Otis Chandler: Otis Chandler, whose vision and determination as publisher of the Los Angeles Times from 1960 to 1980 catapulted the paper from mediocrity into the front ranks of American journalism, died last Monday of a degenerative illness called Lewy body disease. He was 78.
Chandler was the last dominant figure in a newspaper dynasty that had run the Los Angeles Times since 1882. It was in that year that Gen Harrison Gray Otis, his great-grandfather, bought part ownership in a struggling, year-old paper and turned it into a dynamic, highly profitable platform for his pro-business, pro-Republican views.
The paper remained profitable, but provincial and highly partisan, until Otis Chandler took it over and began one of the most dramatic makeovers in the history of American journalism.
"No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did," David Halberstam wrote in 1979.
A fierce competitor in every endeavour he joined, whether it was track and field, race-car driving or big game hunting, Chandler was willing to spend whatever it took, to hire whomever he needed, to advance his goal of turning the Times into a respected publication - one that, he insisted, would eventually "knock the New York Times off its perch" as the most admired American newspaper. By most assessments, including his own, he fell short of that last goal. But Chandler's accomplishments were enough to make him one of the most respected figures in American journalism.
Chandler increased the news budget of the Times tenfold; he let stories run long - too long, some might say - but recognising the challenge of competing with television news, he tried to fashion a paper that would be more of a daily magazine than a just-the-facts presentation of the day's news.
Yet Chandler was also an enigma, a man who threw heart and soul into the paper for more than two decades, then stepped aside as publisher at age 52, ostensibly to assume the chairmanship of parent company Times Mirror Co. That was a job that never seemed to engage him in the way daily journalism had.
When his successors at the Times and Times Mirror began to alter Chandler's business strategies - scaling back on diversification and cutting staff - Otis held his tongue for years, giving rise to an assumption that he no longer cared. But in 1999 he did finally lash out during a controversy over why an entire edition of the paper's Sunday magazine had been given over to the opening of the Staples Centre, a sports arena. It emerged that the paper's publisher, Kathryn Downing, had signed a profit-sharing agreement with the sports arena, a move that came to be seen as undermining the paper's independence.
The episode marked the beginning of the end of the Chandler family's ownership of the Times. Less than a year later, Otis was left in the dark as other members of his family secretly negotiated a deal to sell Times Mirror - including the Times, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun and other properties - to Chicago-based Tribune Co.
Throughout his life, Chandler had a succession of near-death experiences. The first, and probably most serious, came at the age of eight, when he was thrown from a horse. Upon rushing him to the nearest hospital, his mother was told he was dead. At once she took him to a second hospital, where a doctor revived him with a shot of adrenaline in the heart.
Many other death-defying moments would follow, including in 1990 when a musk ox trampled Chandler during a hunting expedition. His right arm was yanked from its socket; doctors said he would lose the use of it. Once again, he proved tougher than the diagnosis: he exercised the arm until he regained nearly full use.
At Stanford University he was a decent student and an outstanding athlete, captain of the track team and finishing second in the nation in the shot put; he would probably have gone to the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, but he sprained his wrist and had to pull out. After Stanford, Chandler joined the Air Force. To his disappointment, his shot-putter's frame was too big for him to qualify as a jet pilot, so he spent three years on the ground in San Francisco Bay.
Returning home in 1953, his father, Norman, who as president and general manager had made the Times the highest-circulation paper in the city - handed Otis a seven-year executive training plan and told him to report to work at the paper two nights later.
He became a pressroom apprentice, at $48 a week. He gradually worked his way through every department at the paper: production, circulation, the mailroom, mechanical, advertising, the newsroom. All the while, he was filling notebooks with ideas for changing the Times. In April 1960, his father stunned the southern California business and political establishment by announcing that he was turning over the publisher's chair to his 32-year-old son.
In an astonishingly short time, Chandler changed the paper in two fundamental and dramatic ways. He spent money - lots of it - to expand and transform the staff, turning an indifferent, provincial newspaper into one with global ambitions and reach. And he ordered an end to political partisanship on the news pages. Some critics on the right, including members of his own family, maintained that Chandler merely turned a reliably conservative paper into a liberal one. But most observers in the business gave Chandler credit for giving the paper a nonpartisan, professional tone. In 1961 circulation of the Sunday edition began to break the one million mark. And by the late 1960s, the Times, once considered among the very worst American newspapers, was consistently being ranked among the three or four best.
Chandler seemed to relish the life of a publisher. He took a keen interest in both the news and business sides of the paper and was well known, in those pre-computer days, for maintaining a chalkboard in his office with a wide range of figures charting the Times' success. In southern California's boom years of the 1960s and 70s, the figures tended to move in one direction: up. It came as a shock to many when, on March 5th, 1980, Chandler announced that he was stepping aside as publisher, assuming the newly-created position of editor-in-chief of Times Mirror and later chairman of the board. In 1986, he gave up active control over the company and took on the largely ceremonial role of chairman of its executive committee.
He did not retire to a rocking chair. Instead, he pursued his many passions: hunting, racing, weightlifting, cycling and collecting classic automobiles and motorcycles. His wife, Bettina, was with him when he died.
Otis Chandler, born November 23rd, 1927: died February 27th, 2006