Los Angeles Times

The LA Times’ parent company, Tribune Publishing, was spun off from the Tribune Company in August 2014. It is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. In the third quarter of 2015, the company had revenues of $404 million, of which $220 million came from advertising and $33 million from direct mail, digital marketing services and content syndication.

The newspaper was founded in 1881 as the Los Angeles Daily Times by Nathan Cole Jr. and Thomas Gardiner before it was turned over to the Mirror Company (later named the Times-Mirror Company). Members of the Otis-Chandler family served as publisher from 1882 to 1980. In 2000, the Tribune Company acquired Times-Mirror Company, placing the paper in co-ownership with local television station KTLA, which Tribune had owned since 1985. After emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at the end of 2012, the Tribune Company split into two companies in 2013, spinning off its publishing division ‒ and its newspapers ‒ into Tribune Publishing.

Along with the LA Times, Tribune Publishing also owns the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Sun Sentinel, the Orlando Sentinel, the Hartford Courant and the Daily Press Media Group. The LA Times has 1.5 million readers for its Monday through Saturday papers and 2.6 million Sunday subscribers, as well as more than 22 million unique monthly visitors on its website.

Timothy E. Ryan has been the publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times (and the San Diego Union-Tribune, also owned by Tribune Publishing) since September 2015, after the ouster of Austin Beutner. Ryan was previously the publisher and CEO of the Baltimore Sun, which increased its readership under him. He oversaw massive cutbacks in the newspaper’s staff at the end of 2015.

The editor and executive vice president for the Los Angeles Times Media Group oversees the LA Times newsroom, as well as several other news outlets affiliated with the Times. Maharaj has worked at the paper for over a quarter-century. He began his career as a reporter, worked his way up to managing editor in 2008 and was named to his current role in 2011.

She was one of the first women to cover ice hockey, and the first female journalist to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame (indeed any major sport’s hall of fame) in 2005, receiving the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award for bringing "honor to journalism and to hockey." Elliott joined the LA Times’ sports department in 1989 as a baseball writer for the then-California Angels. After three years, she covered the LA Lakers beat for a season. She covered the NHL and the Olympics for more than a decade. Elliott became a general sports columnist in 2006. She is married to a former publicist for the New York Mets and Knicks.

He is the Washington, DC-based columnist for the LA Times, with his column running twice a week on the op-ed page. It is also syndicated worldwide. He has worked as a foreign correspondent, a White House correspondent and a sportswriter, albeit briefly. McManus moderated the Clinton and Obama debates in Los-Angeles in 2008. He speaks positively of the two.

LA Times’ parent company, Tribune Publishing, fired the paper’s publisher and CEO Austin Beutner in September 2015. Beutner reportedly had poor personal chemistry with Tribune Publishing’s CEO Jack Griffin. Executives at the corporate headquarters in Chicago opposed Beutner’s moves to make the California papers focused on local audiences, which was against the centralization process of the parent company aimed at saving money. Before becoming the CEO and publisher of the LA Times in August 2014, Beutner made an unsuccessful run for mayor of Los Angeles in 2013. He was the city’s first deputy mayor and jobs czar between 2010 and 2013, overseeing the policy and operations of 13 city departments for an annual salary of $1. Many in Los-Angeles were discontent with his dismissal as he was seen as a person who understands local community. "I am not departing by choice," Beutner wrote in a Facebook post announcing his termination. He used the statement to highlight his accomplishments at the paper and blast the headquarters its management strategies. "Cost-cutting alone is not a path to survival in the face of continued declines in print revenue and fierce competition in the digital world," Beutner wrote. "Successful digital media organizations will have fewer managers and corporate executives, choosing instead to invest in journalists and technologists."

Since June 2000, when the paper’s parent company was acquired by the Chicago-based Tribune Media, the Los Angeles Times more than halved number of journalists to the current figure of around 500.

Though billionaire Eli Broad has offered to buy the paper several times, Tribune refuses to sell.

