The Hollywood Reporter | LA Weekly
The billionaire Eli Broad will join former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner in a bid for either the Los Angeles Times or all the Tribune Co.'s newspapers, Paul Bond reports in The Hollywood Reporter.

Broad joined supermarket magnate Ron Burkle to bid on Tribune in 2007 but lost out to a group led by Sam Zell. That disastrous deal led Tribune into bankruptcy, from which it emerged at the end of last year with a plan to sell its newspapers.

"Mr. Broad has always believed in local ownership of the Times and would be interested in joining with others to buy the paper," Broad's spokesperson Karen Denne told Bond. Beutner's group would run the paper as a nonprofit, with Broad on its board and Beutner running the paper, Bond writes. (more...)

LA Weekly
A "member of the L.A. Times Editorial Board" tells Hillel Aron that Charles and David Koch may help buy the paper by financing "a bid by 'Papa Doug' Manchester, himself a right-wing multimillionaire who in 2009 bought the San Diego Union-Tribune and promptly turned it into a propaganda organ for San Diego development."

"It's hard to believe there's a chance that the liberal and Hollywood-adjacent Los Angeles Times might one day be owned by the Koch Brothers," Aron writes. But Tribune is said to want to keep all or most of its papers together in a sale, and the Kochs, Aron writes, have the interest and financial wherewithal to finance such a bid.

Also, Aron notes, they own Georgia Pacific, and "their grandfather, Harry Koch, once ran a weekly newspaper in Texas after emigrating there from the Netherlands." (more...)

California manhunt subject Christopher Dorner may or may not be dead: Forensics investigators will look at the teeth and make chest X-rays of the charred corpse found in a rental cabin where police say the former Los Angeles police officer holed up and exchanged gunfire with cops.

That image perfectly encapsulates the gnarly reporting around last night's shootout. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office asked reporters to stop tweeting in the event Dorner was monitoring Twitter (police made the same request of TV viewers). Candy Martin, who was surprised to see her rental cabin on television -- told police it had "no cable, telephone or Internet service," the Los Angeles Times reported.

KPCC didn't comply with the request and posted some bewildered reaction from media outlets and consumers alike. "It's not unusual, particularly in a police standoff, for police to ask television in particular to be very careful in their live coverage," Poynter's Al Tompkins told me in a phone call. "But this idea of Twitter coverage is a new wrinkle." (more...)

Mother Jones | CJR
2012 was a great year for men to die. "Big papers' lists of significant deaths in 2012 overwhelmingly feature men," Dana Liebelson writes in Mother Jones.

The Washington Post put 18 women and 48 men on its list. On the other side of the country, the Los Angeles Times listed 36 women and 114 men. And lest you think this is some kind of freak 2012 phenomenon, the New York Times has consistently listed many more men than women over the last five years.

Obituaries are a "rearview mirror," New York Times obituaries editor Bill McDonald tells Liebelson. "The people we write about largely shaped the world of the 1950s, '60s and, increasingly, the '70s, and those movers and shakers were—no surprise—predominantly white men." (more...)

The Wrap | The Associated Press
U-T San Diego's leadership now says it "is not interested in entering an auction for the L.A. Times," company CEO John Lynch told The Wrap's Alexander C. Kaufman.

"The Times is a great asset, everyone related to the newspaper or media business is rumored to be interested in buying, including William Randolph Hearst and Horace Greely," he said in an email to TheWrap.

Hearst and Greeley (correct spelling) have been dead for a combined total of about 201 years, so perhaps Lynch was referencing modern-day media baron Rupert Murdoch, who is reportedly interested in the Times, as is new Orange County Register owner Aaron Kushner. (more...)

The Wall Street Journal
News Corp.'s publishing business may "pursue acquisitions of distressed newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times" after its planned split from the company's media and entertainment divisions, John Jannarone reports. Reports of Rupert Murdoch's interest in that title have been bouncing around since at least this past June, when the split was announced.

"News Corp executives -- including Murdoch's son James -- flew into Los Angeles twice this month to take a preliminary look at the storied daily's books," Reuters initially reported Saturday. The LA Times says Murdoch is also interested in the Chicago Tribune. Both papers are owned by the Tribune Company, which is expected to exit bankruptcy this year. Also interested in the Times, which could sell for $400 million it reports, are Doug Manchester, new owner of U-T San Diego, and Aaron Kushner, new owner of the Orange County Register. (more...)