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The Los Angeles Times
Published in LA, California, the Los Angeles Times is a newspaper founded in 1881 that is published on a daily basis and is one of the largest newspapers in the United States.
The newspaper started out in 1881 and was originally published every 10 days, but the paper that at the time was called The Los Angeles Daily Times, soon went under and had to file for bankruptcy. Soon after the bankruptcy it was picked up by the Mirror Company. During this takeover former army lieutenant Harrison Gray Otis was taken on as the editor for this paper. This time the paper was successfully re-introduced by Otis and in 1884 Otis acquired the company in order to gain full control in order to found the Times-Mirror Company.
After his death in 1917 the business was taken over by Harry Chandler, who was Otis's son in law, who in turn turned over the reins to his son in 1944. During those years of rapid growth the newspaper became part owner of the TV station KTTV, and took it over completely in 1951. It sold the station during the sixties to Metromedia.
The Otis-Chandler publishers remained in their positions until the eighties. During those years the pursuit for national recognition started, due to the fact that this family newspaper often got overlooked in the North East of the US. So it was decided to redo the newspaper after the fashion of the nation's most reputable newspapers. In this concept the newsroom was the core of the business so its budget got increased, along with its staff, resulting in reporting on a much broader scale, and in 1962 a partnership between the newspaper and The Washington post was established which started off a new service, where news articles from both papers got syndicated and distributed to other news corporations on a nationwide scale.
Like most printing companies in today’s information age since the late nineties, the circulation numbers of the paper have been steadily declining to the point that the paper that once was the number 2 newspaper of the US could no longer pass the 1 million milestone, something it could do with ease in earlier times.
Though opinions on the matter differ, it is generally accepted that the arrival of other types of media like the Internet, Television and even the old radio, caused the decline in numbers because these types of media make it easier to access information wherever and whenever consumers desire, and most often for free. As a result, on October 2008, the papers reported circulation stopped at a mere 739,000.
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