The Los Angeles Times is cutting its newsroom staff, becoming the latest news organization to contract amid economic pressures brought on by advertising and print readership declines.
The Times is eliminating 74 positions in the newsroom, representing about 13% of the total.
Full-time and temporary workers will be let go, including a handful of managers. Reporting positions are expected to be largely spared but the production staff will be scaled back. Nearly a third of the cuts come from news and copy editor ranks. Some photographers, audience engagement editors and audio producers will also be affected.
Times Executive Editor Kevin Merida announced the layoffs Wednesday in a note to the newsroom, saying the decision was “made more urgent by the economic climate and the unique challenges of our industry.”
L.A. Times Guild leader Reed Johnson called the layoffs announcement “outrageous and reckless,” noting that 57 LAT Guild members, including several union leaders, were being let go.
The restructuring represents the first significant belt tightening since Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and his wife, Michele, acquired the paper five years ago from Tribune Publishing, which no longer exists as a stand-alone company. Since then, The Times’ newsroom has been largely protected from massive layoffs that have hobbled many other news outlets.
When the Soon-Shiong family purchased the paper, The Times was shedding print subscribers and had just 125,000 digital subscribers. The family invested millions of dollars to help the organization recover from more than a decade of devastating cost-cutting, management missteps and a flight of journalistic talent under Tribune.
Under Soon-Shiong, the newsroom added more than 150 journalists, rebuilt its business operations and launched an entertainment studio. The paper was making strong gains in revenue by early 2020. But the COVID-19 health crisis derailed the paper’s path to profitability as pandemic-related closures obliterated the paper’s advertising.
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