LA Times in *these* Times
California has 33 million people. The fifth-largest economy in the world. But the LA Times is imploding...
California’s largest newspaper is not the LA Times, at least not by circulation. It’s the New York Times. But, if you think about a newspaper that belongs to California and the most important newspaper in the state, it is absolutely the LA Times.
Once again, the LA Times has been gutted by an owner who promised to do better. This time, owner was once again living in the city. This time, the owner was not an old, white man from the Hills. This time, the newspaper had made a concerted effort to make right by the Black, Latino, and Asian population communities it had covered so badly for so long.
This time hurts hard, and I have nothing tied up in the place or the institution, except that I live in California. The last time layoffs at the LA Times shook me this bad, though, I was a summer intern in the newsroom, and it ~shook~ me. In June 2004, I sat down at the Los Angeles Times metro desk a few spots behind the inestimable metro editor (and LA native), Shelby Grad. I remember being so proud to be sitting in that desk “working” at the LA Times.
But also that day, I looked to my left (or right?) and there was a big messy desk half-packed in crates. Someone mentioned quietly that there had been layoffs the previous Monday, and that the messy desk used to belong to someone. “She’s gone now.” No name. The desk would remain in this state of unclaimed, half-packed inertia for the rest of the summer. This would be the first of the hundreds of empty-desk newsroom ghosts I would encounter over the ensuing years. It was also the first time that I was acutely aware that you could lose your job in a newsroom if “corporate” didn’t think there were enough profits.
It was the first (and only) newspaper I ever worked for that could be called a “first read.” Meaning: If you read the LA Times every day, you really didn’t need to read anything else to learn about the world - you didn’t need The New York Times. It was your first choice and first read every morning. In your hands, The LA Times would bring you the world from its own reporting staff at bureaus across the country and around the world. Ever the rebel, I remember thinking that I could go an entire summer without reading the New York Times and feel like I knew what was happening in the world, and that was my big middle finger to the East Coast journalism establishment. California old timers, journalists and non-journalists alike, will still call the LA Times “The Times.”
For me, the dream fizzled, fast. Maybe it was that I had no chance getting hired at the LA Times: I was six months out of college and there was a far more qualified metro intern who was both fluent in Spanish and had a masters’ degree in journalism from Berkeley. But I was already starting to think that maybe I didn’t want to go chase after dead bodies and cover police shootings and make friends with obnoxious sources and make so little money and do a job my parents didn’t approve of ….because even the best journalists could be journalists without jobs. This was 2004. This was a lifetime ago (literally some of my current students were born in 2004).
By the time Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times in 2018, the New York Times had become the first-read serving California. There are more New York Times subscribers in California than there are in New York. This is not to compare newspapers, except to say that by 2018, the LA Times had abandoned its first-read status, after being gutted and gutted year after year.
At first, I watched the gutting happen with the newspaper folded in my hands. From 2006 to 2011, I was a regular print subscriber to the LA Times and even then, the only subscriber in my big apartment building in South Park (in downtown LA). This was pre-paywall era, but I was studying newspapers and I knew that my subscription was more valuable than whatever website ads were generating. But LA Times was thinner, and it wasn’t a “first read” any more. The months when I felt like I needed to get the print New York Times, print LA Times, and print Wall Street Journal … daily …, because I studied newspapers, it was so immediately clear that the paper’s ambitions in addition to its size had shrunk (ask me anything about student loan debt).
Still, I took pride during those years in watching people rip out the LA Times’ editorial page endorsements and carry the pages of the paper with them into to the voting booths. People used the endorsements to make sense of the ridiculous propositions on the ballot (and my precinct wasn’t in hoity-toity LA, I lived downtown!). I distinctly remember the 2008 election, in part because my marriage was on the ballot. I vividly recall a Korean-American woman coming in to the voting precinct with what appeared to be a church pamphlet with an endorsement guide in Korean and the LA Times endorsements in her hands, scanning them both as if cramming for an exam. That was democracy, to me, right there. Like, all of it. Embedded in a moment. And the LA Times was feeding its soul.
But the newspaper kept fading into national irrelevance. I kept track of the LA Times, but stopped print subscribing because I don’t think there was any way to get the daily print LA Times in DC in 2011. Still, I missed LA every day that I wasn’t living in Southern California (12+ years, glad to be back), so I stayed loyal and relied on the newspaper for anything West Coast media buzzy.
