CNN
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Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire who purchased the Los Angeles Times for $500 million in 2018, said Monday he is taking the ailing newspaper public.
Speaking on “The Daily Show,” Soon-Shiong told host Jon Stewart the newspaper will take the company public over the course of the next year. The billionaire did not clarify when that would happen.
“We literally are going to take the LA Times public and allow it to be democratized and allow the public to have the ownership of this paper,” Soon-Shiong told Stewart. “We think over the next year we will. I’m working through (that) with an organization that’s putting that together right now.”
The move follows years of trouble at the Times. In early 2024, The Times cut 20% of its workforce, approximately 115 reporters, following the departure of the paper’s top editor, Kevin Merida.
In October, the Times came under fire after Soon-Shiong blocked the paper’s endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris over Donald Trump for president, prompting the resignation of the paper’s editorial board editor, Mariel Garza.
Since then, the Times’ entire editorial board has resigned, with the last departure coming in February. According to NPR, around 20,000 subscribers canceled their digital subscriptions.
Soon-Shiong said the paper has striven “to have voices of all.”
“Whether you’re right, left, Democrat or Republican, you’re an American,” he said on Monday.
Over the past year, the billionaire has criticized his own paper for what he described as veering “very left” and said he would balance the paper’s editorial board with voices that “trend right.”
The paper has had high-profile missteps in its transformations, such as a briefly-introduced AI-imbued tool that sympathized with the Ku Klux Klan.
