Terry McGarry dies at 72 — and the long-tenured editor class the LA Times no longer produces

By Jordan Vega · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer (2011) · Wayback archive →

In late April 2011, LA Times reporter Andrew Blankstein tweeted out the news that former Times editor Terry McGarry had died at 72. The paper published its own obit the same day.

Then

McGarry had spent the bulk of his career at the LA Times — long enough that his retirement and now his death marked the end of a documented institutional generation at the paper. The Times’ own obit detailed his news-desk leadership across multiple decades.

Now

The 30-and-40-year-tenured editor class that Terry McGarry represented at the LA Times has substantially aged out across the decade and a half since 2011. The structural reality of the post-2008 daily-paper contraction is that newer editors don’t accumulate 30-year tenures because the institutional infrastructure that supported those careers no longer exists. Andrew Blankstein moved from the LA Times to NBC News, where he has been one of the network’s senior investigative reporters across the rest of the 2010s and into the 2020s.

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