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.

Unlike The New York Times, the LA Times doesn’t have a gargantuan games or cooking side hustle to fall back on, and it didn’t even break the top 50 most visited English-language news websites in May, according to Similarweb data via Press Gazette.

There has been much ink spilled (mostly online, naturally) about the death of print newspapers, and it doesn’t seem like the LA Times is any exception, despite the buzz it got on a late-night talk show — another media mainstay in slow decline.