The Examiner flourished in the 1940s under the leadership of the city editor James H. Richardson, who led his reporters to emphasize crime and Hollywood scandal coverage.

Its editorials openly praised the mass deportation of Mexicans, including U.S. citizens, in the early 1930s, and was hostile to liberal movements and labor strikes during the Depression.

Its coverage of the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles during World War II also was particularly harsh on the Mexican-American community.

Underwood remained on the staff following the merger in an upper management position, leaving the day-to-day operations to younger editors.

Afternoon newspaper readership was declining as television news became more prominent, while expanding suburbs made it harder to distribute papers during the rush hour.

The fact that sports leagues were playing more night games also meant that evening newspapers were no longer able to print full results.

Following the merger between the Herald-Express and Examiner, readership of the morning Los Angeles Times soared to 757,000 weekday readers and more than 1 million on Sunday.

Numerous violent incidents took place between pickets and strike-breakers, as well as confrontations between the guards and the Los Angeles Police Department.

The excitement of rejuvenating a newspaper in Los Angeles with a storied past attracted a stream of young journalists, many with Ivy League credentials.

[citation needed] The paper switched back to a morning publication in 1982, 20 years after the merger; this did little to improve sagging revenue and readership.

[6][7] Editorial writer Joel Bellman recalled that by then the newspaper's[7] once-splendid 1913 Julia Morgan-inspired Mission Revival building had gone to seed, the ground-floor arched windows long since covered over as a result of vandalism .

Its beautiful lobby and graceful staircase to the second-floor newsroom were virtually all that was left of the original interior; the rest looked like a cheap 1950s-era retrofit.The Examiner was the first newspaper to break the story of the 1947 dismemberment murder of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, who was ultimately dubbed the Black Dahlia by Los Angeles Herald-Express crime reporter Bevo Means.

[3] Examiner news reporter Will Fowler was on another assignment with photographer Felix Paegel on January 15, 1947, when they heard a radio call of a mutilated female body found in a vacant lot on Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park area of Los Angeles.

By the late afternoon of January 15, an autopsy on the female victim was completed by the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office.

Jack Donahoe, who was chief of the department's homicide division, that the victim's fingerprints be transmitted to the FBI by using the Examiner's new soundphoto machine.

The Examiner noted that Short had lived in Los Angeles for a period of time before moving to various other cities in the pursuit of jobs and men.

The newspaper's editors were so desperate for fresh stories that they sent rookie reporter Roy Ringer to the Examiner's offices on Broadway.

At one point an anonymous tip led Examiner reporters to the Greyhound bus station in downtown Los Angeles, where a steamer trunk owned by Short was discovered.

The Black Dahlia case was never solved, but for three months it led most of the Los Angeles newspaper's front pages until other sensational homicides replaced it.

The courts, however, recognized that a journalist could spend the rest of his life in jail if he refuses to divulge his sources on moral principle.

[11] After the newspaper closed in 1989, the building remained in use as a popular filming location for 26 years, with its ornate, period appropriate lobby to 15 standing sets ranging from a modern police station, a courtroom, a hospital, to an industrial basement perfect for horror.

It was once the second-most-filmed location in Los Angeles having hosted over 1,250 individual productions as of 2013, ranging from Hollywood blockbusters such as Short Cuts (1993), The Usual Suspects (1995), the Academy Award winner, Dreamgirls (2006),[citation needed] to its last production, the indie film Fixed (2017), produced by longtime property manager Bryan Erwin.

Plans for an $80-million[15] renovation by architecture firm Gensler included restaurants and shops on the ground floor and offices in the remaining space.

[12] In 2019, Arizona State University announced plans to locate its Los Angeles campus in the building, which was eventually opened in 2022.