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Tribune buyer Sam Zell is known as "the grave dancer," so OC Register travel editor-blogger Gary Warner thought he would mark yesterday's news by stopping in at the graves of the Chandler family that ran the L.A. Times for almost the entire 20th century and then some. Off he went to Hollywood Forever, ostensibly to see the grave markers of the Ramones with his son, but eventually they were drawn to the cemetery's Chandler monuments.
As a journalist, there are two areas of interest when I visit Hollywood Cemetery. The first is the grave of Marion Davies, the actress who was the longtime mistress of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration of Orson Welles "Citizen Kane."The Times folks get their own little section. There's the obelisk to Harrison Gray Otis, leader of the paper soon after it was founded in 1881 and outright owner from 1884. He died in 1917. Next door to his monument is a curving marble memorial dedicated to his daughter Marion Otis and her husband, Harry Chandler, publisher from 1917 to 1944. There's also a memorial to the 20 employees killed by a bombing of the Times in 1910 during an ugly struggle between Otis and local labor activists. Unlike the movie star graves, there was no one around. Old publisher's don't have the star power of screen legends, no matter how big the markers they built for themselves
Tons of next-day media analysis of the news, of course. Romenesko has good national links round-ups here and on his main page.