Billionaire funding isn’t ideal, but journalism needs it right now

Ideally, it would be easy to make a profit running a newspaper in America’s second-largest metropolitan area, the home of the film industry and numerous sports teams. Or someone like Soon-Shiong, who made a ton of money in the biotech industry, could figure out the right strategy. Or a person with a net worth between $5 and $20 billion (published estimates vary) would be willing to lose $30 million to 40 million a year (the deficit of the paper, according to Soon-Shiong) to support the most important news organization in America’s largest state.

Alas. Soon-Shiong bought the Times in 2018 and backed the hiring of 150 journalists as part of a strategy to revitalize the paper, boosting the staff size to around 500. He seemed very enthusiastic about owning the Times. “It’s got nothing to do with the business analysis. It’s got to do with an analysis of what’s important for humanity,” he told the Guardian back then.

Six years later, Soon-Shiong is focused on the business analysis — and unhappy with what he sees. Citing tensions with Soon-Shiong, Kevin Merida, a very well-respected journalist who was once the No. 2 editor at The Post, resigned this month. Now, combining these cuts with a previous round last year, the Times will have about the same number of journalists it did when Soon-Shiong first took over, having laid off about one-third of the staff in less than a year.

Soon-Shiong hasn’t been specific about his vision for the paper. Perhaps he has some great plans to improve it. But the departure of top editors (two of the Times’s managing editors have also now resigned) and mass layoffs are difficult to interpret as anything other than a sign that a paper is reducing its ambitions.

And it’s not just Soon-Shiong. Time magazine, owned by tech billionaire Marc Benioff, announced it was cutting staff this week. The Post increased its ranks from around 600 to 1,000 journalists after Jeff Bezos took over the paper in 2013. But about 120 Post journalists took buyouts in December, with layoffs looming if too few did. Bezos (worth nearly $200 billion) has even more money than Soon-Shiong but also chose to reduce his losses.

An emphasis on profits isn’t the only problem with billionaires owning news outlets. First and most important, it’s pretty undemocratic — oligarchic, even. Ideally, in a democracy, the broader public has the power and no individual has outsize influence, particularly one who is unelected. But who in Boston would want to cross John Henry, owner of the Red Sox and the Boston Globe? Billionaires also tend to be White men, a group already with disproportionate power in American society.

Second, ultrawealthy owners inevitably affect journalism. There’s the obvious problem of right-wing billionaires such as Rupert Murdoch who make their news properties (in his case, Fox News) essentially conservative political entities. But centrist billionaires can also cause tensions because they sometimes want to inject themselves into journalism decisions. Soon-Shiong has said he was frustrated Merida didn’t notify him before pulling off Gaza coverage writers who had signed a letter condemning media accounts of the conflict as too biased toward Israel.

And even when they aren’t actively involved, billionaire owners affect news outlets in more subtle ways. The billionaires who aren’t conservatives tend to be socially liberal, pro-capitalism urbanites. And that ideology shows up in the news products they own. Both capitalism-skeptical leftists and social conservatives are correctly worried that some news outlets are biased (perhaps unconsciously) against their candidates and causes. The billionaires also choose the leaders of the newsrooms they own. So the top editors at The Post (or their counterparts at Bloomberg News, owned by the eponymous financial mogul) aren’t likely to be people who have been publicly stating that billionaires shouldn’t exist.

These owners also have personal histories and interests that likely have a chilling effect on the journalists they employ. It’s hard to imagine The Post running an editorial calling for an antitrust case to break up Amazon, which Bezos founded. I doubt the Atlantic would have a cover story sharply attacking Apple, the company once led by Atlantic owner Laurene Powell Jobs’s late husband, Steve.

But despite all those clear downsides, we still need billionaires to support journalism — because the news industry needs any funding it can get. Since the internet destroyed the print advertising market, local newspapers in particular have been declining in profits and cutting staff to not go too deep in the red. Aside from the New York Times, most papers, even The Post, have struggled to get enough paying subscribers for their online editions to make a profit. Television news is doing better financially, but cord-cutting is eating into the margins of even behemoths such as CNN and ESPN.

What’s particularly alarming is that these cuts are happening even as the American economy overall is strong, suggesting a particular problem in the journalism industry.

And while there is a growing recognition that journalism is a public good that should be funded through donations or philanthropy if it can’t thrive as a for-profit industry, getting a large pool of donors or a foundation to fund a news outlet is still really hard.

So I welcome journalism funding from Bezos, Bloomberg, Henry and other wealthy individuals, such as Stewart Bainum Jr., who is backing a start-up called the Baltimore Banner, which is trying to fill the coverage hole created by the decline of the Baltimore Sun.

I’m biased, of course: Perhaps I would be unemployed but for Bezos running The Post at a loss. But even if I didn’t work here, around 900 other journalists do. Some of them, myself included, write critically about the role of billionaires in society. And being funded by a single billionaire is often better than being operated, as so many news outlets are now, by a hedge fund or large corporation that is even more likely to be fixated on profits and less connected to a given community.

Billionaire-funding isn’t the solution for journalism; we need everything else too (donations, philanthropy, subscriptions, advertising, journalist-owned cooperatives, labor union backing, taxpayer funding) right now because the field is in such crisis. Billionaires are part of that.

I’m sad to see Soon-Shiong backtrack on his commitment to the news industry and lay off so many journalists. I hope he either reconsiders his approach or sells the Los Angeles Times to an organization or another billionaire more enthusiastic about the paper. I wish wealth was more widely shared in America, so that perhaps the public could more easily pool its money together and support news organizations.

But sadly, we have billionaires. So they should pump some of their exorbitant wealth into making sure the public is informed and government officials are watched closely — even if it means they lose millions of dollars some years.