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overview
landmarks
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overview
This profile considers the Times-Mirror group, Los
Angeles Times and Chandler family. Times-Mirror was
acquired by the Chicago-based Tribune group in 2001.
It covers -
introduction
In 2001 Chicago-based
Tribune Group absorbed the Los Angeles Times-Mirror
group in a merger promoted as leading to economies of
scale for advertisers and above-average growth through
co-ownership of newspapers and television stations in
large metropolitan markets.
At its height the Times-Mirror holdings extended across
newspaper and magazine publishing, online services, sports
teams, printing and directories, broadcasting, television/radio
production and property. Tribune offloaded substantial
interests following the takeover, notably through sale
of the Times-Mirror magazines to Time
Warner.
A chronology of the Tribune group is here.
the LA Times
The Los Angeles Times, with a daily circulation
of 965,000 as of 2002, is the second-largest metropolitan
US newspaper. Its significance reflects the importance
of the Californian economy since the 1930s.
Its site is here.
The Times traces its origins to the Los Angeles
Weekly Mirror (launched by Jesse Yarnell, TJ
Caystile and SJ Mathes in 1873) and the Los Angeles Daily
Times (launched by Nathan Cole Jr. and Thomas Gardiner
in December 1881). The daily sheet went bankrupt and was
taken over by the Mirror Company, its printer, under the
editorship of former Union army lieutenant colonel Harrison
Gray Otis (1837-1913). Otis gained a stake in the paper
in 1882 and two years later gained control of the printing
company and newspaper, forming the Times-Mirror Company.
In 1891 the Weekly Mirror was incorporated with
the Saturday Times, which became the Los Angeles
Saturday Times & Weekly Mirror.
In 1894 Otis' daughter Marian married Harry Chandler.
Otis and Chandler successfully engaged in increasingly
large-scale property speculation, for example making a
fortune in 1905 when the Owens River was diverted to Los
Angeles and in 1912 when they acquired the Tejon Ranch.
Both men attracted attention for vehement conservatism.
That was evident in Chandler's 1915 indictment by a Federal
Grand Jury for alleged involvement in the Mexican Revolution,
reflecting the family's substantial land holdings south
of the border. It was also evident in the October 1910
bombing of the Times headquarters and Otis' home,
killing 21 people. The attacks have been attributed to
anarchists or a lunatic; they served to illustrate Otis'
crusade against organised labour in an era where passions
were strong and hyperbole was accepted. During the preceding
year Hiram Johnson had thus attacked Otis as
vile,
infamous, degraded and putrescence ... [with] senile
dementia, gangrened heart and rotting brain.
On Otis's death in 1917, his son-in-law Harry Chandler
became publisher of the Times, responsible for
such gems as a denunciation of Upton Sinclair's 1934 EPIC
campaign that warned
what
is eating at the heart of America [is] ... a maggot-like
horde of Reds ... they are termites secretly and darkly
eating into the foundations and the roof beams of everything
that the American heart has held dear and sacred ...
they rally uncleanly to every sore spot. They drop poison
in every bruise.
Harry
was in turn succeeded in 1944 by son Norman Chandler,
who ran the paper during the rapid growth of post-war
Los Angeles. Disquiet about claimed conflicts of interest
(including rezonings) and influence and support for the
far right were reflected in works such as William Bonelli's
1954 Billion Dollar Blackjack (Beverly Hills: Civic
Research Press 1954) and David Halberstam's comment that
the
Times was not an organ of the Republican Party
in Southern California, it was the Republican
Party.
Norman's son Otis Chandler, chief executive from 1960
to 1980, successfully remade the paper in the model of
the New York Times and Washington Post.
That involved a more liberal stance - consistent with
changing readership but provoking disquiet among the extended
Chandler family - and significant investment in infrastructure,
management systems and reporting.
Closure in 1989 of the Herald Examiner, its last
metropolitan rival for the daily newspaper market, supposedly
made Los Angeles a one-newspaper city. In practice the
Times faced competition from local dailies in
Orange County and other locations and from other media.
the group
As its chronology suggests,
the Times-Mirror company was able to leverage the Los
Angeles Times to expand into book and magazine publishing,
other newspapers and broadcasting.
In 1903 it launched The Wireless, a newspaper for
Catalina Island. In 1922 it established KHJ, the first
commercial radio station in Los Angeles County (sold 1927).
