By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2011
The Los Angeles Times built its mid-century reputation partly on an ambitious foreign desk. Louis B. Fleming helped build it.
Then
In March 2011, FishbowlLA marked the death of Louis B. Fleming, one of the Los Angeles Times’ original foreign correspondents, who had died over the weekend at the age of 85. A Pittsburgh native who spent most of his life in California, Fleming entered the newspaper business at the San Gabriel Sun in 1947 and also worked at the Pomona Progress-Bulletin and the Pasadena Star-News.
He joined the Times in 1960 and, just two years later, opened the paper’s United Nations bureau. He went on to open a Rome bureau and to cover the turbulent Middle East of the 1970s, spending the rest of his career at the Times before retiring in 1990.
Now
Fleming’s career traced the arc of the Los Angeles Times’ rise into a national paper. The expansion of its foreign bureaus from the 1960s onward was central to the Times’ transformation, in the Otis Chandler era, from a regional booster sheet into one of the country’s most respected newsrooms.
That global footprint became one of the costliest casualties of the newspaper economics that followed. Across the 2000s and 2010s the Times sharply reduced its foreign coverage and closed bureaus, part of an industry-wide retreat from the kind of international reporting Fleming spent three decades doing. His career stands as a record of an institution at its most expansive — and of a craft the paper could no longer sustain at the same scale.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.