In one 10-block-square area of downtown Los Angeles, it is said, 140 different languages and dialects are spoken. That is not a difficult statistic to believe as you walk along the noisy open-air markets of Broadway, or the streets that extend from downtown to the beachfront some 26 miles away.
There is Koreatown, an area that stretches for miles, unmistakable with all its store signage in Korean. There is a Chinatown, of course, but also Little Tokyo, Little Salvador, the list goes on. It is estimated that Los Angeles County is becoming more Latino at a rate of 1 per cent a year, and that Hispanics will constitute a majority within the next 10 years.
It is, in other words, not the easiest place to sell an English language newspaper that was born 75 years ago when the west was wild in a more homogeneous fashion. Once considered little more than a rag, the Los Angeles
Times became the American publishing success story of the century under the leadership of a California surfer named Otis Chandler, whose great-grandfather had bought it for $1,000 in 1882.
Mr Chandler took over the paper in 1960. By 1964 Time magazine named it one of the best 10 newspapers in the country.
And, oh, the glory days were glorious. As California prospered the Los Angeles Times prospered along with it, through a commitment to quality journalism and a nurturing of writers. Circulation grew to 1,225,189 copies daily, and 1,514,096 for the heavyweight Sunday paper. Money flowed in. At one point in 1989 the paper had 14 reporters and photographers based in and covering the Soviet Union.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the paper had a 14-editor-strong war desk, and Time called its war coverage the best in the US. A number of the paper's 1,100 journalists collected Pulitzer Prizes on a regular basis.
"I always thought the good old days were too good," the veteran reporter and current city editor, Bill Boyarsky, told the American Journalism Review recently. "It was great. It was incredible. I always knew it would end."
What Mr Boyarksy could not have foreseen was the ethical and morale downfall that has now severely damaged the paper's reputation since a scandal broke in October 1999. The story of that trespass is one far more common now in American media circles than most would care to admit.
The early 1990s produced a devastating recession in California. The aerospace and defence
industry that had fuelled the California expansion for 40 years collapsed along with the Berlin Wall and the Cold War.
Real estate prices sank, advertising revenue shrivelled, there were the Rodney King race riots, an earthquake that killed or injured hundreds in 1994, and a spate of forest fires that turned Malibu into a moonscape. Angelenos joked that locusts were the only horror left to descend.
By 1995 the Los Angeles Times's circulation had shrunk to its lowest levels in 24 years, and the paper cut back several editions.
Mr Chandler, whose family still holds a considerable interest in Times Mirror, the paper's parent company, had begun to cut back his involvement as early as 1980, when he gave up the job he had held as publisher for 20 years. However, he remained on the board of directors until 1998.
Two years ago the board hired Mark Willes as chief executive officer of Times Mirror. A man whose experience was at General Foods, a man who once boasted to the Wall Street Journal that Cheerios cereal had become the favourite of Latinos under his marketing expertise, Mr Willes became known as "the cereal killer" or "Captain Crunch". He closed down the unprofitable New York Newsday, another of the Times Mirror newspapers.
In Los Angeles staff was cut, travel budgets hacked, news bureaux closed. When he appointed himself publisher of the Los Angeles Times, a title he held until 1999 when he turned it over to another executive with no newspaper experience, he boasted that he would double circulation the same way you sell cereal, and that he would "reinvent" the paper.
Neither happened: circulation remained stagnant, morale was low, and Mr Willes's focus on the stock price, which grew from $13 a share to almost $67, did nothing to help journalism.
However, that low-grade misery dims compared to the October scandal.
On October 6th the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine was an unusually fat 164 pages, containing $2 million worth of advertising. It was solely about the opening of the Staples Centre, a new arena that would be home to the city's sports teams, and would also serve as a concert venue, debuting with Bruce Springsteen.
The magazine editors had argued with management that the topic was too lightweight, and not worthy of an entire issue of the magazine. They were overruled. What the editors did not know was that the newspaper had entered into a "joint revenue agreement" with the Staples Centre in a complex deal which traded advertising and profits.
You can't keep a secret in a newsroom. When the truth came out, protests erupted among reporters and editors, and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal weighed in with criticism. The normally reticent Mr Chandler even called the city editor, Mr Boyarsky, with a statement of support for the journalists that was read aloud in the newsroom over the objection of the paper's managing editor, Micheal Parks.
The scandal has not died down, despite a 14-page highly critical investigation by the newspaper's own respected media critic. A great newspaper remains in decline. But when journalism is reduced to terms like "brands" and "products" - think of the language used to describe CNN and Time in the recent news stories of the AOL-Time Warner merger - and the sole determinant of quality is rising stock price, something is going to suffer.
The biggest losers are usually the readers.
Contact: elainelafferty@ireland.com