All You Need To Know About The "LA" Times

One of the great civic benefactors of Los Angeles died yesterday, but you would never know it by reading the news sections of the Chicago, I mean, LA Times. Richard D. Colburn was the force behind and the major financial supporter of the Colburn School of Performing Arts on Bunker Hill and the major supporter of the soon to be built $80 million expansion designed to give Los Angeles a school equal to New York's Juilliard.

But Colburn's extensive obituary was buried on page ten of the 'B' section rather than being on the front page as the story would have been if he had lived in Chicago - or any other city in with a locally owned and operated newspaper. To do this, though, would have required bumping off urgently breaking front page stories such as one about a horse in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.

I would like to say I was surprised by this, but this is the same out-of-town team that did not feel that even Ira Yellin's passing was worthy of coverage in the regular news section.

Unfortunately, this is the continuing price this city has to pay for a paper owned by absentee landlords and edited and published by outsiders for whom LA is just another temporary pit stop in their careers.