77. "Who wouldn't want to own the Los Angeles Times?"
On the blustery spring day in 2000 when the Los Angeles Times was sold to the Tribune Company under the guise of a merger, Kathryn Downing "? picked to be the publisher of the Times by its hapless CEO Mark Willes "? answered a question which she thought had an obvious answer. A Times staff member, standing in a packed Chandler Auditorium to hear news of the sale, asked why anyone would want to buy the Times."We are a crown jewel," Downing answered. "Who wouldn't want to own the Los Angeles Times?"
"Inventing LA: The Chandlers and Their Times," (a documentary airing on Monday, October 5 at 9:00 p.m. on KCET), answers that question in bleak detail and long after the paper and the Tribune Company passed into the hands of the even more hapless Sam Zell and into bankruptcy.
Most of the 170 members of the extended Chandler family would have a smiled sardonically if any of them had read Downing's answer in the LA Weekly a few days later. Who wouldn't want to own the Los Angeles Times? The Chandlers wouldn't, although three generations of Chandlers had run it.
By then, some Chandlers had done everything they could to profit by ridding themselves of the newspaper. They no longer wanted this most visible symbol of their place in a city they no longer needed. Embittered by Norman Chandler's decision in 1960 to turn over the paper and leadership of the family trust to his son Otis Chandler, two generations of family members had spent more than thirty years maneuvering for that day in late March 2000.
They had hired Mark Willes five years before to spruce up a troubled asset, not to publish a newspaper. Willes' job was to boost the value of the shares in the Chandler trust, ironically designed by family patriarch Harry Chandler sixty years earlier to prevent the sale of the paper. When Willes' work was done, and the Chandlers completed the torturous stock deal needed to transfer ownership, the Tribune Company possessed a nearly great newspaper about which Tribune managers knew next to nothing in a town they strove to dislike almost as much as a majority of the Chandlers already did.
Characteristically, the deal was poisonous for everyone involved except the Chandlers and their financial advisors. And now you can add Sam Zell to those who wouldn't want to own the Times; he now calls his takeover of the Tribune Company a disaster.
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