After more than 120 years, the Chandlers are getting out of the newspaper business, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The much-celebrated and maligned family that once dominated the civic, cultural and political life of Southern California through its control of the Los Angeles Times agreed Monday to sell its entire stake in Tribune Co., the newspaper’s parent.
With the core group of the family that propelled the newspaper to prominence having died or lost influence, the extended Chandler clan gradually lost its devotion to the media business. They sold the family-controlled Times Mirror Co. to Tribune in 2000. As Tribune’s share price declined recently, the Chandlers’ disenchantment with the media business reached a breaking point.
In the end, both defenders and detractors of one of the region’s dynastic families agreed on one thing: The Chandlers acted like any other investor, seeking the maximum price for a declining asset.
“The Chandlers had a kind of public trust obligation and by failing to look out more closely for the future of the newspaper, that writes an epitaph of a family,” said Robert Gottlieb, an Occidental College professor who wrote a 1977 history of The Times. “They could have burnished their reputation, but instead they took a final step that showed they were just interested in making a buck off L.A.”
