Following calls from staff to diversify the Los Angeles Times newsroom, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong pledged to have a quarter of the Times’ newsroom staff to be Latino over the next five years.
“Our staff makeup and coverage should better reflect the fact that one in two people in LA County is Latino. This should go without saying,” Soon-Shiong wrote in a Tuesday letter to the Times’ staff and Latino Caucus, which has recently launched social media campaigns to highlight the underrepresentation of Latinx staff at the paper. “Over the next five years, we expect to achieve a newsroom where Latinos make up one quarter of our staff.”