Los Angeles Times

The Times was first published on December 4, 1881, as the Los Angeles Daily Times, under the direction of Nathan Cole Jr. and Thomas Gardiner. It was first printed at the Mirror printing plant, owned by Jesse Yarnell and T. J. Caystile. Unable to pay the printing bill, Cole and Gardiner turned the paper over to the Mirror Company. In the meantime, S. J. Mathes had joined the firm, and it was at his insistence that the Times continued publication. In July 1882, Harrison Gray Otis moved from Santa Barbara, California to become the paper's editor.[10] Otis made the Times a financial success.

Historian Kevin Starr wrote that Otis was a businessman "capable of manipulating the entire apparatus of politics and public opinion for his own enrichment".[11] Otis's editorial policy was based on civic boosterism, extolling the virtues of Los Angeles and promoting its growth. Toward those ends, the paper supported efforts to expand the city's water supply by acquiring the rights to the water supply of the distant Owens Valley.[12]

Rubble of the L.A. Times building after the 1910 bombing

The efforts of the Times to fight local unions led to the bombing of its headquarters on October 1, 1910, killing 21 people. Two of the union leaders, James and Joseph McNamara, were charged. The American Federation of Labor hired noted trial attorney Clarence Darrow to represent the brothers, who eventually pleaded guilty.

Otis fastened a bronze eagle on top of a high frieze of the new Times headquarters building designed by Gordon Kaufmann, proclaiming anew the credo written by his wife, Eliza: "Stand Fast, Stand Firm, Stand Sure, Stand True".[13][14]

After Otis's death in 1917, his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, took control 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, 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. The site also includes a memorial to the Times Building bombing victims.

In 1935, the newspaper moved to a new, landmark Art Deco building, the Los Angeles Times Building, to which the newspaper would add other facilities until taking up the entire city block between Spring, Broadway, First and Second streets, which came to be known as Times Mirror Square and would house the paper until 2018. Harry Chandler, then the president and general manager of Times-Mirror Co., declared the Los Angeles Times Building a "monument to the progress of our city and Southern California".[15]

The fourth generation of family publishers, Otis Chandler, held that position from 1960 to 1980. 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, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Believing that the newsroom was "the heartbeat of the business",[16] 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. He also toned down the unyielding conservatism that had characterized the paper over the years, adopting a much more centrist editorial stance.

During the 1960s, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than its previous nine decades combined.

Writing in 2013 about the pattern of newspaper ownership by founding families, Times reporter Michael Hiltzik said that:

The first generations bought or founded their local paper for profits and also social and political influence (which often brought more profits). Their children enjoyed both profits and influence, but as the families grew larger, the later generations found that only one or two branches got the power, and everyone else got a share of the money. Eventually the coupon-clipping branches realized that they could make more money investing in something other than newspapers. Under their pressure the companies went public, or split apart, or disappeared. That's the pattern followed over more than a century by the Los Angeles Times under the Chandler family.[17]

The paper's early history and subsequent transformation was chronicled in an unauthorized history, Thinking Big (1977, ISBN 0-399-11766-0), and was one of four organizations profiled by David Halberstam in The Powers That Be (1979, ISBN 0-394-50381-3; 2000 reprint ISBN 0-252-06941-2). It has also been the whole or partial subject of nearly thirty dissertations in communications or social science in the past four decades.[18]

The Los Angeles Times has occupied five physical sites beginning in 1881.

Times newspaper vending machine featuring news of the 1984 Summer Olympics

The Los Angeles Times was beset in the first decade of the 21st century by a change in ownership, a bankruptcy, a rapid succession of editors, reductions in staff, decreases in paid circulation, the need to increase its Web presence, and a series of controversies.

