Branding a Newspaper: The Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times, the second largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States, is owned by the Tribune Company [NYSE:TRB], which also owns other publishing and broadcast media assets, including the Chicago Cubs major league baseball franchise.

Facing competitive pressures, Tribune is attempting to determine how best to unlock the value of its assets to grow the value of the company. At the same time, the L.A. Times is like many daily newspapers facing declining paid circulation figures.

But there is hope. That hope comes in Tribune rethinking how it might own the conversation in the marketplace by demonstrating a unique difference, planting a flag in the sand and standing for that difference. It’s called branding.

This column in the L.A. Times offers a roadmap of how Tribune might rethink the strategy behind the brand known as the L.A. Times, and how that could play into a repositioning of all it’s daily newspaper assets:

Los Angeles is the capital of the increasingly dominant infotainment-media-celebrity complex. Broaden your scope to California generally and you can throw in high technology as well. The L.A. Times should be the diary of this capital.

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