Los Angeles Times suburban sections
The giant Los Angeles daily had a "more aggressive zoning policy than perhaps any other newspaper" because its local market was so widespread, a writer for The New York Times opined.
[1] But as two of these and six other specialized sections were eliminated in 1995 because of a downturn in newspaper revenues, Times editor Shelby Coffey called them simply "a noble experiment.
A one-year anniversary layout listed the names of key people working on the San Fernando section as Straszer, Maurice Stoller, Mary Nogueras, Albert Markado, Norman Dash, Richard W. Degnon and Fred Baumberger.
[3] By 1968, the experience of the weekly zoned editions had generally been positive — but Orange County, to the south of Los Angeles was a different matter.
[10]Under the direction of Orange County managing editor Ted Weegar, a separate editorial staff — including a reporter stationed in Sacramento, the state capital, each day took apart the editorial product prepared in Los Angeles and "Orafied" — or localized — the entire newspaper, from front page to sports, especially for Orange County readers.
The cost was estimated to be some $9.5 million a year "to give suburbanites and exurbanites the feeling that they are reading a world-minded paper with a home-town emphasis."
"[10][11] In April 1978, the Times began a daily San Diego County edition, with a 26-person news staff, plus advertising and circulation employees.
[12] A shake-up in the Times editorial department in April 1981 resulted in the transfer of H. Durant Osborne, 52, from his job as city editor of the main newspaper to "an administrative role in the Suburban Community Sections."
In that year,[16] a new edition was started in Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles, and a weekly Spanish-language publication called El Tiempo was also being planned.
[11] Traditionalists were opposed to expanding the existing San Fernando Valley zoned pages into a semi-independent publication with its own focus[11] and its own printing plant.
[17] In 1997, Julia C. Wilson was named president of both the San Fernando Valley and Ventura editions, succeeding Jeffrey S.
[16] In a 1990 investigation of minority recruitment at the Los Angeles Times, journalism investigative reporter David Shaw found that the zone sections had become "a training ground of sorts for the main paper" and that that practice had "helped create the paper's poor reputation with minorities" because they had to start in a suburban office rather than downtown.
[19] Afterward, Times editor Shelby Coffey III and publisher David Laventhol gave the green light to establishing an entirely new kind of zoned section — City Times, a 28-page tabloid covering the central city neighborhoods "from Hispanic East Los Angeles to Koreatown to mostly black South Central and Southwest Los Angeles."
[15] Ed Cray wrote in the American Journalism Review: The majority of the cover stories deal with cross-community, cross-neighborhood problems: check-cashing services as a banking system for the poor; the true cost of enterprise zones in South Los Angeles; the largely Anglo command of the Los Angeles Police Department; school vandalism; and the pervasive fear of crime on central city bus lines.
[15] On November 6, 1992, the Times announced it would stop publishing its San Diego County edition and eliminate 500 jobs throughout the company through a voluntary buyout and normal attrition.
[1]"Otis Chandler's dream of being a newspaper from Santa Barbara to Tijuana isn't going to happen in this economy," Phyllis Pfeiffer, the edition's general manager, said.
"The Westside section, serving the city's most affluent areas, including Beverly Hills and Westwood, will continue to appear twice a week," the New York Times reported.
"[22] By 1999, the suburban sections had been almost entirely supplanted by a new venture, Our Times, a Los Angeles Times subsidiary that published separate community-oriented newspapers in Brea, Conejo Valley, the Crenshaw District in Los Angeles, Montebello and Pico Rivera, Irvine, Laguna Hills, Mission Viejo, Santa Clarita, Santa Monica, Sherman Oaks, Simi Valley and Ventura.
[24] Finally, in September 2001 the Times ended publication of its zoned San Gabriel Valley, South Bay and Westside sections.
[26] In December 2005, the newspaper announced it would close its Chatsworth plant, where the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County editions had been published.
[27] The Times ended printing at its Costa Mesa Orange County plant in June 2010 but kept its editorial and business operations open there.
