LA Times fires 115 journalists in ‘HR zoom webinar’ following union protests

The Los Angeles Times said it was laying off 115 journalists – or more than 20% of its newsroom – the day after members of Congress warned in a letter that sweeping media layoffs could undermine democracy in a high-stakes election year.

The 142-year-old newspaper, which has one of the largest print circulations in the US, has also lost its editor-in-chief and managing editor in recent weeks. On Friday, the union representing the newsroom’s journalists held an unprecedented daylong walkout, urging Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s billionaire owner, to reconsider a planned staff reduction.

Matt Pearce, the president of Media Guild of the West, which represents the Times’ unionized journalists, wrote on X that 94 union members had been notified on Wednesday that they were being laid off, about a quarter of the union’s membership, but a smaller number than the union had originally anticipated. He also wrote that an email from the company’s CEO had confirmed that “that the company decided to reduce the number of @latguild members to be laid off after we went on strike last week”.

The LA Times layoffs appear to have affected a wide swathe of the paper’s reporters, editors, and managers. These included journalists and editors working on more digitally-focused initiatives for younger audiences, such as the paper’s new “meme team” that had worked on TikTok content, to those leading its national political coverage. Among the journalists laid off on Wednesday were the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning DC Bureau Chief, Kimbriell Kelly, and its deputy DC bureau chief, Nick Baumann, who received their layoff notices on Tuesday, the day of the New Hampshire presidential primary election.

LA Times journalists who lost their jobs, and those who retained them, continued to publicly criticize what they described as a chaotic and poorly-managed process.

“The LA Times laid us off in an HR zoom webinar with chat disabled, no q&a, no chance to ask questions,” one former news editor wrote on X.

The latest round of layoffs comes after more than 70 positions – about 13% of the newsroom – were slashed last June, the Associated Press reported.

Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire, acquired the LA Times and other local papers in 2018, and had pledged to make his newspaper one of the “bastions of democracy” and to fight fake news, which he called the “cancer of our time”.

Soon-Shiong told the LA Times that the paper was losing $30 to $40m a year and that it was not making enough progress in growing its readership and advertising revenue in order to become financially stable. Forbes estimates Soon-Shiong’s net worth at $5.4bn.

Ten Democratic members of Congress who represent California had written Soon-Shiong a letter on Tuesday, saying that they were “concerned about reports of potential layoffs facing the LA Times newsroom and the effect this will have on all Angelenos, the availability of essential news and the strength of our democracy at large”.

Responding to these comments on Tuesday, Soon-Shiong said that US lawmakers should be doing more to support the struggling media industry, pointing to legislation in Australia and Canada that forces companies like Google and Facebook to pay for news content shared on their platforms, as tech giants have captured wide swathes of the advertising market that used to sustain news publications.

“I’d like to put the question to [lawmakers]: what can they do to help preserve a free and robust press, one that is instrumental in upholding our democracy?” he said.

The LA Times layoffs follow months of firings at media outlets across the US. A report released in early December 2023 found that the US news industry had lost 2,681 jobs through November, a higher number than in previous years.

In comments Tuesday and Wednesday, Soon-Shiong said that over the past five years since he had acquired the LA Times, he had invested “hundreds of millions of dollars – approaching $1 billion” in sustaining it.

During the tumultuous years of the Covid-19 pandemic, the paper had previously avoided major layoffs despite “losses that surpassed $100m in operational and capital expenses”, Soon-Shiong told the LA Times’ media reporter.

A spokesperson for the Times did not have additional comment.

On Wednesday, Soon-Shiong pushed back on descriptions of what his own newspaper had characterized as “LA Times Turmoil” in a headline.

“We are not in turmoil. We have a real plan,” he said.

In advance of major presidential election year, several billionaire-owned US news publications have made significant staff layoffs. The union for journalists at Time Magazine, which is owned by tech billionaire Marc Benioff, said on Wednesday that 15% of their journalists had been laid off. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced last year that it needed to lay off 240 employees, leading to a round of buyouts that saw high-profile journalists and editors depart the paper. Other major news outlets, from National Public Radio to Vice News to Sports Illustrated, have seen substantial layoffs and staff reductions.