Being bought by a billionaire is not enough. This is the bitter experience lived by the Los Angeles Times, struggling with a loss of revenue and an erosion of its sales. The southern California daily was bought in 2018 for $500 million (€460 million) by biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong. The daily experienced, on Friday January 19, the first strike since its founding in 1881. In question, an upcoming social plan which follows the elimination of 70 positions in the newsroom in June 2023.
In 2023, the newspaper, which has some 500,000 digital subscribers, has lost $30 million to $40 million. Its editorial director, Kevin Merida, threw in the towel in early January. In question, the disappointing results, the absence of a salary agreement with the press union for more than a year and friction with the editorial staff on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: when in November around thirty journalists from Los Angeles Times signed a petition “urge[ant] to integrity in Western media coverage of atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinians”Kevin Merida banned them from covering the conflict for three months.
Other major media are also in the storm, such as Washington Postbought in 2013 for $250 million by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, or the weekly magazine Timetaken over by Marc Benioff, one of the founders of Salesforce, for 190 million in 2018. Thus, according to an investigation by New York TimesTHE Washington Post fell back hard after taking advantage of readership mobilization in the Trump years (“Democracy dies in darkness”had added the daily as a motto) and would have lost 100 million dollars in 2023. The newspaper, which revealed the Watergate scandal in 1972, reduced its staff by 240 people out of 2,000, parting ways with some of its feathers .
Disaster landscape
Timehe would lose some 20 million dollars. Questioned by the New York Timesmedia scholar and entrepreneur Ken Doctor notes that billionaires who have invested in the media show “greater signs of fatigue” : “The very rich find it very difficult to lose money year after year, even if they can afford it. »
Some newspapers are getting away with it. Of course, the New York Times with more than 10 million subscribers (9.4 million digital and 670,000 print, 2.5 billion turnover and 194 million profits) or the economic daily Wall Street Journal with its 4 million subscribers (3.4 million digital, 560,000 in paper version), leaders in their market and benefiting from the logic “winner takes all”. Locally, the Boston Globe would also make a profit.
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