The Los Angeles Times will soon become a publicly traded company, as it seeks to recover subscribers.
The newspaper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, told The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart that the initial public offering would happen within the next year.
“We literally are going to take the LA Times public and allow it to be democratised and allow the public to have the ownership of this paper,” Soon-Shiong said. “We think over the next year we will.”
“Whether you’re 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 acquired the Los Angeles Times in 2018 for US$500 million, having previously invented the cancer medication Abraxane and founded the biotechnology network NantWorks. The paper's staff were not told about the initial public offering plans before the announcement, Politico reported.
The New York Times is also publicly traded, as well as newspaper publishers like Gannett and News Corp.
The Los Angeles Times has undergone several rounds of layoffs in recent years. It cut around 20% of its employees in 2024 after the exit of executive editor Kevin Merida.
Soon-Shiong, a supporter of United States President Donald Trump, has also pushed the newspaper towards conservatism. All of the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board members resigned or accepted a buyout after Soon-Shiong axed its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 United States election, with the paper losing around 20,000 subscribers at the time.
The Los Angeles Times introduced a ‘bias meter’ at Soon-Shiong’s direction earlier this year, an artificial intelligence tool intended to label articles’ political stance and offer alternative views. The paper withdrew the feature after just one day, as one of its notes had said the Ku Klux Klan was often framed “as a product of ‘white Protestant culture’ responding to societal changes rather than an explicitly hate-driven movement”.
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