(The following essay discusses Norman Chandler and his son, Otis Chandler.)

The Los Angeles Times and its parent company, Times Mirror, are, by professional journalistic and business standards, major examples of the successful urban-national newspaper and media conglomerate, respectively, in the late twentieth century. For most of its history, however, the Times was as far from being a "newspaperman's newspaper" as fool's gold is from the real thing. Then, in the period from 1960 to 1969, it was transformed into a world-class newspaper, identified by the end of that decade as a publication in the same rank as the New York Times and the Washington Post. At the same time its parent company began to imitate the major corporations of that era by expanding and diversifying its holdings.

The metanoia of the Times and Times Mirror in the 1960s occurred for several reasons, including changes that were taking place in...