L.A.’S LAST BIG-CITY TRAPPING ABOUT TO DISAPPEAR
And then there were none.
With the departure of Times Mirror Co., Los Angeles has lost virtually its last corporate link to its 20th century past. The sale to Tribune Co. leaves the region without control of any of the traditional building blocks of corporate grandeur newspapers, major banks, oil companies or utilities associated with a major city.
It also signifies the passing into oblivion of a once proud, if often admittedly nasty, L.A. WASP establishment once centered on the Chandler family. Like the hegemons who once ran the banks and utilities and other key corporations, the Chandlers now ultimately have chosen to reduce themselves into coupon-clippers; they’d rather relax and play golf than, in the tradition of their ancestors, build new empires and challenge eastern elites.
In the process, residents of Los Angeles whatever their ethnic origin now inhabit a city that is in some sense less important, less capable of determining its own fate. The city’s great assets remain its weather and its creative, diverse population but the sense that L.A. can rival New York, or now even Chicago, has faded. There’s no one locally to make the case.
Instead Los Angeles has become something of a banana republic, more favored than Honduras, to be sure, but not much more in control of its own fate. All the critical sinews of power gas, most of the electricity, the news media, and the financial services infrastructure are in the hands of outsiders who see L.A. as an investment, not a home.
As a longtime contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times, I find this all somewhat depressing. The surrender of the Chandler family represents the final chapter in the gradual loss of commitment to the city that has crept into the paper over the past decade or so. Perhaps most impressive is that that commitment lasted as long as it did, long after much of the WASP establishment had given out. The Chandlers might have been bastards for much of their history, but at least they were our bastards.
Underperforming city
Does this matter in a digital age where business is placeless? It certainly does. Like people or companies, cities have a kind of internal mechanism that drives them either to under- or over-perform. Despite the pretenses of journalism school professors, newspapers whether the Tribune, the L.A. Times, or The New York Times always have represented an important part of that mechanism. A newspaper, even today, helps define a city and its mission, provides a sense of what a community is and aspires to become.
Sometimes this is crudely done, as was the case for the L.A. Times for much of its first century in existence, in the form of shameless boosterism. Later on, it became more subtle, as the Times’ growing journalistic sophistication lent ever greater credibility to the idea that Los Angeles had become a first-class city capable of both admiring its achievements and examining its own warts.
Today a paper like The New York Times helps position itself with an unspoken assumption that Gotham is the most important, exciting city on the planet. Other, less worldly papers the San Jose Mercury News comes to mind consciously promote their region, in the Merc’s case helping define the evolution of Silicon Valley’s mythology.
It is unlikely that the new Los Angeles Times, run by a viceroy selected from Chicago, will take on that kind of mission. Tribune Co. may see Los Angeles as a good place to expand its burgeoning media assets, but it will have no particular commitment to see that the bulk of that growth takes place in L.A.
They’ll invest so far as the price of our coconuts meets their corporate guidelines, but, unlike the Chandlers of the past, they will be unlikely to go any further than that.
Willes was like a Chandler
To hear some people at the Times talk, now departing CEO Mark Willes represented these kinds of soulless, placeless corporate values. He certainly made many mistakes, most notably in the Staples Center advertising fiasco.
But in terms of commitment to the city, Willes was actually more of a Chandler than the current generation of milquetoasts within that family. He came to be a player in the city, and seemed to care deeply about its future. This was a welcome contrast to the active dislike for Los Angeles that all too often characterized the paper under the previous regime, when the place was run by the patrician anti-Angeleno Shelby Coffey.
In the final analysis, however, Willes served simply to prepare for the final sell-out. He cut some of the paper’s legendary fat and reduced, at least somewhat, its culture of civic self-hatred. I would feel sorry for him except that he, too, will leave with a fat bankroll. That may not be so true for the scores, if not hundreds, of mainstream, unorganized Times Mirror employees who may soon find themselves suddenly redundant.
Who else loses? Certainly downtown Los Angeles, which no longer will have its traditional linchpin. One wonders how long the Tribune executives will want to inhabit an isolated downtown fortress inhabited by the ghosts of Chandlers past especially after they’ve tasted the delights of Santa Monica or Beverly Hills. The news grunts may stay there, but the elite decision-makers may not.
Beyond that will be the accelerated deconstruction of downtown Los Angeles not only economically but politically. The barely concealed glee with which the Daily News greeted news of Times Mirror’s demise was not surprising. In some fundamental sense, Valley secessionists have won a great victory. The new Tribune-owned Times will lack the necessary credibility, and maybe even the will, to battle the dismemberment of the city.
And what about the readers? Well, it could be worse the paper could have been bought by a chop shop like Gannett. Tribune Co. puts out solid, second-tier newspapers that focus on local issues. When they get to cutting back the redundant foreign staff, and ultimately eliminate some of the more self-indulgent reportage, they could even put more resources into local news.
But there will be something missing. The dream of Los Angeles as a true world-class city so associated with the Chandlers a rival to New York, Tokyo or London is fading fast. The sale of Times Mirror is just another reflection of that sad fact.
Business Journal columnist Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow with the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy and a research fellow at the Reason Public Policy Institute.
