Press: The World’s Oldest Surfer

A California publisher becomes au Courant in Connecticut

For decades the Los Angeles Times was little more than the instrument with which the Chandler family, its sole owners since 1886, scooped out a financial and social empire in Southern California. Real estate deals dictated editorial policy, and news columns seldom threatened the good names and growing fortunes of local business interests. Humorist S.J. Perelman once wrote of a cross-country train trip: “I asked the porter to get me a newspaper and unfortunately the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles Times.”

Times, and the Los Angeles Times, have changed. The crucial difference is Otis Chandler, 51, who became publisher in 1960. Though his father Norman had made the Times a serious paper, Otis made it one of the nation’s best, and turned its parent Times Mirror Co. into a vast communications empire. Times Mirror owns five other newspapers, two television stations, two cable TV companies, five magazines, three book clubs, seven book-publishing companies and extensive paper and forest holdings. Revenues last year topped $1.4 billion, and David Halberstam in his bestselling The Powers That Be calls the newspaper “a comet in constant ascent.”

This month Chandler’s comet will acquire an important East Coast associate, the Hartford Courant (circ. 218,000). Connecticut’s largest and one of the nation’s oldest dailies, the Courant (pronounced current) covered the Boston Tea Party and counted George Washington among its readers. Courant employees and retirees, who own most of its stock, turned down a $133-a-share takeover bid last fall by Capital Cities Communications, a media conglomerate with a reputation for rough labor dealings. There was little opposition to Times Mirror, however. The firm made a better offer—$200 a share, or $1056 million—which will make a few Courant associates millionaires. And many staffers were impressed by the company’s reputation for journalistic excellence. As one secretary put it: “If I have to be married, I’d rather be married to a prince than a frog.”

Chandler generally improves what his firm buys. At the Dallas Times Herald, for example, the editorial budget has been doubled and news columns increased by 30% since Times Mirror took over in 1969. Says David Laventhol, publisher of Long Island’s Newsday, acquired in 1970: “Chandler has a good sense of the need for local autonomy.”

Despite his place in the family dynasty, Otis Chandler learned the business from the bottom up. After he returned from the Korean War, his hard-driving mother, Buff Chandler, now 78 and still the grande dame of the Los Angeles cultural establishment, gave him one weekend off, then started him on a seven-year grind that took him from the mail room to the city room. Chandler is quick to deny any implication that he is his mother’s masterpiece: “Her influence on the paper since I’ve been publisher has not been significant at all.”

Chandler has approached both work and play with that same drive to prove himself. A big-game hunter who says his sport has taken him to “all the high mountains of the world,” Chandler is also a motorcycle enthusiast, weight lifter and former Stanford University shotputter who made the Olympic team in 1952. Tall, tanned and blond, Chandler describes himself as “the world’s oldest surfer” and regales visitors with tales of riding 12-ft. waves. He owns a $4 million fleet of competition cars and antique autos and is, along with Friend Paul Newman, one of the oldest active international race-car drivers. “It was one of those things I always wanted to do,” says Chandler. A family man with five children, ages 15 to 27, Chandler finally took up the sport because Son Michael, 21, was interested in it.

Employees sometimes mock his youthful vigor (“Here comes Otis dribbling his shotput through the newsroom”). But they generally respect his hands-off policy. When Chandler asked for an advance look at Times Media Reporter David Shaw’s 1976 story on the newspaper business, Shaw questioned the propriety of Chandler’s request and the publisher backed down.

Times staffers have good reason to like Chandler; during his years as publisher, the Times has grown from a paper with only one foreign correspondent to one with 19 overseas bureaus and eleven in the U.S. The once tiny Washington office is now staffed by 26 correspondents, one of the largest crews in the capital.

Like Los Angeles, the Times tends to sprawl: 350 columns of news a day vs. 160 for the New York Times, and stories that “jump” from page to page to page before concluding. “You don’t read the Los Angeles Times,” jokes a subscriber. “You weigh it.” Yet the Times has become known as a writers’ paper, running well-researched stories averaging 2,000 words daily. “No one else is doing that kind of newspaper journalism,” boasts Chandler. “It’s analogous to a daily newsmagazine.”

Despite early caution about the DC-10 (McDonnell Douglas has old Chandler connections), the Times was the first news organization to send a reporter to Oklahoma City to check on previous malfunctions of the plane that caused America’s worst air disaster. The California Supreme Court is still in turmoil as a result of last November’s Times story reporting that the court withheld politically sensitive decisions until after the election. And the Times put three months and about $2 million into a 32-page special section on oil-rich Mexico published July 15.

Some critics, however, claim that Chandler has emphasized national and foreign coverage at the expense of local news. Until 1977 the Times had only two reporters covering city hall. The paper missed a scandal in its own backyard when Columbia Pictures Executive Davie Begelman in 1977 was accused of financial improprieties; the Times’s first substantial piece on “Hollywoodgate” was a condensed version of a Washington Post story. Minorities complain that Chandler cares more about covering Mexico than Hispanic East Los Angeles. In January for instance, the Times virtually ignored a story about the death of Eula Love, a black woman shot eight times by two policemen. More than three months later after Esquire mentioned the Times’s omission, the paper printed a front-page story about the shooting. (The Times did run a piece by David Shaw last month confessing the Begelman and Love failures.) “I would be willing to make the investment on those communities if I felt I knew how to do it,” says Chandler. “But I don’t.”

Such misses undermine one of Chandler’s goals: to make the rest of the country take California, and the Times, seriously. The Eastern press ignored a frontpage Times story on June 29 revealing that former HEW Secretary Joseph Califano had been reprimanded by Vice President Mondale at the request of Carter. A month later Califano’s departure came as too much of a surprise to much of Washington. “Had the story got East Coast play,” says Times Washington Bureau Chief Jack Nelson, “it would undoubtedly have had more impact.” Chandler’s growing presence in the Greater New York area newspaper market (small dailies in suburban Stamford and Greenwich, as well as Newsday and, now, the Courant) is his way of breaking into the New York-Washington news axis. Chandler says it is merely good business. Yet during the past year he has taken out full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal to reprint some notable Los Angeles Times stories and demonstrate his newspaper’s quality. “I’m trying to be a salesman for the West Coast,” says Chandler. “We do not yet receive the recognition that is due us.”