New Owner Plans To Move LA Times Newsroom

A California health-care tycoon stunned staffers at The Los Angeles Times on Friday, telling him he planned to move their newsroom to the city’s industrial outskirts — despite the fact he hasn’t closed a deal to buy the company yet.

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong — a local billionaire who is in talks to buy the LA Times and San Diego Union-Tribune for $500 million — told hundreds of journalists that they will be moving from their longtime headquarters, located in an art deco building in downtown Los Angeles, to El Segundo, Calif., an enclave south of Los Angeles International Airport about 20 miles away.

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong

The surprise Friday morning announcement — made by Dr. Soon-Shiong at a rented space inside the LA Times’ downtown headquarters — blindsided Tronc, the publishing giant that currently owns The Los Angeles Times, as well as other major US newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News.

“We did not give him permission to speak,” a Tronc spokesman said Friday.

Dr. Soon-Shiong declined to comment.

Soon-Shiong’s purchase comes at a perilous time for the publishing industry as advertisers migrate their dollars to Facebook and Google, and as readers have become less willing to pay for print subscriptions.

Newspapers across the country have been reeling from the shift by slashing their newsroom staff. In less than three years, The Times’ parent, Tronc, has shed about 1,400 employees, with most of those coming from operations outside its newsrooms. That represents nearly a fifth of the company’s workforce.

The newsroom in January overwhelmingly voted to join a union to try to preserve jobs. Plans were in the works to cut up to 20% of The Times’ staff and close its Washington, D.C., bureau, Soon-Shiong said, news that spurred him to act “as desperately fast as possible” to save the paper.

“The idea of reducing the newsroom and getting rid of the Washington bureau — I thought if we didn’t move, that would be the death knell of the institution as we knew it,” he said.

Soon-Shiong’s purchase appeared to halt such massive cuts.

The NYPost reported exclusively on Thursday that Dr. Soon-Shiong’s negotiations to complete his $500 million buyout of The Los Angeles Times from Tronc have lately appeared to stall.

While Dr. Soon-Shiong got antitrust clearance to complete the signed deal on March 5, he had remained largely silent since then, provoking speculation that he might be looking to wiggle out of the deal or renegotiate the price.