L.a. Times
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The Los Angeles Times (also known as the LA Times) is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California and distributed throughout the Western United States. It is the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States and the fourth-most widely distributed newspaper in the United States. Its daily circulation reported in October 2008 was 739,000, down from a peak of 1.1 million. In addition to its print product, the Times also publishes a 24-hour news Web site at latimes.com.
The paper's printer, the Mirror Company, took over the newspaper and installed former Union Army lieutenant colonel Harrison Gray Otis as an editor. In 1884, he bought out the newspaper and printing company to form the Times-Mirror Company.
Rubble of the Times building after the 1910 bombing
Historian Kevin Starr lists Otis (with Henry E.
Huntington and Moses Sherman) as a businessman "capable of manipulating the entire apparatus of politics and public opinion for his own enrichment." Otis's editorial policy was based on civic boosterism, extolling the virtues of Los Angeles and promoting its growth. The American Federation of Labor hired noted trial attorney Clarence Darrow to represent the brothers, who eventually pleaded guilty.
Clarence Darrow was later found innocent of giving a $4,000 bribe to a juryman. The paper soon relocated to the Times Building, a Los Angeles landmark.
Chandler era
On Otis's death in 1917, his son-in-law Harry Chandler took over the reins as publisher of the Times. Harry Chandler was succeeded in 1944 by his son, Norman Chandler, who ran the paper during the rapid growth of post-war Los Angeles.
Norman's wife, heiress and fellow Stanford alumnus Dorothy Buffum Chandler, became active in civic affairs and led the effort to build the Los Angeles Music Center, whose main concert hall was named the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in her honor. Family members are buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery near Paramount Studios.
Otis Chandler sought legitimacy and recognition for his family's paper, often forgotten in the power centers of the Northeastern United States due to its geographic and cultural distance. He sought to remake the paper in the model of the nation's most respected newspapers, notably The New York Times and Washington Post.
Believing that the newsroom was "the heartbeat of the business", Otis Chandler increased the size and pay of the reporting staff and expanded its national and international reporting. In 1962, the paper joined with the Washington Post to form the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service to syndicate articles from both papers for other news organizations.
During the 1960s, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than its previous nine decades combined.
A Pulitzer Prize in 1990 went to the Times' Jim Murray, considered by many to be one of the greatest sportswriters of the century.
The paper's early history and subsequent transformation was chronicled in an unauthorized history Thinking Big (1977, ISBN 0399117660), and was one of four organizations profiled by David Halberstam in The Powers That Be (1979, ISBN 0394503813; 2000 reprint ISBN 0252069412).
It has also been the whole or partial subject of nearly thirty dissertations in communications or social science in the past four decades.
Modern era
LA Times building, May 2006, featuring green "125 Years" banners, at 1st and Spring, downtown Los Angeles
Los Angeles Times building, viewed from the corner of 1st and Spring streets
Times vending machine featuring news of the 1984 Summer Olympics
The Los Angeles Times paid circulation figures have decreased since the mid-1990s. Others also believe that the drop was due to the circulation director (Bert Tiffany) retiring.
She speculated that the paper's revenue shortfall could be reversed by expanding coverage of economic justice topics which she believes are increasingly relevant to Southern California; she cited the paper's attempted hiring of a "celebrity justice reporter" as an example of the wrong approach.
In 2000, the Times-Mirror Company was purchased by the Tribune Company of Chicago, Illinois, ending one of the final examples of a family-controlled metropolitan daily newspaper in the U.S. John Carroll, former editor of the Baltimore Sun, was brought in to restore the luster of the newspaper.
Despite operating profits of 20 percent the Tribune executives were unsatisfied with returns and by 2005 John Carroll had left the Los Angeles Times.
Dean Baquet replaced John Carroll, who refused to impose the additional cutbacks mandated by Tribune. Baquet was the first African American to hold this type of editorial position at a top-tier daily.
During Baquet and Carroll's time at the paper it won 13 Pulitzers, more than any other paper but the New York Times. Subsequently, Baquet was himself ousted for not meeting the demands of the Tribune Group- as was publisher Jeffrey Johnson - and replaced by James O'Shea of the Chicago Tribune. O'Shea himself left in January, 2008 after a budget dispute with publisher David Hiller.
The paper's content and design style has been overhauled several times in recent years in attempts to help increase circulation.
In 2000, a major change more closely organized the news sections (related news was put closer together) and changed the "Local" section to the "California" section with more extensive coverage. Another major change in 2005 saw the Sunday "Opinion" section retitled the Sunday "Current" section, with a radical change in its presentation and columnists featured.
There are regular cross-promotions with co-owned KTLA to bring evening news viewers into the Times fold.
In early 2006, the Times closed its San Fernando Valley printing plant, leaving press operations at the Olympic Plant and Orange County. The Times' loss of circulation is the highest out of the top ten newspapers in the U.S. Despite this recent circulation decline, many in the media industry have lauded the newspaper's effort to decrease its reliance on 'other-paid' circulation in favor of building its 'individually-paid' circulation base - which showed a marginal increase in the most recent circulation audit.