The increasing importance of the film industry was reflected
in Hedda Hopper's Hollywood gossip column in LA Times
from 1938, competing with Louella Parsons of Hearst's
Los Angeles Examiner. By the mid-1940s the Times
was the leading Los Angeles metropolitan newspaper. It
is useful to note, however, that Hearst's five Californian
papers had over 50% of the market in that state.
In 1948 Times-Mirror and CBS establised
the KTTV (Times Television) television station in Los
Angeles; the Times acquired full ownership of KTTV in
1950, two years after launch of the tabloid LA Mirror.
In 1954 Times-Mirror acquired the circulation list and
assets of the Los Angeles Daily News, which was
folded into the Mirror as the Mirror-News.
The Times-Mirror Syndicate was established in 1958. Flush
with revenue, Times-Mirror diversified under Otis Chandler
from 1960 onwards. In 1960 it bought book publisher New
American Library, followed by H.M. Goucha and the Orange
Coast Publishing Company (Orange Coast Daily Pilot).
In 1962 - coinciding with cessation of the Los Angeles
Mirror - the hyphen dropped from the corporate
title, which became the Times Mirror Company. It joined
with the Washington Post to form
the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service to
syndicate articles from both papers.
Diversification saw acquisition during the early 1960s
of Jespersen Sanderson (the dominant US aviation mapping
and information publisher founded in 1934 by Elrey Borge
Jeppesen), printer HM Goucha and paperback publisher New
American Library.
Times Mirror Company listed on the New York Stock Exchange
in 1964. In 1967 Times Mirror it bought General Features
Corporation (integrated with Los Angeles Times Syndicate)
and in 1969 bought the Dallas Times-Herald, Times-Herald
Printing Company and KDFW. In 1970 it purchased a controlling
interest in Newsday,
the Long Island daily founded in 1939 by Alicia Patterson
(1906-63) of the Tribune dynasty.
Other expansion in the East during the late 1970s saw
acquisition of the Greenwich Times, Stamford Advocate
and Hartford Courant. It moved north with purchase
of the Denver Post for US$95 million in 1980. Its
magazine interests grew with purchase of Broadcasting
(for US$75 million) and Sporting News. In
1986 it bought the Sunpapers group (including the Baltimore
Sun, Evening Sun and WMAR-TV for US$600
million). That acquisition was partly funded by sale of
the Times Mirror Press telephone directory printing arm
to GTE Directories and Denver Post to MediaNews
in 1987.
In 1990 Times Mirror bought a 50% share in La Opinion,
Los Angeles' largest Spanish-language newspaper. A year
later it bought Faber & Faber nursing books, followed
by acquisition of Gower Medical Publishing from Kluwer
in 1993.
Closer to home it acquired the Coast Community News titles
- Glendale News Press, Costa Mesa Daily
Pilot, Burbank Leader, Foothill Leader
and Huntington Beach Independent - and sold KDFW-TV
Dallas and KTBC Austin to Argyle Television. That was
followed by sale of Times Mirror Cable Television to Cox
Communications and the Argyle stake to New
World Communication.
In the late 1990s it bought a range of legal publishing
houses and sold assets such as art publisher Harry N Abrams.
In 1998 it sold most of its specialist publishing interests
to Elsevier for US$1.65 billion.
In 1997 and 1999 the extended Chandler family created
two complex partnerships with Times Mirror that enabled
a tax-free restructuring of family and corporate interests.
The partnerships (valued at over US$3.55 billion in 2006)
embraced real estate, preferred shares and other investments.
By mid-2006, when Tribune announced plans for a major
buyback of its stock, the partnerships - held separately
from the Chandler trusts' direct shareholding in Tribune
- had become a point of contention between the Chandler
Trusts and Tribune management.
Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Sun, acquired by Times Mirror in
1986, was founded in 1837 by printer Arunah Shepherdson
Abell. It is currently the dominant Baltimore newspaper,
with a daily press run of around 430,000 copies (540,000
on Sunday) run of copies. It was owned by Abell's heirs
until 1910, when the Black family took a controlling interest.
The Sun is a morning daily; it absorbed the Baltimore
Evening Sun in 1995.
