A billionaire's buy-out is not always enough. Such is the bitter experience of the Los Angeles Times, which is struggling with revenue loss and declining sales. The Southern California newspaper was purchased in 2018 for $500 million (€460 million) by biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong. On Friday, January 19, he paper witnessed its first strike since its founding in 1881. At issue was an impending redundancy plan, which followed the elimination of 70 newsroom positions in June 2023. Four days later, on Tuesday, it announced that it was laying off more than a fifth of its journalists, which equates to at least 115 newsroom positions as it seeks to right its listing balance sheet.

The newspaper, which has about 500,000 digital subscribers, lost between $30 million and $40 million in 2023. Its managing editor, Kevin Merida, resigned in early January. When some 30 Los Angeles Times journalists signed a petition in November saying that they "condemn Israel's killing of journalists in Gaza and urge integrity in Western media coverage of Israel's atrocities against Palestinians," Merida banned them from covering the conflict for three months.

Other major media have also been caught in the storm, including the Washington Post, purchased for $250 million in 2013 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and the weekly magazine Time, taken over in 2018 by Marc Benioff, one of the founders of Salesforce, for $190 million. According to a New York Times investigation, the Washington Post had a hard landing after benefiting from increased readership during the Trump years. ("Democracy dies in darkness," the daily added as a motto.) It allegedly lost $100 million in 2023. The paper, which revealed the Watergate scandal in 1972, laid off 240 of its 2,000 employees, including some of its writers.

For its part, Time is said to have lost around $20 million in 2023. Interviewed by the New York Times, media specialist and entrepreneur Ken Doctor noted that billionaires who have invested in the media are showing "greater signs of fatigue:" "The very rich find it very difficult to lose money year over year, even if they can afford it."

A few newspapers are doing well. The New York Times, of course, with over 10 million subscribers (9.4 million digital and 670,000 print; $2.5 billion in sales and $194 million in profits), and the Wall Street Journal, with its four million subscribers (3.4 million digital, 560,000 print), are market leaders and benefit from a "winner takes all" logic. Locally, the Boston Globe is also reported to be turning a profit.

You have 50% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.