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 2 1/2 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."

Chandler has a point. Despite its flaws, the Times is one of the nation's most serious, best-reported dailies, and San Diegans could do worse for a new newspaper. But Chandler's urge to spread enlightenment is hardly the sole motive for marching southward. Times circulation dropped below the 1 million level last year, triggering alarms all over the block-long, dark brown granite and smoked-glass building where the $1.1 billion Times Mirror empire is headquartered. What is more, much of the paper's largely white, middle-class readership is apparently leaving town. The Los Angeles community development department calculates that the city's "Anglo" population has dropped from 81% of the total in 1950 to less than 50% today. Says a U.C.L.A. journalism instructor: "As the white folks go south to Orange and San Diego counties, so goes the Times."

So far, the Times has not had to worry much about its home-town competition. The Hearst Corp., five months ago, hired ex-Washington Star Editor Jim Bellows to revive its long flaccid Herald-Examiner (circ. 331,000). Bellows has softened the paper's eye-straining makeup, imported hot-blooded young writers and editors from the East, hired David Frost's girlfriend, Caroline Gushing, to write gossip items, is about to launch a graphically dramatic Sunday photo magazine, and is even thinking about changing the paper's name back to the simpler Examiner. But the retooled daily has not yet made any major circulation gains, and it still runs a pathetically distant second in advertising to the Times, which controls 93% of the Los Angeles market's total, v. 1% for the Herald-Examiner. "When I joined this paper, it was puffing along at one mile per hour," concedes the almost inaudibly soft-spoken Bellows. "Now I've got it up to about three miles per hour."

The Times is hardly the first big-city daily to follow its more affluent readers to the suburbs. The New York Times has launched four new inserts for neighboring areas on Sunday, the Miami Herald now has seven different editions throughout south Florida, the Detroit News has a computerized printing plant in the suburbs for speedier distribution, and the Chicago Tribune last year invested in suburban growth in, of all places, San Diego --by buying nearby Escondido's Times-Advocate (circ. 31,000). The Los Angeles Times itself has been producing a separate edition for neighboring Orange County for a decade.

Of course, few papers have taken the quest for new readers quite so far as the Times has in its San Diego campaign. But then, a restless quest for Lebensraum is another trait that the Times shares with Los Angeles. Since 1915, the city has expanded the size of its jurisdiction more than fourfold. How? By annexing more than 60 neighboring communities.

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