Part 67: Understanding the Culture of Indifference – Can The Los Angeles Times Be Saved?
Published January 19, 2024
Photo of Patrick Soon-Shiong, Ed Roski, Andrew and Penny Cherng, Eli Broad, Richard Riordan, Dominic Ng and Rick Caruso from left to right by Chris Patey (Los Angeles Business Journal).
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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist
Today was a wild day in Los Angeles. For the first time in their 142 year history Los Angeles Times journalists organized by the newsroom guild organized a work stoppage, and I was there to see it in the newly renamed Gloria Molina Park next to Los Angeles City Hall. It was a slightly overcast mood, and after parking I struck up conversation with Richard Serrano, who ran as a write-in candidate in the Council District 6 Special Election to replace former Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez in April 2023 following the LA Fed Tapes leak.
They won’t be renaming any parks after Nury, that’s for sure, not after the racist Tapes which cost her the seat as President of said governing body. After assuring Serrano of my diligent follow-up as always, I went to see the wildness myself of what I heard were 350 journalists at the Los Angeles Times rejecting the proposal of billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong to cut 20% percent of their workforce. This comes following the departure of top Editor Kevin Merida last week over the matter, as well as unspecified editorial decisions.
It's been suggested that Merida’s exit was fueled by the intervention of the owners daughter Nika Soon-Shiong to reverse his decision to restrict those at the Times who had signed a letter expressing opposition to the Israel-Hamas war unfolding in the Gaza Strip. That happened in on November 9, and then on December 19, the Times published a story alleging that LAPD Chief Michel Moore and subordinates in LAPD Internal Affairs had sought to stop an investigation into former LAPD captain Cory Palka and the University of Southern California, and instead investigate Mary Karen Bass over her scholarship from said institution.
The story was decried by Chief Michel Moore as “patently false” and the two whistleblower LAPD detectives, Jason Turner and one unknown who went to the LAPD Office of Inspector General and whose complaints the Los Angeles Times has in their possession. There’s always a heavy police presence in Downtown, and the crowd was so spirited that Scientology journalist Tony Ortega had a hard time recording his update on the Danny Masterson and Leah Remini cases. Masterson wants bail on appeal, and Remini wants Scientology to stop harassing her.
Serrano would have just been happy for Los Angeles to be less corrupt, and even though he too is suspicious of unions, I reminded him that we actually need the Los Angeles Times even if we don’t always believe what’s written in it completely. Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong responded to the demonstration by his own journalists by cutting off their access to company email, Slack channels and even their Adobe software. When you’re out, you’re out, and having gone through the same experience it’s impressive how fast information technology teams can work!
What happens on Monday is anyone’s guess? Will Soon-Shiong decide to further punish his disobedient journalists? The Times is reportedly losing somewhere between $30 million and $50 million per year. The Union seems less concerned about the Editorial troubles so much as the bread and butter issues that anyone faces in Los Angeles, how to possibly survive in a place that seems almost destined to price you out of existence. If it’s not busy crushing your soul, and using the lowest, most corrupt tactics to make those who object to business as usual go away.
You can’t blame the activists for not trusting the LAPD, and you can’t blame the journalists at the Times for starting realize that the honeymoon one gets when a billionaire comes to your rescue only has so much time until an expiration date. Nothing lasts forever, and from the statements and interviews that Merida has given it’s honestly hard to understand why Soon-Shiong even wants to be in the journalism business other than controlling a major civic asset. Ironically, the same discussion we heard on the Tapes about municipal redistricting.
Merida hadn’t turned around the business trajectory of the Times, and even if he was respected, the manner of the departure should raise some concerning questions about the degree that the Los Angeles Times is practicing “independent journalism” as they brand. As I reminded Serrano, the difference you get between my Substack and the Los Angeles Times is that I don’t have a stinking editor. So I thought, are all the Times journalists just going to end up on Substack too now if LA decimates its newspaper again?
