The Los Angeles Times

Last night I sat and watched the PBS documentary on the Los Angeles Times and Southern California. I had read David Halberstam's 1000 page tome on the great newspapers of this country and the families who run them. And this documentary drew heavily on that--with attribution. But still--it was fantastic--and it left me so stirred up I could hardly sleep afterwards.

Part of it was the visuals--what California looked like, the visuals of Nixon riding around with the newspaper editors in a chummy way as they printed one sided stories to get him elected, the vision of the San Fernando Valley, its development, and the role the Chandlers played in making that happen.

And part of it was watching this extraordinarily well-made documentary about my newspaper--the one I read daily, love and worked for for eleven years, where I made many of my greatest friends and covered some of the coolest stories--and knowing this was an obituary. It was like reading your own obituary--before you were dead. You were terminally ill--yes--but you could still turn around. It is too early. Too soon, I wanted to shout at the screen. The paper is not dead yet! That is how it felt.

Later, after I processed more, I thought a lot about newspapers and community. I thought how much having a world-class newspaper made Los Angeles a world class city. San Francisco is a great city. But it never, ever had a world-class paper. That would have changed things.

A newspaper really does affect how that city and the world think about it. It creates a city's identity, even as it writes it down and prints out that first rough draft of history. Even people who never read the paper will read other publications that copy from that paper and pick up the attitude, the dreams, the races, the struggles, and how the city presents itself.

Otis Chandler dreamed big. He dared to put black people on the cover, hire Hispanic writers (well, one, and he was killed) write about Democrats, open bureaus all over the world so that Los Angeles would be an international city. It was also the times--everyone believed journalism could change the world back then. It was the age of Watergate. Journalists could bring down presidents.

But more than anything I wondered--with a newspaper that is dying, that is closing its foreign bureaus and can barely cover its own city, that is clearly writing more boosterish stories that seem like they were printed to make developers happy (like the old days?) -- will Los Angeles shrink in the world?

The story you tell about yourself is the story that becomes the truth--whether you are a person, a family or a city. Who will tell our stories now? And what kinds of stories will they be?