The civic buzz during the Great Recession was that maybe someone super rich would buy the newspaper. I can’t remember why this didn’t work out, but no one really wanted Eli Broad or [insert mogul] running the LA Times, unless he [yes,"he”] might really save it, but wow, what a conflict of interest. But maybe it would be better?
So, when Soon-Shiong bought the paper in 2018 and hired a bunch of the smartest people I know in journalism (including some I am lucky to call friends), I was all in.
The newspaper got better and better. In 2021, it apologized to the community for being racist for so long and so recently, and promised to do better. I found it nothing short of remarkable that the only (and the largest) major newspaper owned by a person of color had decided to engage in a reckoning about the past, present, and future of the LA Times (in fact, I even wrote an academic paper about this with my buddy Matt).
I was so all in that I’ve tried to do the first-read thing again, but distributed content and algorithmic curation makes any full-read impossible for me.
I was so all in for the Soon-Shiong ride that this year I discovered my spouse and I were both paying for our own separate $16/month LA Times subscriptions in addition to a $5.99 Apple news LA Times subscription. (When I want to blame Soon-Shiong for squandering $30 -$40 million a year, which I do, I gut check myself with the fact pattern above. Perhaps the problem with recent financials is lots of people like me trying to audit our credit card statements for the purchases we cannot eat? )
Still, I was worried that Soon-Shiong would only have so much patience with the LA Times union, which in 2020, was already a thorn in his side, demanding reasonable things like - um, a union with proper union protections, equity in pay, and proportional seniority in parity with the city’s diverse population.
These most recent layoffs are both huge (20% of staff) and super shocking for anyone whose life, health, and well-being is tied up in the newspaper (I have heard people were caught by surprise and immediately cut off email?). But I am a cynic, and it seemed to me even before these layoffs were announced that it was only a matter of time after Soon-Shiong sold the San Diego Tribune in Fall 2023 that LA Times would start to see the Soon-Shiong hit the fan.* I made the point in my 2021 book that you cannot choose your city billionaire who buys a newspaper, and the big New Yorker hit piece on Soon-Shiong made me think that maybe the guy wasn’t as flush as he told everyone he was.
But just because I’m a cynic doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suck emotionally to see the biggest newspaper in your state robbed of its influence and power.
Now firmly planted in reader/news consumer land, I’ve watched this newspaper stage an intellectual and influence comeback. The LA Times had become a good place to work and a potential counter-story to all the bad stories about big city newspapers. The LA Times was promising it could make money by leaning into diversity - that diversity itself could be a market value.
What should we take from the fact that Soon-Shiong believes that it is no longer worth supporting his investment in diverse newsrooms and news about diverse populations?
Well, not much, I think, in sofar as mission and market proposition - except that this is one more billionaire to figure out that newspapers are not investments for billionaires to make money from. Rather, newspapers are better as organs of influence or an item line for balancing big tax bills with serious losses (and I’m looking at you, Bill Sinclair as you buy the Baltimore Sun),.
Still, we should be reassured that the LA Times was never in Soon-Shiong’s pocket, for even as a money-losing newspaper, it was still the most influential in the state, but clearly not influential enough for Soon-Shiong himself to decide to keep it as a pet to push his brands and investments.
Unfortunately, the fate of civic life in California is also tied up in what Soon-Shiong has decided he can tolerate losing from his investment.
This is not a healthy way for a democracy to function - across so many institutions, we depend on the very richest to support the public goods that the market fails.
But those people became rich because they understood the market, and are not trustworthy guardians of institutions that hold space for public discourse.
California is a place for dreamers and builders. The Californian Ideology has some real problems, but what I take from it when I teach about it in my classes each year is this - that California gives us space to think that what is impossible is probable and fixable.
It is time for Californians to remember how to take that no-quitter, big dreamer spirit draw from it the inspiration to do better for civic life in the state.
In a forthcoming post, I’ll wax on about what Californians supporting news might look like, but I do not think this actually has to mean the government doing it for us. But when the government does support journalism, it shouldn’t do what California did - and buy its libraries newspaper subscriptions to the New York Times instead of the world-class newspaper headquartered in it own state.
We need to help pay for the promise that is California, and one way to do so is by supporting journalism. More to come, because Californians deserve better journalism, but journalism deserves more from Californians.
(*bad dad joke, I’m sorry, I’ve done math all day)