Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times, commonly referred to as the Times, is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country. In 2000, the Tribune Company, parent company of the Chicago Tribune and local television station KTLA, purchased the Los Angeles Times. It is currently owned by Tribune Publishing.

History

Otis era

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 to become the paper's editor. Otis made the Times a financial success.

In an era where newspapers were driven by party politics, the Times was directed at Republican readers. As was typical of newspapers of the time, the Times would sit on stories for several days, notably including the 1884 victory of Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland.

Historian Kevin Starr wrote that Otis was 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. Toward those ends, the paper supported efforts to expand the city's water supply by acquiring the rights to the water supply of the Owens Valley in the California Water Wars, a set of events fictionalized in the Roman Polanski movie Chinatown.

The efforts of the Times to fight local unions led to the October 1, 1910, bombing of its headquarters, killing twenty-one people. Two 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."

Chandler era

Upon 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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

Modern era

The 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 and the need to increase its Web presence.

In 2000, the Tribune Company acquired the Times, placing the paper in co-ownership with then-WB (now CW)-affiliated KTLA, which Tribune acquired in 1985.

For two days in 2005, the Times experimented with Wikitorial, the first Wiki by a major news organization to allow readers to combine forces to produce their own editorial pieces. However, they shut it down after a few people besieged it with inappropriate material.

In December 2008, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy protection.

The single copy rate is $2. Since March 2015 the paper increased its daily price $0.50 (33.3%) to match its Sunday/Thanksgiving Day rate (at newsracks tax included; price is higher in designated state areas).

Pulitzer prizes

Through 2014, the Times had won 41 Pulitzers, including four in editorial cartooning, and one each in spot news reporting for the 1965 Watts Riots and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Times sportswriter Jim Murray won a Pulitzer in 1990.

Times investigative reporters Chuck Philips and Michael Hiltzik won the Pulitzer in 1999 for a year-long series that exposed corruption in the music business. Mark Saylor, then-entertainment editor of the business section, said it recognized "aggressive reporting on the hometown industry ... where The LA Times has long labored under a cloud, the misperception that ...[they]... were soft on the entertainment industry".

Times journalist David Willman won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting; the organization cited "his pioneering expose of seven unsafe prescription drugs that had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and an analysis of the policy reforms that had reduced the agency's effectiveness." In 2004, the paper won five prizes, which is the third-most by any paper in one year (behind The New York Times in 2002 (7) and The Washington Post in 2008 (6)).

Times reporters Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2009 "for their fresh and painstaking exploration into the cost and effectiveness of attempts to combat the growing menace of wildfires across the western United States."

Competition and rivalry

In the 19th century, the chief competition to the Times was the Los Angeles Herald, followed by the smaller Los Angeles Tribune. In December 1903, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst began publishing the Los Angeles Examiner as a direct morning competitor to the Times. In the 20th century, the Los Angeles Express was an afternoon competitor, as was Manchester Boddy's Los Angeles Daily News, a Democratic newspaper.

By the mid-1940s, the Times was the leading newspaper in terms of circulation in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In 1948, it launched the Los Angeles Mirror, an afternoon tabloid, to compete with both the Daily News and the merged Herald-Express. In 1954, the Mirror absorbed the Daily News. The combined paper, the Mirror-News, ceased publication in 1962, when the Hearst afternoon Herald-Express and the morning Los Angeles Examiner merged to become the Herald-Examiner.

The Herald-Examiner published its last number in 1989. Today the second-largest daily newspaper in Los Angeles is the San Fernando Valley-based Los Angeles Daily News (unrelated to the aforementioned defunct publication).

Special editions

Midwinter and midsummer

Midwinter

For 69 years, from 1885 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." Two years later, the edition had grown to "forty-eight handsome pages (9x15 inches), [which] stitched for convenience and better preservation," was "equivalent to a 150-page book." 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.

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 â€" 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.

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

Midsummer

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

Zoned editions and subsidiaries

In the 1990s, the Times published various editions catering to far-flung areas. Editions included a Ventura County edition, an Inland Empire edition, a San Diego County edition, and 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 folded into Our Times, a group of community supplements included in editions of the regular Los Angeles Metro newspaper.

A subsidiary, Times Community Newspapers, publishes the Burbank Leader, Coastline Pilot of Laguna Beach, Crescenta Valley Sun, Daily Pilot of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, Glendale News-Press, Huntington Beach Independent and La Cañada Valley Sun.

Features

Among the Times‍ '​ staff are columnists Steve Lopez and Patt Morrison and film critic Kenneth Turan. Sports columnists include Bill Plaschke, who is also a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, and Helene Elliott, the first female sportswriter to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Former sports editor Bill Dwyre is also a columnist.

One of the Times‍ '​ features 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 embarked on a number of investigative journalism pieces. A series in December 2004 on the King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles led to a Pulitzer Prize and a more thorough coverage of the hospital's troubled history. Lopez wrote a five-part series on the civic and humanitarian disgrace of Los Angeles' Skid Row, which became the focus of a 2009 motion picture, The Soloist. It also won 62 awards at the SND awards.

On January 31, 2013 a KCBS-TV news report looking at the use of disabled parking placards in Los Angeles, featured Times health columnist Karen Voight using a disabled parking badge, thereby avoiding meter parking charges outside the fitness centre where she was teaching a class. The crew filmed Voight participating in the exercise class, and subsequently walking down the street without any problem. When the CBS reporter David Goldstein confronted the international fitness expert, she said "My knee is unable to do a lot of things."

Promotion

Festival of Books

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. In 2011, the Festival of Books was moved to the University of Southern California.

Book prizes

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".

Broadcasting activities

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 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. 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; 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. 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 wasn't 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. The remaining four outlets were packaged to a new upstart holding company, Argyle Television, in 1993. 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 1994â€"1995.

Stations

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.

Notable employees

Writers and editors

Cartoonists

Photographers

References

Further reading

• Ainsworth, Edward Maddin (c. 1940). History of Los Angeles Times. 
• Berges, Marshall (1984). The life and Times of Los Angeles: A newspaper, a family, and a city. New York: Atheneum. ISBN 0689114273. 
• Gottlieb, Robert; Wolt, Irene (1977). Thinking big : the story of the Los Angeles times, its publishers, and their influence on Southern California. New York: Putnam. 
• Halberstam, David (1979). The Powers That Be. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0394503813. 
• Hart, Jack R. (1981). The information empire: The rise of the Los Angeles Times and the Times Mirror Corporation. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America. ISBN 0819115800. 
• Merrill, John C. and Harold A. Fisher. The world's great dailies: profiles of fifty newspapers (1980) pp 183-91
• Prochnau, William (Januaryâ€"February 2000). "The State of The American Newspaper: Down and Out in L.A.". American Journalism Review (College Park: University of Maryland Foundation). 

External links

• Official website (Mobile)
• Tribune Company
• Los Angeles Times Archives (1881 to present)
• Los Angeles Times Travel
• Los Angeles Times photonegative archive. Department of Special Collection. Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA
• Today's front page in .pdf format (may load slowly)
• "The Times' 128-Year History," Los Angeles Times Media Group
• Article for the Los Angeles Beat about the Los Angeles Times guided tour
• Los Angeles Times at the Wayback Machine (archived December 21, 1996)