The Los Angeles Times, the city's leading newspaper, has suffered from circulation numbers that have decreased since the mid-1990s. It has been unable to pass the one million mark, a milestone easily surpassed in earlier decades. The drop in circulation may be because of a number of short-lived editors.
Other possible reasons for the circulation decline include an increase in price, from 25 cents to 50 cents, or in the rise in readers preferring to read the Web edition. A leading editor characterized the decrease in circulation as an industry-wide issue that the paper had to deal with by putting more content online and placing breaking news there. One prominent journalist attributed the decline 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 various times in recent years in attempts to help push up circulation. In 2000, a major redesign more closely organized the news sections and changed the Local section to the California section, with more detailed coverage. Another significant change in 2005 had the Sunday Opinion section renamed the Sunday Current section, with a radical change in its presentation.
In 2006, The Times shuttered its San Fernando Valley printing press, keeping such operations in neighboring Orange County. Also in the year, the paper announced its circulation down 5.3 percent from the previous year. The Times's loss of circulation is the greatest out of the top ten newspapers in the United States Despite this recent circulation decrease, many in the newspaper industry have applauded the newspaper's effort to increase its reliance on building up its individually-paid circulation base.
In other negative news, the credibility of the Times suffered greatly when it was shown in 1999 that a revenue-sharing arrangement was in place between it and Staples Center in the preparation of a magazine about the opening of the sports arena. The magazine's personnel was not informed 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 discontinue the weekday examples of the Garfield comic strip in 2005, in favor of a newer comic strip, while retaining the Sunday edition. The comic was dropped completely shortly after that.
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