Los Angeles Business Services Include Local Newspaper

The Los Angeles Times, the city's leading newspaper, has suffered from circulation numbers that have decreased since the mid-1990s. It has not been able to pass the one million mark, a milestone easily surpassed in earlier decades. The circulation drop may be a side effect of a succession of short-lived editors.

Other possible reasons for the circulation drop include an increase in cost, from 25 cents to 50 cents, or in the rise in readers preferring to read the Web edition. A leading editor said that the decrease was an industry-wide issue that the paper had to deal with by uploading more content online and maintaining breaking news there. One prominent journalist attributed the circulation decrease to the lack of local coverage featuring news items of interest to working people and organized labor.

The paper's content and design style has been revisited several times recently in attempts to help increase circulation. In 2000, a major change more closely organized the news sections and changed the Local section to the California section, with more detailed coverage. Another major change in 2005 had the Sunday Opinion section retitled the Sunday Current section, with a radical change in its presentation.

In 2006, The Times closed its San Fernando Valley printing press, leaving such operations in neighboring Orange County. Also in 2006, the paper announced its circulation down 5.3 percent from 2005. The Times's loss of circulation is the greatest out of the top ten newspapers in the U.S. Despite this recent circulation decline, many in the newspaper industry have lauded the newspaper's effort to augment its reliance on building up its individually-paid circulation base.

In other negative news, the credibility of the newspaper suffered greatly when it was shown in 1999 that a revenue-sharing arrangement was in place between it and Staples Center in the creation of a magazine about the establishment of the sports arena. The magazine's editors and writers were not made aware of the arrangement, which broke the separation between advertising and journalistic functions at U.S. newspapers. The Times has also come under scrutiny for its decision to drop the weekday edition of the Garfield comic strip in 2005, in favor of a hipper comic strip, while keeping the Sunday edition. Garfield was dropped altogether shortly after that.