Otis Chandler

Journalist and newspaper publisher, born in Los Angeles, California, USA. Born into a wealthy business family, he studied at Stanford University and then embarked on a career in journalism, starting as a junior pressman and finishing as general manager of the Los Angeles Mirror News after a 7-year apprenticeship. Although having gained a reputation for fast living, in 1960 he took over from his father, Norman Chandler (1899–1973), as owner/publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and immediately set about instigating changes which were to greatly enhance the newspaper's standing in the US. He announced his retirement in 1980 at the age of 52, and became chairman of the parent group, Times Mirror. In 2000 the Chandler family sold the group to the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, thus ending over 100 years of ownership.

Otis Chandler (November 23, 1927–February 27, 2006) was best known as the publisher of the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980. He was the son of Norman Chandler, his predecessor as publisher, and Dorothy Buffum Chandler, a patron of the arts and a Regent of the University of California.

After attending his parents' alma mater, Stanford University, Chandler became publisher of the Los Angeles Times in 1960.

David Halberstam wrote in his 1979 book The Powers That Be: "No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did."

In 1980, he became chairman of Times Mirror and wound back his involvement in the running of the company. He handed control to people outside the family in the mid-1980s and became involved in other interests such as the Chandler Vintage Museum of Transportation and Wildlife, which he founded in Oxnard, California in 1987 and was rarely open to the public.

In the late 1990s, he became critical of a perceived decline in the Times.