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Alfred Day Hersh
Alfred Hershe was an American Nobel Prize–winning bacteriologist and geneticist.
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The first edition of the Los Angeles Times is published4.12.1881

Wikipedia (16 Jan 2014, 11:58)
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the first-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country. In 2000, the Tribune Company, parent company of the Chicago Tribune and the area's KTLA, purchased the Los Angeles Times.


Otis era

The Times was first published on December 4, 1881, as the Los Angeles Daily Times under the direction of Nathan Cole Jr. and Thomas Gardiner. It was printed at the Mirror printing plant, owned by Jesse Yarnell and T.J. Caystile. Unable to pay the printing bill, Cole and Gardiner turned the paper over to the Mirror Company. In the meantime, S.J. Mathes had joined the firm, and it was at his insistence that the Times continued publication. In July 1882, Harrison Gray Otis moved from Santa Barbara to become the paper's editor. Otis made the Times a financial success.

In an era where newspapers were driven by party politics, the Times was directed at Republican readers. In an extreme example of partisan tilt, the newspaper waited several days to report the 1884 victory of Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland.

Historian Kevin Starr wrote that Otis was a businessman "capable of manipulating the entire apparatus of politics and public opinion for his own enrichment".[7] Otis's editorial policy was based on civic boosterism, extolling the virtues of Los Angeles and promoting its growth. Toward those ends, the paper supported efforts to expand the city's water supply by acquiring the watershed of the Owens Valley, an effort fictionalized in the Roman Polanski movie Chinatown, which is also covered in California Water Wars.

The efforts of the Times to fight local unions led to the October 1, 1910, bombing of its headquarters, killing twenty-one people. Two union leaders, James and Joseph McNamara, were charged. The American Federation of Labor hired noted trial attorney Clarence Darrow to represent the brothers, who eventually pleaded guilty. Otis fastened a bronze eagle on top of a high frieze of the new Times headquarters, proclaiming anew the credo written by his wife, Eliza: "Stand Fast, Stand Firm, Stand Sure, Stand True."


Chandler era

Upon Otis's death in 1917, his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, took control as publisher of the Times. Harry Chandler was succeeded in 1944 by his son, Norman Chandler, who ran the paper during the rapid growth of post-war Los Angeles. Norman's wife, Dorothy Buffum Chandler, became active in civic affairs and led the effort to build the Los Angeles Music Center, whose main concert hall was named the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in her honor. Family members are buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery near Paramount Studios. The site also includes a memorial to the Times Building bombing victims.

The fourth generation of family publishers, Otis Chandler, held that position from 1960 to 1980. Otis Chandler sought legitimacy and recognition for his family's paper, often forgotten in the power centers of the Northeastern United States due to its geographic and cultural distance. He sought to remake the paper in the model of the nation's most respected newspapers, notably The New York Times and Washington Post. Believing that the newsroom was "the heartbeat of the business", Otis Chandler increased the size and pay of the reporting staff and expanded its national and international reporting. In 1962, the paper joined with the Washington Post to form the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service to syndicate articles from both papers for other news organizations.

During the 1960s, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than its previous nine decades combined.

The paper's early history and subsequent transformation was chronicled in an unauthorized history Thinking Big (1977, ISBN 0-399-11766-0), and was one of four organizations profiled by David Halberstam in The Powers That Be (1979, ISBN 0-394-50381-3; 2000 reprint ISBN 0-252-06941-2). It has also been the whole or partial subject of nearly thirty dissertations in communications or social science in the past four decades.


Modern era

The Times was beset in the first decade of the 21st century by a change in ownership, a bankruptcy, a rapid succession of editors, reductions in staff, decreases in paid circulation and the need to increase its Web presence.

In 2000, the Tribune Company acquired the Times, placing the paper in co-ownership with then-WB (now CW)-affiliated KTLA, which Tribune acquired in 1985.

In December 2008, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy protection.

The single copy rates are $1.50 daily and $2 on Sundays and Thanksgiving Day. On December 3, 2012, the paper increased its daily price 50%.


Pulitzer prizes

Through 2009, the Times had won thirty-nine Pulitzers, including four in editorial cartooning, and one each in spot news reporting for the 1965 Watts Riots and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Times sportswriter Jim Murray won a Pulitzer in 1990.

Times investigative reporters Chuck Philips and Michael Hiltzik won the Pulitzer in 1999  for a year-long series that exposed corruption in the music business in three different areas: The Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences raised money for an ostensible charity that netted only pennies on the dollar for its charity; radio station "payola," for airplay of new recordings; and medical malfeasance in the entertainment industry. Mark Saylor, then entertainment editor of the business section of the paper, said it was especially rewarding because it recognized "aggressive reporting on the hometown industry ... where The LA Times has long labored under a cloud, the misperception that ...[they]... were soft on the entertainment industry".

Times journalist David Willman won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting; the organization cited "his pioneering expose of seven unsafe prescription drugs that had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and an analysis of the policy reforms that had reduced the agency’s effectiveness." In 2004, the paper won five prizes, which is the third-most by any paper in one year (behind The New York Times in 2002 (7) and The Washington Post in 2008 (6)).

Times reporters Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2009 "for their fresh and painstaking exploration into the cost and effectiveness of attempts to combat the growing menace of wildfires across the western United States."




(photo source latimes.tumblr.com)


   
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