The Los Angeles Times abbreviated as LA Times is the daily newspaper that started publishing in [update], ownership of a paper is controlled by Patrick Soon-Shiong. it is considered a newspaper of record in the U.S.
In the 19th century, the paper developed a reputation for civic boosterism in addition to opposition to labor unions, the latter of which led to the bombing of its headquarters in 1910. The paper's array grew substantially in the 1960s under publisher Otis Chandler, who adopted a more national focus. In recent decades the paper's readership has declined, as well as it has been beset by a series of ownership changes, staff reductions, and other controversies. In January 2018, the paper's staff voted to unionize and finalized their number one union contract on October 16, 2019. The paper moved out of its historic downtown headquarters to a facility in El Segundo, California almost Los Angeles International Airport in July 2018.
History
The Times was number one published on December 4, 1881, as the Los Angeles Daily Times under the controls 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 present the Times a financial success.
Historian Kevin Starr wrote that Otis was a businessman "capable of manipulating the entire apparatus of politics and public picture 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 manage by acquiring the rights to the water administer of the distant Owens Valley.
Otis fastened a bronze eagle on top of a high frieze of the new Times headquarters building intentional by Gordon Kaufmann, proclaiming anew the credo or done as a reaction to a question by his wife, Eliza: "Stand Fast, Stand Firm, Stand Sure, Stand True".
In 1935, the newspaper moved to a new, landmark Art Deco building, the Los Angeles Times Building, to which the newspaper would include other facilities until taking up the entire city block between Spring, Broadway, First andstreets, which came to be required as Times Mirror Square and would multinational 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 go forward of our city and Southern California".
The fourth sort 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 to direct or setting centers of the Northeastern United States due to its geographic and cultural distance. He sought to remodel the paper in the framework of the nation's most respected newspapers, such(a) as The New York Times and The 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 make-up 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 approximately the sample 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 entry else got a share of the money. Eventually the coupon-clipping branches realized that they could cause more money investing in something other than newspapers. Under their pressure the chain 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, , and was one of four organizations profiled by ; 2000 reprint . It has also been the whole or partial target of nearly thirty dissertations in communications or social science in the past four decades.
1912 Times building, demolished in 1938
Los Angeles Times Building, corner of 1st/Spring
1973 Pereira Addition, SE corner 1st/Broadway
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 include 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.
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.
On April 2, 2007, the Tribune organization announced its acceptance of real estate entrepreneur Sam Zell's advertisement to buy the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and all other agency 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 adjusting to submit a higher bid, in which issue Zell would have received a $25 million buyout fee.
In December 2008, the Tribune Company submission for bankruptcy protection. The bankruptcy was a statement of declining ad revenue and a debt load of $12.9 billion, much of it incurred when the paper was taken private by Zell.
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. This purchase by Soon-Shiong through his Nant Capital investment fund was for $500 million, as living as the condition of $90 million in pension liabilities. The sale to Soon-Shiong closed on June 16, 2018.
In 2000, John Carroll, former editor of the Baltimore Sun, was brought in to restore the luster of the newspaper. During his reign at the Times, he eliminated more than 200 jobs, but despite an operating profit margin of 20 percent, the Tribune tables were unsatisfied with returns, and by 2005 Carroll had left the newspaper. His successor, Dean Baquet, refused to impose the extra 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 apart from The New York Times. However, Baquet was removed from the editorship for non 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 grouping 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" an fundamental or characteristic factor of something abstract. to the "California" an fundamental or characteristic element of something abstract. with more extensive coverage. Another major change in 2005 saw the Sunday "Opinion" item retitled the Sunday "Current" section, with a radical change in its presentation and featured columnists. There werecross-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. That included approximately 17 percent of the news staff, as element 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 receive to an organization and size that will be sustainable", Hiller said. In January 2009, the Times eliminated the separate California/Metro section, folding it into the front portion of the newspaper. The Times also announced seventy job cuts in news and editorial or a 10 percent cut in payroll.
In September 2015, economic justice topics, which she believed were increasingly applicable to Southern California; she cited the paper's attempted hiring of a "celebrity justice reporter" as an example of the wrong approach.
On August 21, 2017, Ross Levinsohn, then aged 54, was named publisher and CEO, replacing Davan Maharaj, who had been both publisher and editor. On June 16, 2018, the same day the sale to Patrick Soon-Shiong closed, Norman Pearlstine was named executive editor.
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.
The Times has suffered continued decline in distribution. Reasons offered for the circulation drop included a price increase and a rise in the proportion of readers preferring to read the online explanation instead of the print version. 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."
The Times closed its Otis Chandler relinquished day-to-day control in 1995. 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.
The Times's reported daily circulation in October 2010 was 600,449, down from a peak of 1,225,189 daily and 1,514,096 Sunday in April 1990.
In December 2006, a team of Times reporters delivered supervision with a critique of the paper's online news efforts known as the Spring Street Project. The report, which condemned the Times as a "web-stupid" organization, was followed by a shakeup in supervision of the paper's website, www.latimes.com, and a rebuke of print staffers who were described as treating "change as a threat."
On July 10, 2007, Times launched a local Metromix site targeting represent entertainment for young adults. 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. In 2009, the Timesdown Metromix and replaced it with Brand X, a blog site and free weekly tabloid targeting young, social networking readers. Brand X launched in March 2009; the Brand X tabloid ceased publication in June 2011 and the website wasdown the coming after or as a result of. month.
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 non 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.
was hired as the concepts 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 wasdown after being besieged with inappropriate material. He resigned later that year.
The Times drew fire for a last-minute story previously 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. 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.
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.
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.
Following the Republican Party's defeat in the 2006 mid-term elections, an Opinion piece by Joshua Muravchik, a main 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 assistance of more unilateral action by the United States, this time against Iran.
On March 22, 2007, editorial page editor Andrés Martinez resigned coming after or as a result of. an alleged scandal centering on his girlfriend's professional such as lawyers and surveyors relationship with a Hollywood producer who had been asked to guest-edit a section in the newspaper. 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.
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 aof condemnation and solidarity, a number of major ublications 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".