Los Angeles – Otis Chandler, who as publisher of the Los Angeles Times during the 1960s and ’70s turned a narrow, conservative publication into one of the nation’s most distinguished and influential newspapers, died Monday at 78.
Chandler, who had been suffering from a degenerative brain disorder known as Lewy body disease, died at his home in Ojai, said Tom Johnson, who succeeded him as publisher and retired as chairman and chief executive of CNN News Group.
Chandler was the scion of a family that wielded financial and political power in the Los Angeles area for decades. As publisher, he spent most of his career chafing against what he sensed was an East Coast bias against Los Angeles and fought to elevate the Times.
The Times won seven Pulitzer Prizes during Chandler’s tenure.
“No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did,” David Halberstam wrote in his 1979 book “The Powers That Be.”
With his blond hair, weightlifter physique and love of surfing and hot cars, Chandler was a quintessential Californian of his generation. He was an avid hunter as well as a collector of antique cars and motorcycles.
Chandler resigned as the paper’s publisher in 1980 after 20 years at the helm. He remained mostly quiet about the paper’s operation after he left as chairman and editor in chief in 1985.
But he returned as a newsroom hero in 2000 when he publicly berated the newspaper’s management for deep cost-cutting and a scandal involving an advertising arrangement with a sports arena.
Soon after, the Chandler Family Trust sold the newspaper’s parent company, the Times Mirror Co., to the Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune.
Otis Chandler was born in 1927, the son of Times publisher Norman Chandler and great-grandson of Times founder Harrison Gray Otis. He succeeded his father as publisher in 1960 at age 33.
Chandler also expanded the reach of Times Mirror, starting a news service with The Washington Post and acquiring newspapers – including The Denver Post for a few years in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
