More than 40 newsroom employees at the Los Angeles Times have taken the buyout offered by owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, an insider at the legacy newspaper told TheWrap on Thursday.
While TheWrap could not confirm the exact number, the insider said that 40 guild members, 17 of them reporters — and one of whom was part-time— are taking the exit package.
As we exclusively reported last week, several longtime newsroom staffers, including 23-year veteran Jeff Fleishman, a senior writer, were the first confirmed to be taking the buyout.
New York Times reporter Benjamin Mullin then said on Threads on Wednesday that the number exiting in the latest mass exodus is “roughly 48.”
Mullin wrote, “Roughly 48 people in the newsroom took buyouts, with the largest group (~16 people) coming from the reporting ranks. About eight are managers. This is a pretty significant chunk of the remaining staff.”
An employee who is still at the L.A. Times told TheWrap that six veteran copyeditors were among those signing up for the buyout: “The desk was already short-staffed. Under our current management, will those jobs get posted? And we are losing three veteran photojournalists. Again, will those jobs get posted?”
“Regardless, that’s a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge lost,” they added. “Perhaps we should put out a missing flyer in search of the man who bought our paper and made promises about its future.”
TheWrap has reached out to The Times for comment.
Tech billionaire Soon-Shiong bought the L.A. Times in 2018, investing $500 million in the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in the country.
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.
Soon-Shiong’s clashes with the editorial board came to a head when he pulled the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 presidential election, which led to more resignations. Columnist Harry Litman cited what he called the tech billionaire’s “shameful capitulation to Trump” as his reason for leaving in December.
Subsequent actions, including appointing conservative commentator Scott Jennings to the editorial board and announcing plans to establish a “bias meter,” prompted more exits.
In January, journalist Eric Reinhart slammed Soon-Shiong for cutting all criticism of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from an op-ed that originally warned of the dangers of putting the politician in charge of the nation’s health and human services.
“My first and definitely last time working with the Los Angeles Times. Editing out the most urgent point of an OpEd in the minutes before sending to press while then also assigning a title and image that suggest an argument entirely opposite to the author’s clear intent is pretty shi–y,” Reinhart wrote on Bluesky.
