[AlbertCory]

For my book, I did a ton of historical research, mainly the LA Times (via newspapers.com). You can get a free trial of that without paying, but the subscription price is pretty nominal. You can probably get a paper from where you grew up, too.

Anyway, it's pretty eye-opening to see how much of the paper in the late 70s was ads. Like, 3/4 of most pages in the front section, after the first three. The Sunday paper was 300+ pages. They were raking it in. They could afford to subsidize some foreign bureaus.

Why was that? There was no other good way to reach the Southern California audience. I got my job at Xerox by answering an ad in the Sunday Times.

So they had a monopoly, and now it's gone.