By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, August 2011
In late August 2011, FishbowlLA noted the death of Murray Seeger, the former LA Times journalist who spent 14 years at the paper from 1967 to 1981. Seeger died from pneumonia at 82.
Then
Murray Seeger’s 14-year LA Times tenure had spanned a substantial era of the paper’s foreign-correspondence operation. Seeger had been a foreign correspondent — the kind of role that the LA Times, in its expansive mid-century-into-1980s prime, maintained a substantial global bureau network to support. His career had included Cold War-era foreign reporting.
Now
The LA Times’s foreign-correspondence operation has been substantially reduced across the decades since Seeger’s 1981 departure. The post-2008 contraction in particular hit foreign bureaus hard across the entire American newspaper industry.
The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented obituary — and, in retrospect, a marker of an era of LA Times ambition. The global-correspondence model Seeger’s career embodied has been one of the most substantial casualties of the newspaper industry’s long contraction.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.