The newspaper moved to a new headquarters building in El Segundo, near Los Angeles International Airport, in July 2018.[19][20][21][22]

Current headquarters in El Segundo, California

In 2000, Times Mirror Company, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, was purchased by the Tribune Company of Chicago, Illinois, placing the paper in co-ownership with the then WB-affiliated (now CW-affiliated) KTLA, which Tribune acquired in 1985.[23]

On April 2, 2007, the Tribune Company announced its acceptance of real estate entrepreneur Sam Zell's offer to buy the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and all other company assets. Zell announced that he would sell the Chicago Cubs baseball club. He put up for sale the company's 25 percent interest in Comcast SportsNet Chicago. Until shareholder approval was received, 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.[24]

In December 2008, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy protection. The bankruptcy was a result of declining advertising revenue and a debt load of $12.9 billion, much of it incurred when the paper was taken private by Zell.[25]

On February 7, 2018, Tribune Publishing (formerly Tronc Inc.), agreed to sell the Los Angeles Times along with other southern California properties (The San Diego Union-Tribune, Hoy) to billionaire biotech investor Patrick Soon-Shiong.[26][27] This purchase by Soon-Shiong through his Nant Capital investment fund was for $500 million, as well as the assumption of $90 million in pension liabilities.[28][29] The sale to Soon-Shiong closed on June 16, 2018.[30]

In 2000, John Carroll, former editor of the Baltimore Sun, was brought in to restore the luster of the newspaper.[31] During his reign at the Times, he eliminated more than 200 jobs, but despite an operating profit margin of 20 percent, the Tribune executives were unsatisfied with returns, and by 2005 Carroll had left the newspaper. His successor, Dean Baquet, refused to impose the additional cutbacks mandated by the Tribune Company.

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 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other paper except The New York Times.[32] However, Baquet was removed from the editorship for not meeting the demands of the Tribune Group—as was publisher Jeffrey Johnson—and was 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 were overhauled several times in attempts to increase circulation. In 2000, a major change reorganized 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 featured columnists. There were regular cross-promotions with Tribune-owned television station KTLA to bring evening-news viewers into the Times fold.

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 percent.[33][34] That included about 17 percent of the news staff, as part of the newly private media company's mandate to reduce costs. "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.[35] In January 2009, the Times eliminated the separate California/Metro section, folding it into the front section of the newspaper. The Times also announced seventy job cuts in news and editorial or a 10 percent cut in payroll.[36]

In September 2015, Austin Beutner, the publisher and chief executive, was replaced by Timothy E. Ryan.[37] On October 5, 2015, the Poynter Institute reported that "'At least 50' editorial positions will be culled from the Los Angeles Times" through a buyout.[38] On this subject, the Los Angeles Times reported with foresight: "For the 'funemployed,' unemployment is welcome."[39] Nancy Cleeland,[40] who took O'Shea's buyout offer, did so because of "frustration with the paper's coverage of working people and organized labor"[41] (the beat that earned her Pulitzer).[40] She speculated that the paper's revenue shortfall could be reversed by expanding coverage of economic justice topics, which she believed were increasingly relevant to Southern California; she cited the paper's attempted hiring of a "celebrity justice reporter" as an example of the wrong approach.[41]

On August 21, 2017, Ross Levinsohn, then aged 54, was named publisher and CEO, replacing Davan Maharaj, who had been both publisher and editor.[42] On June 16, 2018, the same day the sale to Patrick Soon-Shiong closed, Norman Pearlstine was named executive editor.[30]

On May 3, 2021, the newspaper announced that it had selected Kevin Merida to be the new executive editor. Merida is a senior vice president at ESPN and leads The Undefeated, a site focused on sports, race, and culture. Previously, he was the first Black managing editor at The Washington Post.[43]

The Los Angeles Times Olympic Boulevard printing press was not purchased by Soon-Shiong and was kept by the original Tribune before being sold to developers in 2016, who plan to build sound stages on the property.[44] It was opened in 1990 and could print 70,000 96-page newspapers an hour.[45] The printing press was scheduled to close in 2024, but in preparation for the closure and editorial reasons for refocusing sports coverage, daily game and box score coverage was eliminated on July 9, 2023. The sports section features less time sensitive articles, billed as similar to a magazine.[46] The change caused consternation from the Los Angeles Jewish community, who often found reading box scores in the morning a Shabbat ritual.[47] The Times will be printed in Riverside, at the Southern California News Group's Press-Enterprise printer, which also prints Southern California editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.[48]

