In 1988 the Los Angeles Times had a turnover of more than one billion dollars. And on its best days it sold 1.2 million copies. Founded in 1881, it was a four-page newspaper in a city without running water, unpaved streets and barely 5,000 inhabitants (today more than 14 million people live in its metropolitan area). It went bankrupt and in 1882 it was bought by Harrison Gray Otis, a warlike soldier who fought in the Civil War, a businessman who enlisted as a volunteer in the Philippine War. In 1885 Otis hired his son-in-law Harry Chandler as editor of the newspaper, who ended up being the son he never had and the first of the Chandlers to inherit a provincial and ultra-conservative newspaper, but in a city that “invented” this newspaper-publishing family.
I remember visiting the venerable newspaper building, an Art Nouveau gem, opened in 1935 with Bing Crosby singing at its opening. I then met with its CEO, the chubby-cheeked Roberto Erburu, a lawyer descended from Basque shepherds who succeeded the last of the Chandlers as president of the newspaper, an editor who turned the newspaper into a very prestigious newspaper and which became the second newspaper most important in the United States. Erburu managed the last years of abundance and earned the benevolence of the family by ensuring millionaire dividends and making them rich, but at the price of not intervening in the management of the group.
However, the family's fifty shareholders decided to fire Otis Chandler, whom they considered too liberal, a heresy for a newspaper that his father Norman put at the service of Richard Nixon.
Like so many family businesses, the Chandlers resolved the conflict by signing successive professional executives who, supposedly, would know how to run the company as a multimedia group and thus the Times Mirror company was born, a conglomerate that, even before the Internet, began to lose money in a diversification that The only thing he achieved was for the family to sell it to the owners of the Chicago Tribune in 2000 for $8.3 billion. Its last CEO was Mark Willes, a colorful executive from a multinational breakfast cereal company who, of course, was fired for being incompetent.
Far from improving things, the new owners of the Los Angeles Times faced the challenge of the Internet. They created a large “electronic information” division and in the newspaper's editorial office they assigned Internet coverage to a group of reporters to investigate what the hell was happening with this new revolution and how the Los Angeles Times should save the furniture. The result of that work was published in a series of articles that, in some way, were a precedent for the “Innovation Report” published years later by The New York Times.
The Times Mirror thing ended up like the “rosary of dawn.” The Chandlers had lost the newspaper that made them multimillionaires, but they went ahead to sell it as other large family-owned newspapers did years later, although at bargain prices. In 2017 the Chicago Tribune group declared bankruptcy and in 2018, Patrick Soon-Shiong, one of the richest men in California, rescued the remains of the Chandler empire for 500 million dollars (Jeff Bezos had bought the Grahams' Washington Post).
Patrick (70 years old) is an affable Japanese surgeon born in South Africa, Catholic, who made his fortune ($7.6 billion) patenting pharmaceutical treatments for diabetes and cancer. Of impeccable conduct, a Lakers fan and friend of Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol, he has since invested some billion dollars in a new building that includes one of the most modern multimedia newsrooms in the United States. He always said that he would respect the autonomy of journalists, but also that he hoped not to become a patron of “lost causes.”
With barely 500,000 digital subscribers and print newspaper sales of less than 100,000 copies a day, good old Soon-Shiong seems to have thrown in the towel and at the beginning of this year everything seems to have blown up. First the editor and two deputy editors of the newspaper resigned because the dismissal of 115 journalists (20% of the editorial staff) was announced, then the first general strike of journalists in the history of the Los Angeles Times was declared and last week the former opinion director of the newspaper as the new “interim director” of the newsroom, the first woman in 142 years to hold that position.
For many analysts, the lesson is clear: money or patrons are not enough. The journalistic companies of the future, in order not to end up being “soulless cathedrals,” will continue to need a “culture” that was previously guaranteed by great dynasties of editors like the Chandlers or the Grahams, and that these great businessmen do not have.
