Left-Coast Makeover

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Investigative reporting is Carroll's passion, and with 40 years of experience in newspapers and a nine-year stint on the Pulitzer Prize Board, he has a fine-tuned instinct for spotting prizewinning potential — stories that he calls bell ringers. These, he says, are pieces that require in-depth reporting, have universal resonance and "tell me something I didn't know." His staffs won three Pulitzers while he was editor in Lexington and Baltimore, and since arriving at the Times, Carroll has helped line edit four stories that won Pulitzers — including an expose of unsafe prescription drugs, whose opening paragraphs he reworked "at least a dozen times."

Some Times staff members charge that Carroll "edits for prizes" and complain that reporters who are not on the A-list have their work ignored. A few have left, including Robin Wright, a star foreign-affairs reporter, but the level of dissent is low. "There is a quality about him that makes you want to do your best work," says Steve Lopez, a former TIME writer who does a popular thrice-weekly column on Los Angeles.

The Carroll regime has not been without controversy. Last May he criticized a piece on abortion for not giving both sides of the story, saying in an internal memo, "We are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the Times." Carroll published a story last October, only five days before the recall election, about Arnold Schwarzenegger's alleged groping of women. The paper was accused of trying to influence the vote, but Carroll was unapologetic, writing an editor's note promising even more investigative reporting.

His determination to make a better paper is unflagging. After the Pulitzer announcement, he told his section heads, "We are still the same people as before, and we still have a lot of things to work on." Carroll's goal for the Los Angeles Times is a total makeover. And he isn't finished yet.