Former Times publisher Richard T. “Dick” Schlosberg III, who led the newspaper during an era that saw double-digit profits and the rise of the Internet that would eventually decimate the industry, died Wednesday in San Antonio. He was 79 years old.
The cause was brain cancer, according to his son, Dr. Richard T. Schlosberg IV.
Schlosberg spent a decade at The Times, coming from the Denver Post in 1988 to serve as president and retiring as editor in 1997. The paper was then the flagship of the Chandler family's Times-Mirror chain and the second-largest metropolitan newspaper. largest in the country with a newsroom of 1,500 journalists and a circulation that exceeded one million. Journalists flew first class and Picasso lithographs adorned the walls of an executive dining room.
Schlosberg in an undated photo. He graduated from the United States Air Force Academy.
(Schlosberg family)
“There are no bad days as editor of the LA Times,” Schlosberg said in 1997. “There are good days and great days.”
To celebrate blockbuster advertising revenue in the mid-1990s, The Times rented the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip and hired the Laker Girls to perform. Schlosberg and then-executive editor Shelby Coffey performed “Wild Thing” backed by a band.
“We weren't without problems at various times and we had to cut and tighten, but certainly looking back… it was a pretty high point,” Coffey said.
In an indication of the prestige the Times enjoyed at the time, actress and singer Barbra Streisand invited Coffey, Schlosberg and their wives to her home for a dinner with actor Warren Beatty, which the former editor recalled as “a pleasant evening.” .
Then Los Angeles Times editor Richard T. Schlosberg, left, with David Laventhol, center, and President Clinton in 1994.
(Los Angeles Times History Center)
Meanwhile, clouds were gathering in Silicon Valley. Harry Chandler, then heading business development, traveled to Palo Alto in 1995 to meet with two Stanford graduates, David Filo and Jerry Yang, who were seeking funding for a technology startup.
Upon his return, he told Schlosberg and Coffey, “I need an hour to tell you what the Internet is and why we should buy a company called Yahoo.”
The Times offered $1.6 million for about half of the fledgling company (an investment that would have dramatically altered the newspaper's history), but Yahoo's founders backed out.
Schlosberg was known for showing consideration toward rank-and-file employees. He banned smoking in the Denver newsroom in the 1980s, citing the danger to non-smokers, his son recalled, and in Los Angeles he sought input from low-level employees to make important decisions.
Schlosberg in 1996.
(Photography by Lee Salem)
“He was a person who always went to the source of information. In some ways, he didn't follow a typical chain of command,” said Dickson Louie, who worked under him at The Times.
During Schlosberg's tenure, The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1994 Northridge earthquake and was a Pulitzer finalist nine times.
The son of a World War II pilot, Schlosberg was born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and graduated from the United States Air Force Academy. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he flew more than 200 combat support missions, according to an obituary in the San Antonio Report. He received an MBA from Harvard before beginning a journalism career.
Following his retirement from the Times, he served as executive director of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Los Altos-based charity created by the Hewlett-Packard co-founder and his wife.
He is survived by his wife of 58 years, Kathy, his son and daughter Deb Rich Herczeg, as well as five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
After leaving The Times, Schlosberg watched with concern as the paper went through different owners and many rounds of layoffs. The then-parent company, Tribune, filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and the newsroom was reduced to fewer than 400 journalists before the Soon-Shiong family returned the paper to local ownership in 2018.
Schlosberg and four others formed a committee to defend retired Times-Mirror employees and spent 15 years fighting for money they were owed under deferred compensation plans.
“It was on principle,” said former Times general counsel William Niese, who also served on the committee. “Dick Schlosberg was a very rich man and he didn't need to do it at all.”
The employees ultimately collected about a third of what they were owed through the bankruptcy proceedings, Niese said.