The Times has suffered continued decline in distribution. Reasons offered for the circulation drop included a price increase[49] and a rise in the proportion of readers preferring to read the online version instead of the print version.[50] Editor Jim O'Shea, in an internal memo announcing a May 2007, mostly voluntary, reduction in force, characterized the decrease in circulation as an "industry-wide problem" which the paper had to counter by "growing rapidly on-line", "break[ing] news on the Web and explain[ing] and analyz[ing] it in our newspaper."[51]

The Times closed its San Fernando Valley printing plant in early 2006, leaving press operations to the Olympic plant and to Orange County. Also that year the paper announced its circulation had fallen to 851,532, down 5.4 percent from 2005. The Times's loss of circulation was the largest of the top ten newspapers in the U.S.[52] Some observers believed that the drop was due to the retirement of circulation director Bert Tiffany. Still, others thought the decline was a side effect of a succession of short-lived editors who were appointed by publisher Mark Willes after publisher Otis Chandler relinquished day-to-day control in 1995.[16] Willes, the former president of General Mills, was criticized for his lack of understanding of the newspaper business, and was derisively referred to by reporters and editors as The Cereal Killer.[53] Subsequently, the Orange County plant closed in 2010.[54]

Abandoned Los Angeles Times vending machine in Covina, California, in 2011

The Times's reported daily circulation in October 2010 was 600,449,[55] down from a peak of 1,225,189 daily and 1,514,096 Sunday in April 1990.[56][57]

In December 2006, a team of Times reporters delivered management with a critique of the paper's online news efforts known as the Spring Street Project.[58] The report, which condemned the Times as a "web-stupid" organization,[58] was followed by a shakeup in management of the paper's website,[59] www.latimes.com, and a rebuke of print staffers who were described as treating "change as a threat."[60]

On July 10, 2007, Times launched a local Metromix site targeting live entertainment for young adults.[61] A free weekly tabloid print edition of Metromix Los Angeles followed in February 2008; the publication was the newspaper's first stand-alone print weekly.[62] In 2009, the Times shut down Metromix and replaced it with Brand X, a blog site and free weekly tabloid targeting young, social networking readers.[63] Brand X launched in March 2009; the Brand X tabloid ceased publication in June 2011 and the website was shut down the following month.[64]

In May 2018, the Times blocked access to its online edition from most of Europe because of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.[65][66]

It was revealed in 1999 that a revenue-sharing arrangement was in place between the Times and Staples Center in the preparation of a 168-page magazine about the opening of the sports arena. 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. Publisher Mark Willes also had not prevented advertisers from pressuring reporters in other sections of the newspaper to write stories favorable to their point of view.[67] Michael Kinsley was hired as the Opinion and Editorial (op-ed) Editor in April 2004 to help improve the quality of the opinion pieces. His role was controversial, for 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. Although it failed, readers could combine forces to produce their own editorial pieces. It was shut down after being besieged with inappropriate material. He resigned later that year.[68]

The Times drew fire for a last-minute story before the 2003 California recall election alleging that gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger groped scores of women during his movie career. Columnist Jill Stewart wrote on the American Reporter website that the Times did not do a story on allegations that former Governor Gray Davis had verbally and physically abused women in his office, and that the Schwarzenegger story relied on a number of anonymous sources. 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.[69][70] 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.[71]

On November 12, 2005, new op-ed editor Andrés Martinez announced the dismissal of liberal op-ed columnist Robert Scheer and conservative editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez.[72]

The Times also came 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 it in the Sunday edition. Garfield was dropped altogether shortly thereafter.[73]

Following the Republican Party's defeat in the 2006 mid-term elections, an Opinion piece by Joshua Muravchik, a leading neoconservative and a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, published on November 19, 2006, was titled 'Bomb Iran'. The article shocked some readers, with its hawkish comments in support of more unilateral action by the United States, this time against Iran.[74]

On March 22, 2007, editorial page editor Andrés Martinez resigned following an alleged scandal centering on his girlfriend's professional relationship with a Hollywood producer who had been asked to guest-edit a section in the newspaper.[75] In an open letter written upon leaving the paper, Martinez criticized the publication for allowing the Chinese wall between the news and editorial departments to be weakened, accusing news staffers of lobbying the opinion desk.[76]

