Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong intends to make the paper a publicly traded company by next year, the billionaire said during an interview with Jon Stewart on Monday’s episode of “The Daily Show.”
“Whether you right, left, Democrat, Republican, you’re an American. So the opportunity for us to provide a paper that is the voices of the people, truly the voices of the people [is important],” Soon-Shiong said. “So I’m going to announce something with you tonight…that we are going to take LA Times public and allow it to be democratized and allow the public to have ownership of this paper,” Soon-Shiong said.
Asked when this would happen, Soon-Shiong said, “We think over the next year that we will, I’m working through with an organization that’s putting that together right now, and that can hopefully remove maybe some of those questions of where ethics get cloudy.”
Watch the interview below:
It’s unclear how this will affect the paper’s current employees, who have been rocked by cascading crises in recent years. This year alone has seen layoffs and buyouts, on top of an ideological shift mandated by Soon-Shiong that led directly to a steep drop in subscribers.
In early May, 14 staffers were let go, and in March, dozens of employees in operations and communications sections were axed, a move that followed buyouts for 40 newsroom employees.
And the paper lost at least 25,000 subscribers in the weeks after Soon-Shiong overrode the paper’s editorial board to cancel a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, and then began mandating more right leaning coverage.
And aside from all of that, LA Times reportedly lost $50 million in 2024.
