Los Angeles Daily News

How good of a newspaper is the Los Angeles Daily News? How is it perceived in Southern California? How much of an impact does it have? What is its circulation? What is the best place to find circulation figures?

 

I know it is part of Alden's Los Angeles News Group (LANG). LANG owns basically every paper in Southern California except teh the LA Times, the San Diego paper and the Ventura paper.

In the period ending June 30, 2017 it had the lowest profit contribution margins in the Alden chain.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/n...alism-it-might-not-want-to-stop-anytime-soon/

Since 2017 the newspaper industry has sunk further into the depths of hell.

Personally I think the LA Times is going to run the LANG group out of business. If you are considering moving for a job I would not buy a house in the LA market but instead rent. I think there are many documented cases of Alden throwing people overboard in order to hot a profit target.

 

Wouldn't the demise of the LANG group be the result of the poor quality of its newspapers rather than the strength of the Los Angeles Times? The Los Angeles Times has gotten worse in recent years.

 

Interviewed there in 1985. Was told I finished "second" (what all losers were probably told).

Their No. 2 guy at the time used to work in Fort Lauderdale. Fred Turner called him a couple of weeks after my interview and asked if he knew of any job candidates. Guy gave my name to Fred.

I started in Fort Lauderdale 2 months later and spent the greatest 26 years of my career there. You just never know.

 

I’m a consumer of news here in SoCal and if you had posted “it’s been a year since the Daily News folded,” I honestly would have thought, “seems longer than that.”

 

I last saw a copy of the Daily News in 2005 and it looked like a Pagination 101 student in 1995 designed it.

 

A question I asked a few years ago was this (and never got an answer): If a newspaper group headed by a medium-sized paper buys a group that has a paper bigger than your biggest, which becomes the flagship? I.E. The Orange County Register was always bigger and better than the L.A. Daily News. But the LADN buys the group headed by OCR. Who's the boss?

 

My reckoning is the smaller acquisitor almost always assumes the identity of the bigger. That's borne out in history. The Prussians eventually took over and unified Germany in the 1870s, but it all ended up Germany and not Prussia. NationsBank bought out Bank of America in the late 1990s and kept the more legacy name. And we all know what happened with Gannett vis-a-vis GateHouse.

 

Is this question moot? At what point do the papers that are managed as a cluster become a single paper? Given the cutbacks in staffs how much differentiated content do the papers publish? How much is shared content? The only LANG paper I have seen in years is the Orange County Register so I do not know.

But I have seen a papers in metros with a population of up to a million that have five or less local bylines in a daily paper. Are the LANG papers basically the same product with different mastheads?

 

Yup. But Alden's business strategy is to milk the cash cow (this strategy was taught in my MBA program ). Alden is not putting more money into the papers.

 

To answer your question, yes, they are basically the same. I get the Riverside Press-Enterprise, but most of the news comes from San Bernardino County, where they have Ontario and San Bernardino mastheads. At least once a week, there is LA news on our "local" page. The photographers work for Southern California News Group, not a specific paper.

I will give them this, they run a complete, separate sports section every day. The LAT is the back pages of the Metro section five days per week. And SCNG has reporters covering the Kings and Ducks. Times is using AP, even on home games.

 

Wow. Didn't know that.