Chandlers' Interest in L.A. Times Now Strictly Business

Who are the Chandlers, the family seemingly intent on breaking up one of the industry's oldest and most venerated newspaper companies?

For more than a century, the family played a central role in the Los Angeles Times and the building of modern L.A. The Chandlers' patriarch, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, took over the Times in 1884 and built Times Mirror, a vastly successful family-run newspaper chain. Today, the Chandlers are once again agents of change in the newspaper business -- this time as shareholders, rather than as editors and publishers.

Seven years after a merger with Tribune Co. made them the largest shareholders of the Chicago-based media empire, the Chandlers have watched the value of their stake in Tribune decline along with the newspaper industry's circulation and advertising revenue. They have forced the company onto the block and submitted their own bid to split it up and extract much of their investment.

Tribune, which has 11 newspapers and 25 broadcast stations, may spin off its television division, be forced to take on huge amounts of new debt, sell the company's beloved Chicago Cubs or make more cuts at its newspapers in the coming weeks. The Tribune board's decision on the Chandlers' plan could come as soon as next week, a source close to the company said.

Similar scenes are playing out at other large newspaper and TV companies. What most don't have, however, is a family shareholder as large, varied, powerful and provocative as the Chandlers.

Today's Chandlers are 170-some descendants of Otis and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler. Once a straight line of succession, father-to-son owners and publishers of the Times, the Chandlers are now a diverse collection of sons, daughters, cousins and in-laws that sprawls like the great city itself and who relate to each other about as well as Compton does to Beverly Hills.

They are the beneficiaries of two trusts set up by Harry Chandler during the Depression that now are worth at least $3 billion, half of which is tied up in flat-lined Tribune stock.

The last Chandler to run the Times left in 1980, turning the paper over to professional management and effectively ending most of the family's interest in journalism as anything other than an investment.

Twenty years later, the Chandlers sold Times Mirror, which included the L.A. Times and several other papers, to Tribune for $8 billion in stock. They got three seats on Tribune's board and came to own 20 percent of the company.

But the combined company's stock, which traded as high as $60 a share after the merger, has lost half of its value in the seven years since. That helped splinter the Chandlers, souring many of them on journalism as a source of income and amplifying their differences.

"Many members of this extended family live outside Southern California; most are not named Chandler," Harry B. Chandler, son of the legendary Otis Chandler, the last Chandler publisher of the L.A. Times, wrote in an op-ed article in the Times in November.

A photographer and one of only seven current family members to work at the paper, Harry Chandler lamented how Tribune's troubles affected the Times. After Tribune forced out the paper's editor and publisher in November, Chandler wrote: "My point is that a family of this size, largely personally disconnected from this newspaper, is unlikely to act in concert toward a solution for The Times. What a shame that is."