Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a regional American daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles, California in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles area city of El Segundo since 2018,[3] it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the United States, as well as the largest newspaper in the western United States.[4] Owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by California Times, the paper has won more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes.[5][6][7][8]
Type
Los Angeles Times Communications LLC (Nant Capital)
Terry Tang
December 4, 1881 (as Los Angeles Daily Times)
English
2300 E. Imperial Highway
El Segundo, California 90245
United States
In the 19th century, the paper developed a reputation for civic boosterism and opposition to labor unions, the latter of which led to the bombing of its headquarters in 1910. The paper's profile grew substantially in the 1960s under publisher Otis Chandler, who adopted a more national focus. As with other regional newspapers in California and the United States, the paper's readership has declined since 2010. It has also 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 first union contract on October 16, 2019.[9] The paper moved out of its historic headquarters in downtown Los Angeles to a facility in El Segundo, near the Los Angeles International Airport, in July 2018. The L.A. Times' news coverage has evolved away from U.S. and international headlines and toward emphasizing California and especially Southern California stories since 2020.
In January 2024, the paper underwent its largest percentage reduction in headcount amounting to a layoff of over 20%, including senior staff editorial positions, in an effort to stem the tide of financial losses and maintain enough cash to be viably operational through the end of the year in a struggle for survival and relevance as a regional newspaper of diminished status.[10][11][12]
As of 2014, the Times has won 41 Pulitzer Prizes, including four in editorial cartooning, and one each in spot news reporting for the 1965 Watts Riots and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.[87]
Competition and rivalries[edit]
In the 19th century, the chief competition to the Times was the Los Angeles Examiner 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.[97] In the 20th century, the Los Angeles Express, Manchester Boddy's Los Angeles Daily News, a Democratic newspaper, were both afternoon competitors.[98]
By the mid-1940s, the Times was the leading newspaper in terms of circulation in the Greater Los Angeles. 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.[99] The Herald-Examiner published its last number in 1989.
In 2014, the Los Angeles Register, published by Freedom Communications, then-parent company of the Orange County Register, was launched as a daily newspaper to compete with the Times. By late September of that year, however, the Los Angeles Register closed.[100][101]
Features[edit]
One of the Times' features was "Column One", a feature that appeared daily on the front page to the left-hand side. Established in September 1968, it was 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 wrote that the column's purpose was 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.
From 1967 to 1972, the Times produced a Sunday supplement called West magazine. West was recognized for its art design, which was directed by Mike Salisbury (who later became art director of Rolling Stone magazine).[119] From 2000 to 2012, the Times published the Los Angeles Times Magazine, which started as a weekly and then became a monthly supplement. The magazine focused on stories and photos of people, places, style, and other cultural affairs occurring in Los Angeles and its surrounding cities and communities. Since 2014, The California Sunday Magazine has been included in the Sunday L.A. Times edition.
Formerly
KTTV, Inc. (1947–1963)
December 1947
1993
Acquired by Argyle Television (sold to New World Communications in 1994)
The Times-Mirror Company (1947–1963, 1970–1993)
Silent (1963–1970)
Other media[edit]
Book publishing[edit]
The Times Mirror Corporation has also owned a number of book publishers over the years, including New American Library, C.V. Mosby, Harry N. Abrams, Matthew Bender, and Jeppesen.[123]
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.[124] 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.[123]
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.[125]
Employees[edit]
Unionization[edit]
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.[131] 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.
