The Last Los Angeles Times Press Run

Plus, Biden misleads New Hampshire voters about his own income

The final non-outsourced press run of the Los Angeles Times happened March 10. The newspaper posted a video about it on YouTube.

One of my earliest jobs in journalism was at the Los Angeles Times in 1994 and 1995, and perhaps as a result, I found the video quite affecting. The fact that it was posted on YouTube, which is owned by Google, or, as it’s now called, Alphabet, encapsulates the situation. The distribution network that connected advertisers with customers in Southern California used to be the Los Angeles Times, whose Sunday edition was fat with ads for cars, apartments, and jobs. Now it is Google, Meta, and the rest of the Internet, big and small.

That change has had significant tradeoffs, both positive and negative. I wouldn’t want to romanticize the old days too much. When I went out to report the news in Ventura County, in places like Oxnard and Simi Valley, I was sometimes treated with suspicion by conservatives who, based on long experience with the press, saw me as a representative of a biased liberal media.

The capital requirements to assemble a printing and distribution network, and the winner-take-most aspect of the classified advertising market (advertisers and readers both highly value the marketplace with the most ads and the largest audience) created significant entry barriers that, at worst, bred a kind of monopoly complacency and arrogance.

At best, though, those profits paid for reporters, like me, to go out and report and write news.  And they paid for editors who, at best, helped make sure that news was accurate and accessible and fair. The newspaper owners lived in the community and cared about its long-term health and prosperity.

The reporting, writing, thinking, and editing skills are independent of the printing technology and can be transferred to the Internet, too, especially with the benefit of technology like what you are experiencing right now that allows readers and writers to connect more directly without the intermediation of a large news organization such as the Los Angeles Times.

With lower entry barriers come less authority, but perhaps the authority that does still exist is more authentically earned—the product of a reputation for reason rather than investing in, or happening to inherit, a big printing and distribution network. That’s the most optimistic take on it; the less optimistic take on it is that today people are getting their information from TikTok rather than from the Chandler family that owned the Los Angeles Times. I have a lot of faith in the ability of people to sort through and get to the truth, but I sometimes wonder if that faith is misplaced.

The last word on this should probably come from the video itself: John Martin, who worked at the paper there for 42 years, says, “I thank God for my time, I thank God for everything that I got a chance to do here.” He said, “Talking about it gets me a little emotional, but it was a good run.”

I thank God, too, for having had the opportunity to start at the Los Angeles Times (and at the Harvard Crimson when it still had a six-nights-a-week operating printing press in the basement of the building. That press, too, has now been idled and replaced with an outsourced, weekly vendor). And for the opportunity to remain at it today, mostly online, here, I thank God and the paying readers.

Biden in Goffstown: President Biden was in Goffstown, New Hampshire yesterday as part of his initiative to lower inflation by personally targeting unpopular industries. From the White House transcript of “Remarks by President Biden on Lowering Healthcare Costs for American Families”: “I want to cap the cost of insulin at 35 bucks for every American — every American.”

Price controls lead to shortages. I predict that if the president imposes this “cap,” we’ll have insulin shortages.