In his first interview since abruptly leaving the Los Angeles Times in January, former executive editor Kevin Merida said “disagreements” with owner Patrick Soon-Shiong led to his exit from the paper.
Merida’s comment came during a one-on-one interview with Oliver Darcy of Status News at TheWrap’s annual Grill conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
Two major job cuts — one in June 2023 that eliminated 74 newsroom positions, and another 115 layoffs in January 2024 — were a driving factor in Merida’s decision, he said. Merida resigned two weeks before the January 2024 layoffs were announced.
“I came there to try to transform the place. It’s very hard. I thought the last round of layoffs — that was not something I thought was going to be beneficial to what we were trying to do to grow. … And there were some disagreements that the owner and I had,” Merida said.
One of those disagreements, TheWrap reported earlier this year, was Soon-Shiong’s interfering in editorial decisions — something that damaged his relationship with his top editor.
On Tuesday, Darcy asked if Soon-Shiong’s newsroom meddling influenced Merida’s decision to leave. Merida didn’t deny or confirm it, but said that wasn’t the norm at his previous roles. (He previously was an editor at The Washington Post and was editor-in-chief of ESPN’s The Undefeated.)
“Anyone who owns a newspaper, who owns a news organization, can do anything they want,” Merida replied. “It’s theirs, they own it. It’s not my experience, in the places I’ve worked, that you have that happen with owners.”
Merida added there were “a lot of factors” that led to his exit, including the Times’ “structure.”
“I’m not normally the kind of person who will leave a place, I’m trying to stay someplace. I’m trying to help the LA Times because I know how important it is to the people of Los Angeles, California, and really, to the nation. It can’t fail,” Merida said. “I did everything I could to stay there. I just thought ultimately, it was best for me to leave.”
Elsewhere during the panel, titled “The Next Chapter of Journalism in Los Angeles,” Darcy asked Merida about CBS’ recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates which the news organization said didn’t meet their standards as morning show anchor Tony Dokoupil pressed the author on his opinions on the Israel-Gaza war.
“I was surprised to see the interview. It was uncommon. It was not like I’ve seen a book author receive,” he said. “The opening question about how [the book] could have been in the backpack of ‘extremists’ — I’ve never heard that as an opening question of an author. … It was a very surprising approach to an interview, to me.”
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