Word: chandler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...decades the Los Angeles Times was little more than the instrument with which the Chandler family, its sole owners since 1886, scooped out a financial and social empire in Southern California. Real estate deals dictated editorial policy, and news columns seldom threatened the good names and growing fortunes of local business interests. Humorist S.J. Perelman once wrote of a cross-country train trip: "I asked the porter to get me a newspaper and unfortunately the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles Times...
Times, and the Los Angeles Times, have changed. The crucial difference is Otis Chandler, 51, who became publisher in 1960. Though his father Norman had made the Times a serious paper, Otis made it one of the nation's best, and turned its parent Times Mirror Co. into a vast communications empire. Times Mirror owns five other newspapers, two television stations, two cable TV companies, five magazines, three book clubs, seven book-publishing companies and extensive paper and forest holdings. Revenues last year topped $1.4 billion, and David Halberstam in his bestselling The Powers That Be calls the newspaper...
This month Chandler's comet will acquire an important East Coast associate, the Hartford Courant (circ. 218,000). Connecticut's largest and one of the nation's oldest dailies, the Courant (pronounced current) covered the Boston Tea Party and counted George Washington among its readers. Courant employees and retirees, who own most of its stock, turned down a $133-a-share takeover bid last fall by Capital Cities Communications, a media conglomerate with a reputation for rough labor dealings. There was little opposition to Times Mirror, however. The firm made a better offer-$200 a share...
...Chandler generally improves what his firm buys. At the Dallas Times Herald, for example, the editorial budget has been doubled and news columns increased by 30% since Times Mirror took over in 1969. Says David Laventhol, publisher of Long Island's Newsday, acquired in 1970: "Chandler has a good sense of the need for local autonomy...
...talent as an interviewer and reporter gushes from every page like Old Faithful. From interviews with The Washington Post's Kay Graham, among others, Halberstam has drawn an engrossing and remarkably full account of her husband Philip's manic-depression and tragic suicide in 1963. From Dorothy "Buff" Chandler, he elicited the real reason her husband Norman dropped Robert Taft in 1952 to go for Ike--Buff simply refused to sleep with Norman until he came around. From friends and colleagues of Ed Murrow, Halberstam relates the details of CBS chairman Bill Paley's horning-in on the memorial program...