Patrick Soon-Shiong says he’ll take the L.A. Times public within a year

The Los Angeles Times will be a public company within the next year, its billionaire owner told Daily Show host Jon Stewart on Monday night.

“Whether you are right, left, Democrat, Republican: you’re an American. The opportunity [is] for us to provide a paper that is the voices of the people, truly the voices of the people. So I’m going to announce something with you tonight,” owner Patrick Soon-Shiong said. “We are literally going to take the L.A. Times public and allow [it] to be democratized and allow the public to have the ownership of this paper.”

Soon-Shiong estimated this will take place over “the next year,” adding “I’m working through [that] with an organization that’s putting that together right now.”

The New York Times Company and the owner of The Wall Street Journal, News Corp, are also publicly traded newspaper companies. But unlike those papers, the L.A. Times — purchased by Soon-Shiong in 2018 — stands on shakier financial ground. The paper has seen multiple rounds of layoffs and lost subscribers after declining to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024. It regained some subscribers following its excellent wildfire coverage, but continues to raise eyebrows over owner-driven initiatives such as AI-generated “counterpoints” on opinion articles.

Here’s Rebuild Local News director of policy and former L.A. Times reporter Matt Pearce on Soon-Shiong’s announcement:

Well, there’s not really a way to write an honest opinion here without sounding like a bastard. But the L.A. Times under Soon-Shiong has been an awful business, having lost loads of money and requiring annual injections of cash from the billionaire owner after he bought the organization in 2018. It’s organized as commercial enterprise but is effectively a nonprofit, as its enormous corporate losses has reportedly been a significant write-off for Soon-Shiong’s own personal taxes.

But what would the L.A. Times even look like if it started operating as a traditional commercial business? L.A. is a difficult market, the Times itself has been rapidly shrinking, has no economies of scale and doesn’t own its own property (it rents to Soon-Shiong last time I checked). It is not your, um, traditional wonderful IPO candidate. And I say this as somebody who loves the L.A. Times.

Maybe people will get excited by Soon-Shiong’s vision and snap up the stock anyway. In any case, if it does become publicly traded, er, “democratized,” Nieman Lab will get a closer look at its finances and subscription business through quarterly reports.

On the episode, Stewart also addressed CBS canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Though Stewart acknowledged that late-night TV is “a struggling financial model” akin to “operating a Blockbuster kiosk inside of a Tower Records,” he warned media institutions about backing down.

“If you believe, as corporations or as networks, you can make yourselves so innocuous that you can serve a gruel so flavorless that you will never again be on the boy king’s radar…Why will anyone watch you?” Stewart said. “And you are fucking wrong.”

You can watch the episode on YouTube here.