It is best known for its affiliation with H L Mencken
and emphasis on overseas reporting in an era when Africa
and Asia were terra incognita for much of the US press.
LA Daily News
Times-Mirror acquired the circulation list and assets
of the Los Angeles Daily News in 1954. They were
amalgamated with the Mirror, which became the Mirror-News
and then simply the Mirror before closing in
1962.
The Daily News had been launched in 1926 by property
developer Manchester Boddy (1891-1967) through a reconstruction
of the bankrupt Illustrated Daily News founded
by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr in 1923. From the 1920s through
the 1940s it served as the city's lone liberal newspaper.
Boddy had some success with the Los Angeles Evening
Record but harboured political ambitions, with a
venomous campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas in the
1950 Democratic primary for the US Senate nomination.
The Daily News was founded in 1911 as the Van
Nuys News and became the Valley News &
Green Sheet. In 1973 it was sold to the Chicago Tribune
Co by the Markham and Mendenhall families for US$25 million
and renamed as the Daily News. In 1985 the Tribune
sold the paper to Jack Kent Cooke
for US$176 million. He in turn sold it to MediaNews
in 1998.
studies
David Halberstam's classic The Powers That Be (New
York: Knopf 1979) is a picture by the leading US journalist
of the Washington Post, CBS, New York
Times and LA Times at the peak of the 'television
age'.
Its exploration of character, politics and industry economics
is greatly superior to the profile of the Chandlers and
the Times in the more recent Paper Tigers
(London: Heinemann 1993) by Nicholas Coleridge.
Jack Hart's The Information Empire: The Rise of the
Los Angeles Times and the Times Mirror Corporation
(Washington: Uni Press of America 1982) is a creditable
academic study, although its origins as a doctoral thesis
often show. It might be supplemented with The Life
and Times of Los Angeles: A Newspaper, a Family, and a
City (New York: Atheneum 1984) by Marshall Berges.
For Otis, the Owens Valley and the politics of property
development see Abraham Hoffman's Vision or Villainy:
Origins of the Owens Valley - Los Angeles Water Controversy
(College Station: Texas A&M Press 1981), William Kahrl's
Water & Power: The Conflict Over Los Angeles's
Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley: Uni of
California Press 1982), Robert Fogelson's The Fragmented
Metropolis: Los Angeles 1850-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard
Uni Press 1967), William Fulton's The Reluctant Metropolis:
The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1997) and William Spalding's Autobiography
of a Los Angeles Newspaperman 1874-1900 (Berkeley:
Uni of California Press 2007).
Dennis McDougal's Privileged Son: Otis Chandler &
the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty" (Reading:
Perseus 2001) does little to explain Chandler's transformation
of the paper captured in SJ Perelman's quip about a train
trip to California:
I
asked the porter to get me a newspaper and unfortunately
the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles
Times.
Perelman would have been even more underwhelmed by the
Copley's San Diego Tribune.
Turn instead to Robert Gottlieb's Thinking Big: The
Story of the LA Times (New York: Dutton 1977). Marc
Edge's passionate 'And The Wall Came Tumbling Down in
Los Angeles' in The Big Chill: Investigative Reporting
in the Current Media Environment (Ames: Iowa State
Uni Press 2000) edited by Joseph Bernt & Marilyn Greenwald
considers the Willes years.
For the Sun see Harold Williams' The Baltimore
Sun: 1837-1987 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press
1987), an insider account, and The Sunpapers of Baltimore,
1837-1937 (New York: Knopf 1937) by Gerald Johnson.
Fred Hobson's Mencken: A Life (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Uni Press 1995) is a point into the voluminous
literature about and by that man.
For the Hartford Courant see Andrew Krieg's Spiked:
How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper
(Old Saybrook: Peregrine Press 1988).
There has been no major study of Boddy or the Daily
News, although there is an engaging account of Los
Angeles newspaper publishing in Red Ink White Lies:
The Rise & Fall of Los Angeles Newspapers 1920-1962
(Euclid: Dragonflyer Press 2000) by Robert Wagner. For
Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr see his Man of the World:
My Life on Five Continents (New York: Crown 1959).
The Gahagan Douglas campaign is explored in Greg Mitchell's
Tricky Dick & the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs
Helen Gahagan Douglas - Sexual Politics and the Red Scare,
1950 (New York: Random 1998).
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