The reality of indifference is that people don’t want to pay for news. They expect it for free when they want it whether on television, and outside of paying for cable to get Fox News, NewsNation, CNN and MSNBC essentially they expect journalists to give them a product for free. I was quickly reminded of this yesterday on TikTok, that most wily of platforms full of foreign intrigues and inanity by a poster named “Your Mom” – “When news is behind a paywall it's not really useful anymore.” You better learn how to use TikTok!
Provided the Los Angeles Times doesn’t completely collapse, and yes, basically journalists will work for peanuts out of simple love for the profession, the “dark energy” that Los Angeles Times Noah Goldberg noticed about the affair is real. Goldberg is the son of a much senior editor, and among the proposals made by Soon-Shiong in making the cuts is to dispose of the seniority system. The dark energy is real in Los Angeles precisely because there’s very little accountability in this town outside of social media bullying.
Whether it’s the City Council indictments that Serrano reminded me, the ongoing issues at USC in responding to sexual violence, yes I’m calling it what it is, rape cover-ups, part of a culture of rape, the power of indifference to ignore the suffering of others is very real. The Times demonstration today occurred amidst a continuing visible homeless crisis as well as one unseen, that is the final place of darkness in this great wasteland of suburbia and blight that is our beloved Los Angeles. Rigged as many say about the dynamic!
So how do you Unrig LA as independent journalist Rob Quan uses as his handle? How do you get a man like Patrick Soon-Shiong to even want to bargain with the Los Angeles Times Guild? While you shut it down like the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild did, one day without news in Los Angeles is a drop in the bucket, the only people who notice are other media outlets, and for the most part people aren’t going to care. They’ve tuned out already. So what’s the best option? Well for starters, if Soon-Shiong is maxed out, he should tap out. Selling off the San Diego Union Tribune to Alden Capital who will surely gut it just as he now proposes to do the Times again, following prior layoffs last summer.
After Los Angeles Times journalist James Queally began an emphatic chant of “Shut it down” within earshot I heard a couple other Times journalists joke, “No, don’t shut it down.” Well I have some news for the Times journalists, losing your job is hard, losing out on income is hard, just look at what’s happened to me for whistleblowing at USC, which recently reported according to the Daily Trojan that “USC’s endowment grew by more than $330 million in the past year, according to the latest financial report from the University Comptroller.” Maybe Soon-Shiong should just sell the paper to USC and call it a day?
I honestly don’t have very much reason to believe that Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose prior business ventures are in biotech and hospitals has much expertise or knowledge about journalism even as he seeks to influence it at his own paper. If you ask me, Soon-Shiong is like most rich people when they acquire an asset for petty reasons that costs too much. They start treating it with indifference, as something that should be freely given. The love affair between Soon-Shiong and his asset is clearly over, but I’d also question whether the Times Guild is prepared to go the full distance like the Writing or Acting unions.
Losing your job is hard, and even more so in a shrinking journalism market nationwide, so while I wish the Times journalists no ill will, in fact, I need them to do my job, I think the questions I’ve asked about their news coverage in the last year is entirely warranted. The idea that Soon-Shiong is apolitical and doesn’t talk to other rich and powerful people in Los Angeles seems farcical, after all he owns the newspaper. I wasn’t surprised that the Times endorsed Bass over Caruso, or Kenneth Mejia over Paul Koretz for controller, but more so that when Caruso alleged in Vanity Fair this summer that Bass had won on “identity politics” and that her camp was behind the Tapes, the Times didn’t follow-up.
Talk about missing some low-hanging fruit, and I’m glad that the videos in the Edin Alex Enamorado case came to play finally in their reporting, that’s what the criminal case is going to be about. Enamorado along with 6 others are still being held on no-bail in San Bernardino County, so now it looks like the prosecution simply doesn’t understand their advantage at trial, that they have the evidence, and honestly it’s hard to see at this point how releasing the group, even absent their leader would pose a public safety risk.
Safety and employment go hand-in-hand, so I don’t blame those at the Times who are starting to feel unsafe, and I support the calls made to protect the gains in diversity at the paper even if you wonder if Soon-Shiong doesn’t know exactly how to capitalize on Los Angeles’s biggest asset. The recent launch of De Los was inspiring, to see the Times even try to reach more Latino audience, but you have to wonder where Soon-Shiong sees the future going. He’s eliminated video and podcasts units already.