"It would appear, then, that the LA Times is being held hostage by a company that won’t give it the money it needs and won’t let it get sold to someone who might actually want to invest in its operations," Jack Mirkinson wrote in Salon.

Starting November the company is terminating around 50 more jobs, with the buyout list ‘make you want to cry’ as LA Observed put it.

During the 2013 round of layoffs, the LA Times let go its only art reporter, Jori Finkel. Over a dozen art museum directors from across Southern California wrote created a Change.org petition to have her reinstated, leading LA Weekly to call the journalist "LA’s most wanted woman." The paper did not change its decision, and wrote in a statement, "As a policy, we do not discuss employee relations, but our commitment to intelligent and illuminating reporting of arts and culture in Southern California is in no way diminished. We devote more staff resources to the arts than almost any other general news organization in the country."

Reporter Ken Dilanian allowed CIA handlers to edit his articles prior to publication, in violation of journalistic ethics ‒ including the paper’s published ethics guidelines ‒ and the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. He also reported false information to manipulate his audience. Using Freedom of Information Act requests, the Intercept obtained a trove of emails sent between the CIA’s press office and a handful of acclaimed American journalists from March to July 2012, revealing questionable conduct between the government agency and the press. Dilanian was considered the worst offender. The emails showed that the LA Times’ security reporter provided drafts of his articles concerning the CIA with the agency ahead of publication, and at times wrote the spy office to present officials with opportunities to be represented in a positive light.

Dilanian left the LA Times in May 2014 and now [October 2015] works at Associated Press.

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Michael Hiltzik was suspended without pay in 2006 after he admitted to "sockpuppeting" ‒ creating an online identity used for the purposes of deception ‒ on his blog ‘The Golden State’. The incident grew out of a feud between the columnist and Hugh Hewitt, a radio talk show host and blogger, and Patrick Frey, a Los Angeles district attorney and blogger. When commenters on Frey’s site, Patterico’s Pontifications ‒ as well as other blogs ‒ criticized Hiltzik, a poster by the name of "Mikekoshi" responded in his defense. Frey examined the IP addresses involved, and showed that the user was the LA Times writer himself. Hiltzik’s blog at the LA Times was the newspaper’s first, and he was suspended for his actions, which then-editor Dean Baquet said "constitute[d] deception and violate[d] a central tenet of the Times’ ethics guidelines," noting that staff members should not misrepresent themselves or conceal their affiliation with the paper, even online because "the web doesn’t change the rules for Times journalists." Hiltzik was reassigned after his suspension, and continued to write regularly for the newspaper. He is currently the paper’s business columnist.

The LA Times then-op-ed editor, Andres Martinez, was dating publicist Kelly Mullens. One of her firm’s clients, film and television producer Brian Grazer, was selected as the guest editor of the paper’s opinion section for one weekend in March 2007. The Times’ publisher, David Hiller, then killed the special section to avoid the appearance that the romantic relationship between the married-but-separated Martinez and Mullens improperly led to Grazer’s selection. "I believe, based on everything that I have seen, that we have only the appearance of a conflict here," Hiller said. "I believe that the selection of Grazer was not based on this relationship. We have an appearance and not a case of actual undue influence."

Martinez subsequently resigned, saying he had been undermined in the newsroom by Hiller, and that the publisher’s decision "amounts to a vote of no confidence in my continued leadership." The couple later broke up, leading to a flurry of legal cases. First, in April 2008, Mullens filed a restraining order against the editor for sending her "constant harassing, intimidating, obsessive, crude and vulgar e-mails or text messages," eventually defaming her, she said in the petition. Martinez sued Mullens in August of that year over what became known as "Grazer-gate," claiming that his ex-girlfriend had "abused our personal relationship by seeking to profit from my editorial decisions behind my back, contrary to our understanding that she would avoid such a conflict of interest," he wrote in an email to the LA Times, slamming her "lack of professional ethics." Mullens and her lawyer claimed the lawsuit was in retaliation for the restraining order, which they said had been amicably settled by that point.