Zell announced plans to take the company private and sell off the Chicago Cubs baseball club. He put up for sale the company's 25 percent interest in Comcast SportsNet Chicago.
Up until the time of shareholder approval, Los Angeles billionaires Ron Burkle and Eli Broad had the right to submit a higher bid, in which case Zell would have received a $25 million buyout fee.
The paper reported on July 3, 2008, that it planned to cut 250 jobs by Labor day and reduce the number of published pages by 15%. That included about 17% of its news staff, as part of the newly private media company's mandate to slash costs. Since Zell bought Tribune, the paper has been struggling to deal with a heavy load of debt.
"We've tried to get ahead of all the change that's occurring in the business and get to an organization and size that will be sustainable," Hiller said.
The changes and cuts have been controversial, prompting criticism from such disparate sources as a Jewish Journal commentary, an anonymously written employee blog called Tell Zell and a satirical Web site, Not the L.A. Its endorsement of Richard Nixon's reelection bid in 1972 caused a furor in the newsroom due to the Chandlers' longstanding relationship with Nixon. As a result, the paper did not issue a presidential endorsement for thirty-six years, until it endorsed Barack Obama in 2008.
Competition and rivalry
The Los Angeles Times building as seen from Grand Ave
In the 19th century, the chief competition to the Times was the Los Angeles Herald, followed by the smaller Los Angeles Tribune.
The combined paper, the Mirror-News, ceased publication in 1962, when the Hearst afternoon Herald-Express was merged with the morning Los Angeles Examiner.
In 1989, the Times's last rival for the Los Angeles daily newspaper market, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, went out of business, making Los Angeles virtually a one-newspaper city, except for smaller dailies in places like Pasadena, the San Fernando Valley, Santa Monica, Long Beach, and Torrance and the South Bay.
In the 1990s, the Times published various editions catering to far-flung areas. owns the News-Press in Glendale, the Leader in Burbank, the Sun in La Crescenta, the Daily Pilot in Newport Beach, and the Independent in Huntington Beach.
Features
Among its current staff are columnists Steve Lopez and Patt Morrison, popular music critics Robert Hillburn and Randy Lewis, film critic Kenneth Turan, entertainment industry columnist Patrick Goldstein and numerous award-winning reporters.
Sports columnists include Bill Plaschke, who is also a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, T.J.
Simers, Kurt Streeter and Helene Elliott, the first female sportswriter to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Former sports editor Bill Dwyre is also now a columnist.
One of the Times' best-known news columns is "Column One," a feature that appears daily on the front page to the left-hand side.
Established in September 1968, it is a place for the weird and the interesting; in the How Far Can a Piano Fly? (a compilation of Column One stories) introduction, Patt Morrison writes that the column's purpose is to elicit a "Gee, that's interesting, I didn't know that" type of reaction.
The Times also embarks on a number of investigative journalism pieces, researching and dissecting a certain scandal or unfavored part of society. The magazine's editors and writers were not informed of the agreement, which breached the "Chinese wall" that traditionally has separated advertising from journalistic functions at American newspapers.
His role was controversial, as he forced writers to take a more decisive stance on issues. In 2005, he created a Wikitorial, the first Wiki by a major news organization.
The change was not well-received by liberal readers, many of whom accused the newspaper of trying to silence liberal voices and remove controversial writers.
The Times has also come under controversy for its decision to drop the weekday edition of the Garfield comic strip in 2005, in favor of a hipper comic strip Brevity, while retaining the Sunday edition. Garfield was dropped altogether shortly thereafter.
Following the GOP's defeat in the 2006 mid-term elections, an Opinion piece published on November 19, 2006, by Joshua Muravchik, a leading neoconservative and a resident scholar at the conservative view American Enterprise Institute, titled BOMB IRAN shocked some readers, with its hawkish overtures in support of more unilateral action by the United States, this time against Iran.
On March 22, 2007, editorial page editor Andrés Martinez resigned following an alleged scandal centering around his girlfriend's professional relationship with a Hollywood producer who had been tapped to guest edit a section in the newspaper. In an open letter penned upon leaving the paper, Martinez blasted the publication for allowing the Chinese Wall between the news and editorial departments to be weakened, accusing news staffers of lobbying the opinion desk.
Also in March 2007 the Times faced rumors that publisher David Hiller suggested and approved former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, with whom Hiller has close personal and business contacts, for a guest editorial position at the newspaper. Rumsfeld was an influential Iraq war hawk in the George W.
Further, she said, four of the six alleged victims were not named. She also said that in the case of the Davis allegations, the Times decided against printing the Davis story because of its reliance on anonymous sources.
The American Society of Newspaper Editors said that the Times lost more than 10,000 subscribers because of the negative publicity surrounding the Schwarzenegger article.