In November 2017, Walt Disney Studios blacklisted the Times from attending press screenings of its films, in retaliation for September 2017 reportage by the paper on Disney's political influence in the Anaheim area. The company considered the coverage to be "biased and inaccurate". As a sign of condemnation and solidarity, a number of major publications and writers, including The New York Times, Boston Globe critic Ty Burr, Washington Post blogger Alyssa Rosenberg, and the websites The A.V. Club and Flavorwire, announced that they would boycott press screenings of future Disney films. The National Society of Film Critics, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, and Boston Society of Film Critics jointly announced that Disney's films would be ineligible for their respective year-end awards unless the decision was reversed, condemning the decision as being "antithetical to the principles of a free press and [setting] a dangerous precedent in a time of already heightened hostility towards journalists". On November 7, 2017, Disney reversed its decision, stating that the company "had productive discussions with the newly installed leadership at the Los Angeles Times regarding our specific concerns".[77][78][79]

For 69 years, from 1885[94] until 1954, the Times issued on New Year's Day a special annual Midwinter Number or Midwinter Edition that extolled the virtues of Southern California. At first, it was called the "Trade Number", and in 1886 it featured a special press run of "extra scope and proportions"; that is, "a twenty-four-page paper, and we hope to make it the finest exponent of this [Southern California] country that ever existed."[95] Two years later, the edition had grown to "forty-eight handsome pages (9×15 inches), [which] stitched for convenience and better preservation", was "equivalent to a 150-page book."[96] The last use of the phrase Trade Number was in 1895, when the edition had grown to thirty-six pages split among three separate sections.[97]

The Midwinter Number drew acclamations from other newspapers, including this one from The Kansas City Star in 1923:

It is made up of five magazines with a total of 240 pages – the maximum size possible under the postal regulations. It goes into every detail of information about Los Angeles and Southern California that the heart could desire. It is virtually a cyclopedia on the subject. It drips official statistics. In addition, it verifies the statistics with a profusion of illustration. . . . it is a remarkable combination of guidebook and travel magazine.[98]

In 1948 the Midwinter Edition, as it was then called, had grown to "7 big picture magazines in beautiful rotogravure reproduction."[99] The last mention of the Midwinter Edition was in a Times advertisement on January 10, 1954.[100]

Between 1891 and 1895, the Times also issued a similar Midsummer Number, the first one featuring the theme, "The Land and Its Fruits".[101] Because of its issue date in September, the edition was in 1891 called the Midsummer Harvest Number.[102]

Front page of the debut (March 25, 1903) issue of the short-lived The Wireless, published in Avalon[103]

In 1903, the Pacific Wireless Telegraph Company established a radiotelegraph link between the California mainland and Santa Catalina Island. In the summer of that year, the Times made use of this link to establish a local daily paper, based in Avalon, called The Wireless, which featured local news plus excerpts which had been transmitted via Morse code from the parent paper.[104] However, this effort apparently survived for only a little more than one year.[105]

In the 1990s, the Times published various editions catering to far-flung areas. Editions included those from the San Fernando Valley, Ventura County, Inland Empire, Orange County, San Diego County & a "National Edition" that was distributed to Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Bay Area. The National Edition was closed in December 2004.

Some of these editions were succeeded by Our Times, a group of community supplements included in editions of the regular Los Angeles Metro newspaper.

A subsidiary, Times Community Newspapers, publishes the Daily Pilot of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.[106][107] From 2011 to 2013, the Times had published the Pasadena Sun.[108] It also had published the Glendale News-Press and Burbank Leader from 1993 to 2020, and the La Cañada Valley Sun from 2005 to 2020.[109]

On April 30, 2020, Charlie Plowman, publisher of Outlook Newspapers, announced he would acquire the Glendale News-Press, Burbank Leader and La Cañada Valley Sun from Times Community Newspapers. Plowman acquired the South Pasadena Review and San Marino Tribune in late January 2020 from the Salter family, who owned and operated these two community weeklies.[110]

2009 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the UCLA campus

In 1996, the Times started the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, in association with the University of California, Los Angeles. It has panel discussions, exhibits, and stages during two days at the end of April each year.[112] In 2011, the Festival of Books was moved to the University of Southern California.[113]

Since 1980, the Times has awarded annual book prizes. The categories are now biography, current interest, fiction, first fiction, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, and young adult fiction. In addition, the Robert Kirsch Award is presented annually to a living author with a substantial connection to the American West whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition".[114]

From 1957 to 1987, the Times sponsored the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix that was held over at the Riverside International Raceway in Moreno Valley, California.

