Uncertain Times

MC101s toured the Times on Jan. 12. We are in the newspaper's ressearch library. Darrell Kunitomi is showing us the massive file of pre-1985 newspaper clippings.

To most longtime Los Angeles residents, the L.A. Times seems about as permanent and integral to the city as City Hall. It's just there, and it has sort of been assumed that it will always be there.

Well, that sense of certainty changed a few years ago when the Chandler family, publishers of the Times for 120 years, sold out to the Tribune Company of Chicago. It didn't quite feel like City Hall had fallen under the occupation of a foreign government hostile to our ways (like Iran or San Francisco), but sort of.

Tribune is a very bottom-line, profit-driven outfit. This is not to say the Chandlers ran the paper as a charitable trust, but somehow under their ownership (or at least the last 40 years of it) the paper hit a reasonable balance between profit and civic responsibility.

However, the Chandlers never had to deal with a newspaper industry with a future as uncertain as the one faced today. With low staff morale low, unhappy stockholders, an aging readership and declining advertising revenues, the Tribune Company has invited bids for a controlling interest in the company. Among the known bidders are two Los Angeles billionaires and the Chandler Family Trust.

These are uncertain times at the Times, as this National Public Radio Story points out.

***CLASSROOM COMPUTER FIXED We've finally got NPR stories playing on the new classroom computer. This should make the madianotes a little more compelling than they've been over the last week or so.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #9