The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country.^[3] In the year 2000, the Tribune Company, parent company of the Chicago Tribune, purchased the Los Angeles Times.

History[link]

Otis era[link]

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.^[4] Otis made the Times a financial success.

Historian Kevin Starr wrote that Otis was a businessman "capable of manipulating the entire apparatus of politics and public opinion for his own enrichment."^[5] 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.

Rubble of the L.A. Times building after the 1910 bombing

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.^[6]

Chandler era[link]

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",^[7] 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.^[8]

Modern era[link]

For the main article, see Los Angeles Times in the 21st century.

Los Angeles Times building, seen from the corner of 1st and Spring streets

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.

Pulitzer prizes[link]

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.^[9]

Times sportswriter Jim Murray won a Pulitzer in 1990.

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."^[10]

Competition and rivalry[link]

In the 19th century, the chief competition to the Times was the Los Angeles Herald, followed by the smaller Los Angeles Tribune. In December 1903, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst began publishing the Los Angeles Examiner as a direct morning competitor to the Times.^[11] In the 20th Century, the Los Angeles Express was an afternoon competitor, as was Manchester Boddy's Los Angeles Daily News, a Democratic newspaper.^[12]

By the mid-1940s, the Times was the leading newspaper in terms of circulation in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In 1948, it launched the Los Angeles Mirror, an afternoon tabloid, to compete with both the Daily News and the merged Herald-Express. In 1954, the Mirror absorbed the Daily News. The combined paper, the Mirror-News, ceased publication in 1962, when the Hearst afternoon Herald-Express was merged with the morning Los Angeles Examiner.^[13]

Special editions[link]

Midwinter and midsummer[link]

Midwinter[link]

For 69 years, from 1885^[14] until 1954, the Times issued on New Year's Day a special annual Midwinter Number or Midwinter Edition that extolled the virtues of Southern California. At first it was called the "Trade Number," and in 1886 it featured a special press run of "extra scope and proportions"; that is, "a twenty-four page paper, and we hope to make it the finest exponent of this [Southern California] country that ever existed."^[15] Two years later, the edition had grown to "forty-eight handsome pages (9x15 inches), [which] stitched for convenience and better preservation," was "equivalent to a 150-page book."^[16] The last use of the phrase Trade Number was in 1895, when the edition had grown to thirty-six pages split among three separate sections.^[17]

The Midwinter Number drew acclamations from other newspapers, including this one from the Kansas City Star in 1923:

It is made up of five magazines with a total of 240 pages — the maximum size possible under the postal regulations. It goes into every detail of information about Los Angeles and Southern California that the heart could desire. It is virtually a cyclopedia on the subject. It drips official statistics. In addition it verifies the statistics with a profusion of illustration. . . . it is a remarkable combination of guidebook and travel magazine.

—^[18]

In 1948 the Midwinter Edition, as it was then called, had grown to "7 big picture magazines in beautiful rotogravure reproduction."^[19] The last mention of the Midwinter Edition was in a Times advertisement on January 10, 1954.^[20]

Midsummer[link]

Between 1891 and 1895, the Times also issued a similar Midsummer Number, the first one with the theme "The Land and Its Fruits.".^[21] Because of its issue date in September, the edition was in 1891 called the Midsummer Harvest Number.^[22]

Zoned editions and subsidiaries[link]

In the 1990s, the Times published various editions catering to far-flung areas. Editions included a Ventura County edition, an Inland Empire edition, a San Diego County edition, and a "National Edition" that was distributed to Washington, D.C. and the San Francisco Bay Area. The National Edition was closed in December 2004.

Some of these editions were folded into Our Times, a group of community supplements included in editions of the regular Los Angeles Metro newspaper.

A subsidiary, Times Community Newspapers, publishes the Burbank Leader, Coastline Pilot of Laguna Beach, Crescenta Valley Sun, Daily Pilot of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, Glendale News-Press, Huntington Beach Independent and La Cañada Valley Sun.^[23]

Features[link]

Among the Times's staff are columnists Steve Lopez and Patt Morrison, music critics Robert Hillburn and Randy Lewis, film critic Kenneth Turan and entertainment industry columnist Patrick Goldstein. Sports columnists include Bill Plaschke, who is also a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, T.J. Simers, Kurt Streeter and Helene Elliott, the first female sportswriter to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Former sports editor Bill Dwyre is also a columnist.

One of the Times's features is "Column One," a feature that appears daily on the front page to the left-hand side. Established in September 1968, it is a place for the weird and the interesting; in the How Far Can a Piano Fly? (a compilation of Column One stories) introduction, Patt Morrison writes that the column's purpose is to elicit a "Gee, that's interesting, I didn't know that" type of reaction.

