The LA Times’ owner wants to take the struggling newspaper public again
Having reportedly lost $50 million, laid off more than 20% of its newsroom, and shed some 26% of its daily print readers last year, billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s announcement that he plans to take the Los Angeles Times public “over the next year” came as a bit of a shock to some on Monday’s “The Daily Show.”
Jon Stewart and his studio audience cheered the news from Soon-Shiong, who made his money in pharmaceuticals and bought the paper for $500 million in 2018. However, whether investors will share that enthusiasm about the company — where internal tensions have bubbled recently and finances have been shaky for even longer — remains to be seen.
It is, as you might expect, a tough time to be running a newspaper that still depends on its print business.
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Per February figures from industry publication Press Gazette, the 25 largest newspapers audited in the US last year saw daily print circulation slip 12.7% on average in the six months through September, with the Los Angeles Times seeing the biggest drop of the lot. Daily print circulation for Soon-Shiong’s paper dropped some 25% from the same period in 2023.
Not one publication posted increasing print circulation compared to the year before, however, with Press Gazette reporting that there isn’t a single US newspaper with a daily average circulation exceeding 500,000 anymore, after The Wall Street Journal slipped by more than 81,000 copies.
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