The Times Mirror Corporation has also owned a number of book publishers over the years, including New American Library and C.V. Mosby, as well as Harry N. Abrams, Matthew Bender, and Jeppesen.[115]

In 1960, Times Mirror of Los Angeles bought the book publisher New American Library, known for publishing affordable paperback reprints of classics and other scholarly works.[116] The NAL continued to operate autonomously from New York and within the Mirror Company. In 1983, Odyssey Partners and Ira J. Hechler bought NAL from the Times Mirror Company for over $50 million.[115]

In 1967, Times Mirror acquired C.V. Mosby Company, a professional publisher and merged it over the years with several other professional publishers including Resource Application, Inc., Year Book Medical Publishers, Wolfe Publishing Ltd., PSG Publishing Company, B.C. Decker, Inc., among others. Eventually in 1998 Mosby was sold to Harcourt Brace & Company to form the Elsevier Health Sciences group.[117]

Times-Mirror Broadcasting Company

Formerly	KTTV, Inc. (1947-1963)
Type	Private
Industry	Broadcast television Media
Founded	December 1947 (1947-12)
Defunct	1993
Fate	Acquired by Argyle Television (sold to New World Communications in 1994)
Headquarters	Los Angeles, California , United States
Area served	United States
Products	Broadcast and cable television
Parent	The Times-Mirror Company (1947–1963, 1970–1993) Silent (1963–1970)

The Times-Mirror Company was a founding owner of television station KTTV in Los Angeles, which opened in January 1949. It became that station's sole owner in 1951, after re-acquiring the minority shares it had sold to CBS in 1948. Times-Mirror also purchased a former motion picture studio, Nassour Studios, in Hollywood in 1950, which was then used to consolidate KTTV's operations. Later to be known as Metromedia Square, the studio was sold along with KTTV to Metromedia in 1963.

After a seven-year hiatus from the medium, the firm reactivated Times-Mirror Broadcasting Company with its 1970 purchase of the Dallas Times Herald and its radio and television stations, KRLD-AM-FM-TV in Dallas.[118] The Federal Communications Commission granted an exemption of its cross-ownership policy and allowed Times-Mirror to retain the newspaper and the television outlet, which was renamed KDFW-TV.

Times-Mirror Broadcasting later acquired KTBC-TV in Austin, Texas in 1973;[119] and in 1980 purchased a group of stations owned by Newhouse Newspapers: WAPI-TV (now WVTM-TV) in Birmingham, Alabama; KTVI in St. Louis; WSYR-TV (now WSTM-TV) in Syracuse, New York and its satellite station WSYE-TV (now WETM-TV) in Elmira, New York; and WTPA-TV (now WHTM-TV) in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.[120] The company also entered the field of cable television, servicing the Phoenix and San Diego areas, amongst others. They were originally titled Times-Mirror Cable, and were later renamed to Dimension Cable Television. Similarly, they also attempted to enter the pay-TV market, with the Spotlight movie network; it was not successful and was quickly shut down. The cable systems were sold in the mid-1990s to Cox Communications.

Times-Mirror also pared its station group down, selling off the Syracuse, Elmira and Harrisburg properties in 1986.[121] The remaining four outlets were packaged to a new upstart holding company, Argyle Television, in 1993.[122] These stations were acquired by New World Communications shortly thereafter and became key components in a sweeping shift of network-station affiliations which occurred between 1994 and 1995.

Notes:

• ¹ Co-owned with CBS until 1951 in a joint venture (51% owned by Times-Mirror, 49% owned by CBS);
• ² Purchased along with KRLD-AM-FM as part of Times-Mirror's acquisition of the Dallas Times Herald. Times-Mirror sold the radio stations to comply with FCC cross-ownership restrictions.

On January 19, 2018, employees of the news department voted 248–44 in a National Labor Relations Board election to be represented by the NewsGuild-CWA.[123] The vote came despite aggressive opposition from the paper's management team, reversing more than a century of anti-union sentiment at one of the biggest newspapers in the country.