A tough place for The Times

How these things play themselves out in the months ahead will depend to a great extent on how the Tribune Co.'s own uncertain future resolves itself. The company may survive as a publicly traded corporation but spin off valuable individual assets, like The Times or its major market television stations, such as KTLA, Channel 5. It may be broken up and all its parts sold off. Or it may survive in a slimmed-down and privatized form, which is the option some reports suggest its current managers favor.

But whether the Los Angeles Times returns to local ownership or is operated as part of one of these arrangements -- or even one yet to be proposed -- nearly everything that really matters about this newspaper's future, about its ability to keep faith with its readers and their communities, will turn on the answers to two questions:

How will the paper's proprietors, whoever they are, conceive The Times' role in Southern California, and are they willing to divert a sufficient share of the paper's substantial profits into the kind of reinvestment that will make the future possible?

To answer that first question, you have to understand what makes The Times unique among major American newspapers. Alone among the country's leading papers, this one is simultaneously the most important news organization in a vast region, the Western United States, the most influential source of news in the largest and most important state in the country and the hometown newspaper of one of the world's greatest and most important cities. At the same time, it is a paper with a national and international reach because the size, interests and sophistication of its local readership require those things. Finally, the demographic realities of the world's most ethnically and culturally diverse region dictate special obligations when it comes to coverage of Latin America and the Pacific Rim.

No other American newspaper must aspire to meet all those obligations at the same time. These are not negotiable obligations in the minds of the paper's readers, and, as easy as it is to blame recent declines in readership on paradigmatic shifts in media technology, the hard truth is that a significant part of that decline has come from an erratic management that has neglected one or another of these responsibilities.