times, wants to split the company into separate publishing and broadcast entities. The management cadre, including chief executive Dennis FitzSimons, insist on integrating the print and electronic sides of the business.

Johnson's departure implies that FitzSimons will keep tight control over the Times. New Publisher David Hiller was formerly publisher at the Chicago Tribune, the flagship paper of the parent corporation. Speculation that a local billionaire could step in to buy the Times and relieve the managerial pressure now appears more distant.

According to management consultant Jeff Angus, squeezing the middle has become the norm for knowledge-based organizations. In an article published in 2001, Angus likened a corporation to a sandwich with middle managers constituting "lunch meat" surrounded by layers of flexible bread. "Pressure on the bottom line will squeeze the lunch meat crowd in ways that make them less valuable," Angus wrote.

Hiller comes to the Times with a strong resume and management skills, but that doesn't change the economic forces of newspaper publishing. Unless he can lessen expectations or engineer a turnaround at the Times, the pressures on the publisher will continue to mount.

BY JOEL RUSSELL

Staff Reporter