» Troubled Times
Mark Lacter on the LAT’s downward spiral.
The news business has been in free fall for some time, in part because of a killer recession but more broadly because arrogant and often incompetent owners and operators didn’t have the smarts to recognize that the world around them was changing. The Times epitomized that attitude. But those institutional and economic challenges have been made considerably worse by Sam Zell, the avaricious real estate tycoon who took over the Times’s parent, Tribune Company, in 2007 in a transaction that even he admits was a mistake. Zell made the purchase with practically all borrowed money, resulting in a debt load that Tribune could not handle. Last December the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as a means to restructure the business and pare down the debt.
