Opinion: WWGD?

Geffen often raises The Times in conversation, these people say, and talks about how he would improve the paper’s look and its coverage of the arts, among other things. He has said the would try to get New York Times star columnist Maureen Dowd to jump to the Los Angeles Times.

Here’s what he’s saying to friends: He’ll pour money into more hires. He plans to staff -- more like stuff -- the paper with name writers and journalism stars. (Of course, he’ll raid The New York Times, where Frank Rich and his wife, Alex Witchel, are his good friends and occasional overnight guests. So are Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi. So are a lot of literati.) He’ll demand quality. He’ll ratchet up the Web site (even though he hates how prohibitively expensive it is to do that). He’ll figure out a way to bring in Latinos as readers. Geffen loathes how boring, badly written, inconsequential and pedestrian the L.A. Times’ editorial and opinion section is. He thinks nobody reads it. He knows nobody talks about it. Most of all, he wants his newspaper to be talked about.

Irving Azoff, a music industry executive who has known Mr. Geffen for years and who now manages the Eagles and Christina Aguilera, said Mr. Geffen was not a micromanager, and was more likely to hire editors with whom he sees eye to eye. “I am sure David would hire people that think the same as him, so he would be sure they didn’t like who he didn’t like before he hired them,” Mr. Azoff said.

‘It could be very exciting if David Geffen buys it and makes Arianna Huffington the editor,’ said former editorial-page editor Michael Kinsley.

For decades, America’s newspaper landscape has been dominated by the ‘Grey Lady’, the New York Times, which rightly claims to being the nearest America has to a quality national. Geffen, however, never plays second fiddle and is reported to be willing to meet this challenge: to stare the Grey Lady in the eye and turn the LA Times into the other American national newspaper. Who would bet against him?