Press: Invasion from the North

The Los Angeles Times storms San Diego, 110 miles away

The Los Angeles Times, say those who try to read it, is a little like Los Angeles: you can't find anything in it. The paper is a jungle of ads, serious national stories that jump from page to page to page, ads, eclectic local reports, ads, entertainment listings, ads, ads and ads (more than any other U.S. daily). Despite periodic attempts to impose order on that marvelous mess, the Times remains the newsprint equivalent of suburban sprawl.

Lately the paper has begun to sprawl topographically as well as typographically. In the past two months, it has opened a local news office in Long Beach, 20 miles to the south, a news bureau in San Bernardino, 55 miles to the east, and another in Santa Barbara, 85 miles to the west—all in hopes of winning new readers in those outposts. Last week, in the boldest act of press imperialism since the New York Times launched a short-lived California edition 16 years ago, the Los Angeles paper invaded San Diego, 110 miles to the south. The Times opened a 26-member editorial office there, committed an estimated $1.5 million to its first year of operation, rented additional office space for 60 circulation employees, installed 1,000 newspaper vending machines around town, and began printing 71,000 copies of a 24-page daily insert of mostly San Diego news (circulation and pages are expected to drop this week).

At San Diego's morning Union and evening Tribune (combined circ. 317,000), the twin flagships of the Copley chain, the Times' move went over like an oil spill. "I look upon this as an invasion," fumed Union Editor Gerald Warren, a sometime White House press secretary who returned to his old home from Washington 2½ years ago to take up his current post. "We're itching for the fight. Our juices are running. We're going to give them the fight of their lives." In response, the Tribune is adding ten reporters, bringing its editorial staff to 140. The Union has added three reporters, another page of state and regional news, and a $100,000 promotion campaign asserting, xeno-phobically enough, that "nobody knows San Diego like we do."

One obvious reason the Times is trying to annex San Diego is that the city is California's second largest (pop. 798,000) and is expected to grow more rapidly than Los Angeles over the next several years. But the Times' 90-member metropolitan hard-news staff is already spread thin over the 464 square miles of the city of Los Angeles, and the paper was scooped by just about everybody on the biggest local story in years, the "Hollywoodgate" scandals. Otis Chandler, 50, Times publisher and vice chairman of the parent Times Mirror Co., asserts blandly: "We already sell more than 30,000 copies [in San Diego], so we're convinced there's a market for a daily paper of our high quality."