Death in Los Angeles

Out of the dingy downtown headquarters of Hearst's Los Angeles morning Examiner stepped Managing Editor William A. Townes, 52. Suddenly he was trapped in the glare of television floodlights. Bill Stout, newscaster for Los Angeles station KTLA, had his microphone at the ready. Could Townes confirm persistent reports that the Examiner was about to die? No, said Townes, he could not. Then he added quietly: "I am sad because I believe the rumors are true."

Thus, the rival medium of TV plastered all over town the biggest Los Angeles newspaper story in more than a decade. By week's end, the whispers that had been circulating for months had turned into fact. Of the city's four newspapers, two had died: Hearst's morning Examiner (circ. 381,037) and Norman Chandler's afternoon Mirror (circ. 301,882). Chandler's big and powerful Times (548,702) was left with a valuable morning monopoly, and Hearst's flamboyant Herald-Express (393,215) had the afternoon field all to itself.

Losing Battles. On purely economic grounds, the disappearance of the Examiner and the Mirror could be called death from natural causes. Although the Examiner was one of the shinier links in the dwindling Hearst newspaper chain, it fought a losing battle for survival against the Times. Founded in 1903. when the late William Randolph Hearst still had millions to squander, the Examiner was a well-written, well-edited, brightly made-up paper. Its political reporting was probably the most balanced in California. During the 1940s, the Examiner was ahead of the Times in daily circulation. But the older, more conservative Times fattened on ads, and a combination of ads and news seemed to be what Los Angeles newspaper readers wanted most. For the last five years, the Times has carried more ads than the city's three other papers combined, and has steadily improved its circulation edge on the Examiner.

Encouraged by its morning supremacy, the Times invaded the afternoon field in 1948 by founding the tabloid Mirror. The odds on survival seemed good. The Chandlers control a wealthy empire consisting of holdings in real estate, oil, timber, a paper mill, a vast cattle ranch, an insurance firm and Los Angeles television station KTTV. There were millions available to underpin their new paper in its deliberate campaign to wrest afternoon readership away, from Hearst's Herald-Express, a flamboyant blend of blaring headlines, race results, and juicy sex and crime stories. Self-styled as an independent-Republican daily, the new Mirror contrasted sharply with the stout, dull Times. The Mirror gave the news a bright, if not particularly thorough, play, and after the paper switched to standard size in 1954, it continued to take on circulation. By 1958, it was edging up on the Herald-Express (319,000 to 341,000).

But the climb was costly. The Chandlers had sunk some $20 million in what, for all its circulation growth, was still a losing proposition. Advertising income remained low, and after touching its 1958 circulation high water mark, the Mirror began to sink. Beginning in 1957, the Chandlers brought in a new editorial team, whose chief instructions were to cut costs on the Mirror and conduct a holding operation. The new management was not successful: of late, the Mirror has been losing money at the rate of $2,000,000 a year.

A Driving Town. The disappearance of the Mirror and the Examiner brings to Los Angeles two dubious distinctions: of the five major population centers in the U.S., it is now the only one without directly competitive papers--and it is the largest U.S. city with only two metropolitan dailies. Part of the explanation lies in the quality of the Los Angeles press. The Times is now the best paper in town; it has a big staff, complete and often able local news coverage, and the security that comes with being a community habit. But it is not by chance that only 23 of 100 Angelenos buy a metropolitan daily, as against 48 per 100 in New York.

Much of the problem lies in the character of the sprawling megalopolis (454.9 sq. mi.), whose inhabitants commute by car--a habit not conducive to newspaper reading. Within Los Angeles County limits are 73 separate municipalities--many of them, e.g., Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, embedded inside the city of Los Angeles itself. A population explosion in the surrounding suburbs has emphasized the role of the county's suburban press, which fields 23 dailies, all of which compete with the big-city dailies for both readers and ads. In these communities, with their glittering, fast-growing shopping centers, local merchants are showing an increasing inclination to give their advertising to the local publisher--at the expense of the downtown dailies.

Small Complaint. The same obstacles confront both surviving Los Angeles papers. But of the two. Hearst is likely to run into more trouble. Although its afternoon paper has been pointedly renamed the Herald-Examiner, this cannot conceal the fact that William Randolph Hearst's cost-conscious successors have expediently submerged their superior Los Angeles possession, the Examiner, into their inferior product. Moreover, as an afternoon paper the Herald-Examiner is in direct competition with the suburban dailies, most of which are published in the afternoon. And it faces grave distribution problems that a morning paper, whose trucks roll in the quiet hours before dawn, avoids easily: to escape the ever increasing rush-hour freeway traffic, an afternoon paper in Los Angeles must go to press no later than noon--giving its staff little time to do more than warm up the news that has already been printed in the morning press.

But it is doubtful that Angelenos, who have never demanded an outstanding newspaper, will complain either about the loss of two papers or the caliber of the survivors. The chief mourners last week were the staffs of the two foundered dailies--400 on the Mirror, 1,000 on the Examiner--who, with scant notice, faced the bleak prospect of looking for other jobs in a diminished market. The Chandlers were ordering the dismissal of a handful of Times staffers to make room for the handful of Mirror people marked for salvage. Hearst hastily formed an "employment exchange" which was designed to land a few Examiner hands in slots elsewhere throughout the Hearst empire.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.