The Times also embarked on a number of investigative journalism pieces. A series in December 2004 on the King-Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles led to a Pulitzer Prize and a more thorough coverage of the hospital's troubled history. Lopez wrote a five-part series on the civic and humanitarian disgrace of Los Angeles' Skid Row, which became the focus of the 2009 motion picture, The Soloist. It also won 62 awards at the SND awards.

Promotion[link]

Festival of Books[link]

2009 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the UCLA campus

In 1996, the Times started the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, in association with the University of California, Los Angeles. It has panel discussions, exhibits, and stages during two days at the end of April each year.^[24] In 2011, the Festival of Books was moved to the University of Southern California.^[25]

Book prizes[link]

Since 1980, the Times has awarded annual book prizes. The categories are now biography, current interest, fiction, first fiction, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, and young adult fiction. In addition, the Robert Kirsch Award is presented annually to a living author with a substantial connection to the American West whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition".^[26]

Television[link]

The Times-Mirror Company was a founding co-owner of then-CBS turned independent television station KTTV. It became that station's sole owner in 1951, and remained so until the station was sold to Metromedia in 1963. For the next seven years, Times-Mirror had no television station until it purchased the Dallas Times Herald, the owner of KRLD-TV (now KDFW) in Dallas, Texas, in 1970.^{[citation needed]}

Notable employees[link]

Writers and editors[link]

Cartoonists[link]

Photographers[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Edward Maddin Ainsworth, History of Los Angeles Times, ca. 1940.
• Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt, Thinking Big, New York: Putnam, 1977.
• David Halberstam, The Powers That Be, New York: Knopf, 1979.
• Jack R. Hart, The information empire: The rise of the Los Angeles Times and the Times Mirror Corporation, Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981.

External links[link]

	Greater Los Angeles portal
	Journalism portal

• Official website (Mobile)
• Tribune Company
• Los Angeles Times Archives (1881 to present)
• Los Angeles Times Travel
• Los Angeles Times photonegative archive. Department of Special Collection. Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA
• Today's front page in .pdf format (may load slowly)
• "The Times' 128-Year History," Los Angeles Times Media Group

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Conor Friedersdorf is an American journalist and a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Career[link]

After graduating college, Friedersdorf worked for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. He began writing for The Atlantic in November 2009.^[1]

Occupy Wall Street quote[link]

On October 14, 2011, Conor Friedersdorf wrote an article for The Atlantic criticizing the Occupy Wall Street movement for focusing on the “symbolic Wall Street” instead of the “actual Wall Street”. The article had the following quote.^[2]

"Much easier to decide that it's wrong to create a mortgage-backed security filled with loans you know are going to fail so that you can sell it to a client who isn't aware that you sabotaged it by intentionally picking the misleadingly rated loans most likely to be defaulted upon...”

On October 15, 2011, freelance journalist Caitlin Curran held a sign at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Times Square that had an excerpt of this quote. A picture of her holding the sign was taken and posted on Twitter. The picture received notoriety, and Caitlin proposed a story to her contract employer, radio station WNYC for a show she was editor on, The Takeaway.^[3] The next day she was fired by WNYC because “When Ms. Curran made the decision to participate in the protest and make herself part of the story, she violated our editorial standards.”^[4]

Forbes has observed that Friedersdorf's words have “taken on a life of their own”.^[5]

Personal life[link]

Friedersdorf grew up in Orange County, California, and currently lives in Venice, California. He attended Pomona College as an undergraduate, and attended the journalism school at New York University on a scholarship.^[6]

He is engaged.^[7]

In an interview with journalist Matt Lewis, Friedersdorf stated that he has right-leaning views but that he does not consider himself to be a doctrinal conservative or a member of the conservative movement.^[8]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic
• Conor Friedersdorf on Twitter

Alexander Skarsgård
Skarsgård in March 2012.
Born	Alexander Johan Hjalmar Skarsgård (1976-08-25) August 25, 1976 (age 35) Stockholm, Sweden
Occupation	Actor, director
Years active	1984–present

Alexander Johan Hjalmar Skarsgård (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈskɑːʂɡoːɖ]; born August 25, 1976) is a Swedish actor. He is best known for his roles as vampire Eric Northman on the HBO series True Blood, Meekus in Zoolander and Brad Colbert in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill.

