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News War: What’s Happening to the News? 1x87

The third segment of the News War series takes us inside the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times, where an epic battle over the future of news is pitting editors and reporters against corporate owners at the Tribune Company in Chicago who are demanding budget and staff cuts to maintain profit rates. The battle reflects what former L.A. Times editor John Carroll calls a “crisis of the soul” in the newspaper world with editors nationwide facing increasing demands from Wall Street, losing readers and advertising revenue to the Internet, and wondering if their newspaper can survive. Yet newspapers are not the only outlets struggling to stay relevant and profitable in today’s unsettling media climate. FRONTLINE interviews TV executives from ABC to The Daily Show, current and former TV anchors — including Charles Gibson, Dan Rather, Connie Chung and Ted Koppel — bloggers, Webcasters, and executives at Google and Yahoo! News, to see where the news business is headed and who is going to pay for serious news reporting.