If news is becoming more like social media, those are all loser moves, and clearly he doesn’t have the confidence to a pull a USC and simply borrow large sums of money to build the University Village or make settlements with the victims of George Tyndall. We’re talking hundreds of millions, even billions, and trillions of dollars in asset management and construction. Even as the Village has seen its shops falter, under high rent and seasonal slowdowns, it hasn’t quite gone out of business because USC students have extremely high amounts of disposable incomes.
If every one of the 49,500 students at USC bought a Los Angeles Times subscription at the current sale price of $98 per year, that would generate an additional $4,851,000 million dollars, still just a drop in the bucket. If the entire city of Pasadena with 138,699 residents bought Los Angeles Times subscriptions that would raise $13,592,502 dollars. Combined that would be enough to plug their budget whole slightly. Perhaps they could get UCLA and Burbank too! The scale of increased demand that they would need to maintain their current supply is significant.
How can a business that’s hemorrhaging money in a struggling industry stay afloat if no one wants to pay for their news? 20% is a small cut in the world of business slashing of distressed assets. We had to do it to the USC Dworak-Peck School of Social Work following Dean Marilyn Flynn’s departure, the Times covered it. They quoted USC School of Dentistry Dean Avishai Sadan saying basically about USC’s plan to turnaround the school, “These kind of things don’t happen overnight, and they don’t get resolved overnight. Across the board, it’s a new world order.”
The May 2019 article by the Los Angeles Times team of Harriet Ryan and Matt Hamilton was just a follow-on to the reporting they did on USC to expose our scandals, but it’s one that stays with me, because I had to coordinate much of the meetings to execute the layoffs of 45% staff over two years, droves of adjunct faculty members and “mid-level deans.” Dean Sadan was a friend, and my supervisor who had presided over the debacle, USC Vice Provost for Academic Operations Mark Todd who had kept the struggling school afloat with Dean Marilyn Flynn through its boom and bust did what they had to do to keep it alive.
I’m not sure if the Los Angeles Times can eat that sort of cut, USC was trying to plug $20 million to $30 million in revenue loss at the School, and there’s a near insatiable demand for admission to a place like USC, even for a highly questionable online Masters in Social Work program. I’m not sure what will happen at the Times next, but from what I read about their books, far more than a 20% cut is going to be needed unless they borrow money or Soon-Shiong opens his reserves up to keep it afloat.
So good people, stay indifferent if you want, don’t pay for journalism, but remember, without the Los Angeles Times, some truly horrible things would still be happening at USC. As one person told me the other week, “when the news is in the Times people believe it” reminding me that it is a so-called “paper of record.” How much longer that record keeps spinning is anyone’s guess, but I think this is just getting started, and we’ll see what happens next in Los Angeles, land of indifference, place of destruction, bound for the news apocalypse.
Link: L.A. Times Guild calls for one-day strike to protest looming staff cuts
Link: 42 3 1 Danny Masterson's attorneys want him released while he appeals conviction
Link: University endowment grew by $330 million, Comptroller’s latest financial report reveals
Link: Vigilantes or champions of street vendors? ‘Justice 8’ activists face allegations
Link: USC considers deep cuts at social work school after revelations of gaping deficit
Please support my work with your subscription or for direct aid use Venmo
Zachary Ellison is an Independent Journalist and Whistleblower in the Los Angeles area. Zach was most recently employed by the University of Southern California, Office of the Provost from October 2015 to August 2022 as an Executive Secretary and Administrative Assistant supporting the Vice Provost for Academic Operations and the Vice Provost and Senior Advisor to the Provost among others. Zach holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Policy and Planning from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. While a student at USC, he worked for the USC Good Neighbors Campaign including on their newsletter distributed university-wide. Zach completed his B.A. in History at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon and was a writer, editor, and photographer for the Pasadena High School Chronicle. He was Barack Obama’s one-millionth online campaign contributor in 2008. Zach is a former AmeriCorps intern for Hawaii State Parks and worked for the City of Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation. He is a trained civil process server, and enjoys weekends in the great outdoors.
