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Los Angeles Times publishing heir Otis Chandler, who transformed the newspaper from a partisan provincial publication into one of the most respected US dailies, died Monday aged 78, the paper said.
Chandler, the fourth generation of a family of publishers who bought the journalistic powerhouse in 1882, died in California fron degenerative illness called Lewy body disease, a brain disorder combining some of the most crippling symptoms of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, the Los Angeles Times announced.
Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times from 1960 to 1980, "catapulted the paper from mediocrity into the front ranks of American journalism," according to the fourth most widely circulated US newspaper.
"Otis Chandler will go down as one of the most important figures in newspaper history," said Dean Baquet, editor of the Los Angeles Times.
"He built a newspaper that was as great as the city it covers. He set his sights on a goal -- making The Times one of the two or three great American papers -- and he pulled it off."
After taking the helm of the very pro-Republican newspaper, Chandler sought to renew the legitimacy of his family's publication, recreating it in the model of the most respected US newspapers, The New York Times and Washington Post.
The LA Times had won 37 Pulitzer Prizes, the highest US award for journalists, by the end of 2004, including awards for reporting on the 1965 Watts riots and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Chandler was the great-grandson of General Harrison Gray Otis, a US Civil War veteran who bought part-ownership of The Times a year after it was first published in 1881, and was its publisher for 35 years.
The family is deeply intertwined with the history of the second-largest US city and were for years the most powerful family in California.
Chandler's grandfather Harry served as an early backer of a 23-million-dollar bond issue in 1907 to build an aqueduct that would carry water from Northern California to allow the nascent desert city of Los Angeles to grow.
The city's famed Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a leading concert hall and venue of the Academy Awards for years, is named after Otis Chandler's grandmother.
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AFP 272020 GMT 02 06
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