A month after at least 40 newsroom employees accepted buyouts, the Los Angeles Times has been hit by another wave of brutal layoffs, this time on the outlet’s business side.
While the full count isn’t known, Oliver Darcy reported Thursday that dozens of employees across the company’s operations and communications sections were let go this week, including Vice President of Communications Hillary Manning.
Representatives for the Los Angeles Times didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from TheWrap.
Manning also did not respond to a request for comment; as of this writing, her LA Times email address has not been deactivated.
The report of more cuts comes a month after more than 40 newsroom employees accepted buyouts offered by the paper’s billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. The exact number of affected employees in that round of cuts is unknown but at least 17 were reporters.
And as TheWrap exclusively reported, this included 23-year veteran senior writer Jeffrey Fleishman, staff writer Tracy Wilkinson and national and foreign editor Alan Zarembo, who were the first confirmed staffers to take the buyout.
At the time of those buyouts, an employee who was still at the the Times told TheWrap that six veteran copyeditors were also among those taking a buyout. This employee had particularly harsh criticism of Soon-Shiong, saying in part, “that’s a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge lost. Perhaps we should put out a missing flyer in search of the man who bought our paper and made promises about its future.”
In January 2024, following the resignation of executive editor Kevin Merida, the Times laid off 115 journalists, with more editors resigning in the following months.
But the latest cuts also follow what critics charge is Soon-Shiong imposing a decidedly right wing tilt on the paper that began when he axed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.
Editorial Editor Mariel Garza resigned in protest over that decision, and as TheWrap reported at that time, editorial writer Karin Klein and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Greene both quit the day after.