Early life[link]

Skarsgård was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He is the son of Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård and his first wife, My, a physician. He has six younger siblings: Gustaf, Sam, Bill, Eija and Valter Skarsgård, and a half-brother, Ossian.^[1][2] Gustaf, Bill, and Valter are also actors.^[1]

A director friend of his father gave Skarsgård his first film role when he was seven years old. He played Kalle Nubb in Åke och hans värld (Åke and His World). In 1989, the lead role in the Swedish television production Hunden som log (The Dog That Smiled) made him famous in Sweden at the age of thirteen. Uncomfortable with being recognized, he quit acting for the next seven years.^[3][4][5]

At age 19, he applied to do his national service. He served in the Swedish military for 18 months, in a unit that dealt with anti-sabotage and anti-terrorism in the Stockholm archipelago.^[6] After completing his service in 1996 he left Sweden and attended Leeds Metropolitan University in England for six months. He enrolled to study English but admits he did not study much and "had a blast" instead.^[4][1]

After seven years away from acting, he started to consider it again. In 1997 he enrolled in a theater course at Marymount Manhattan College and moved to New York City. He returned to Stockholm after six months, but the time he spent studying theater showed him that he wanted to act.^[1][7]

Career[link]

Upon his return to Sweden, Skarsgård began picking up acting jobs, working in film, television and theatrical productions.^[1] While on vacation in the United States, he auditioned for and landed the role of Meekus in the 2001 film Zoolander.^[8] In 2003 his work in Hundtricket-the Movie (The Dog Trick) earned him a Guldbagge nomination for Best Supporting Actor.^[9] He was named the Sexiest Man in Sweden five times.^[3]

He moved to Los Angeles in 2004 but continued to work in Sweden.^[10] His break came when he was cast as Sergeant Brad "Iceman" Colbert in the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries Generation Kill. An adaptation of journalist Evan Wright's book of the same name, Generation Kill follows the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the United States Marine Corps during the early part of the Iraq War. The part of Brad Colbert was the closest to a "lead" in Generation Kill, and director Susanna White and executive producer David Simon at first disagreed about casting Skarsgård. White wanted to cast him but Simon was not convinced he could pull off the American accent. After four auditions in three cities, Skarsgård learned the part was his just 36 hours before he had to board a plane for Namibia where the project was filming. The cast and crew filmed for seven months in the desert, shooting six days a week. Skarsgård worked with a dialect coach to master the American accent.^{[3][1] [11]}

Skarsgård at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival

Just before leaving to shoot Generation Kill, Skarsgård heard about True Blood, a new series HBO was developing based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels by Charlaine Harris. At first he was unsure about playing a vampire, but when he learned that Alan Ball, creator of the HBO series Six Feet Under and Academy Award winning screenwriter of American Beauty, was behind the project, he sent in an audition tape. The audition was for the role of Bill Compton, which eventually went to Stephen Moyer. Skarsgård was later cast as Eric Northman, a 1000-year-old, Viking vampire sheriff, local bar owner and potential love interest of heroine Sookie Stackhouse.^[3][12] True Blood is in its fifth season.

In 2009, Skarsgård appeared in the music video for pop singer Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi".^[12] He was the voice of Stefan in the 2009 animated film Metropia, directed by Tarik Saleh.^[4] In 2010, Skarsgård portrayed Terje, a gay Norwegian trekking to the North Pole, in the British mockumentary Beyond the Pole.^[13]

Suit maker Hickey Freeman chose Skarsgård to model a new look it debuted in 2010. Annie Leibowitz photographed the ad campaign which appeared in The Wall Street Journal Magazine, GQ and Details.^[14][15] He covered the September 2010 issue of Rolling Stone with his True Blood co-stars, Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer.^[16]

Skarsgård appeared in two 2011 films. Melancholia, an apocalyptic movie directed by Lars von Trier and starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kiefer Sutherland, premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.^[17][18] Skarsgård appeared in Straw Dogs, a remake of the 1971 film of the same name, as Charlie Venner. The remake's director, Rod Lurie, transferred the small town setting from Cornwall to Mississippi, and described Venner as "an ex-football star gone to seed". The film co-starred James Marsden and Kate Bosworth^[6] and was released September 16, 2011.

Skarsgård appeared alongside Taylor Kitsch and Rihanna in Peter Berg's Battleship, an adaptation of the Hasbro game. It was released in May 2012.^[19] He will appear in Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s film, What Maisie Knew, an adaptation of the Henry James novel of the same name, which will also star Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan.^[20]

Personal life[link]

Skarsgård is a fan of Swedish football and supports Hammarby IF, a club based in his birth city.^[21] In October 2010, he participated in "Bajen Aid" by donating several items he had autographed and auctioning them off to raise money for the Hammarby football club.^[22]

In July 2011, Skarsgård received an honorary degree from Leeds Metropolitan University where he was formerly a student.^[23] Around the same time, he and his girlfriend of two years, actress Kate Bosworth, ended their relationship.^[24][25]

Filmography[link]

Awards and nominations[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Alexander Skarsgård

• Alexander Skarsgård at the Internet Movie Database
• Alexander Skarsgård at the Swedish Film Database
• Alexander Skarsgård interview on True Blood
• Alexander Skarsgård interviewed about Lady Gaga and True Blood
• Alexander Skarsgård: Millennium Man interview at Los Angeles Times Magazine
• Alexander Skarsgård: Millennium Man video interview at Los Angeles Times Magazine