The Los Angles Times Announces Significant Employee Layoffs
LA Times staffers respond by staging first walkout in paper’s 142-year history…with little support or sympathy from their supposed readers.
Big Media had a very dark Friday.
First, there was news that the once iconic Sports Illustrated magazine was laying off its entire staff.
Now comes news that the Los Angeles Times, the Democrats’ favorite propaganda outlet on the West Coast, is laying off a significant number of its employees.
The layoffs could impact at least 100 journalists or about 20% of the newsroom in a move to address the paper’s financial pressures, the Los Angeles Times reported separately, citing people familiar with the matter.
“The management needs to come to the bargaining table in good faith and work out a buyout plan with us that would first articulate a clear headcount or cost saving they’re aiming for,” the guild said in a statement, adding that the management should then try to hit that number with as few layoffs as possible.
In an emailed response to Reuters, the guild said it was unaware of the number of job cuts.
It response, the unionized Los Angeles Times staffers launched a one-day strike, the first walkout in the newspaper’s 142-year history.
Among the issues, the union is worried about the impact to . . . ‘accountability journalism‘.
“The management of the Los Angeles Times has announced that it intends to imminently lay off a significant number of journalists, and is asking the Guild to gut seniority protections in our union contract so they have vastly more freedom to pick whom to lay off,” the Times Guild said in a statement about the strike.
“This will greatly damage our ability to provide the accountability journalism so important to Southern California.”
The walkout comes at a turbulent time for the storied newspaper. Two weeks ago, the paper’s executive editor Kevin Merida resigned over billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s alleged editorial interference, among other issues, the Wrap reported.
It gets better. The newspaper managers are trying to make arrangements with the union to swap traditional seniority protections for those related to diversity.
Soon-Shiong and other managers asked the union’s bargaining unit to relax provisions in its contract intended to protect journalists with seniority from layoffs. If the union agreed to that, the company would offer affected employees a buyout package in advance of any layoff, managers said.
Soon-Shiong wants to make cuts while also retaining diverse staff members who have joined the paper in recent years as the organization has prioritized its efforts to boost the number of journalists of color to better reflect the community that it serves.
“After so many decades of falling short, we are finally making real strides toward accurately reflecting our city and region,” L.A. Times Guild Caucus leaders wrote in a letter to Soon-Shiong and his wife, Michele Chan Soon-Shiong, earlier this week. The group includes caucuses representing Black, Latino, Asian American, Middle Eastern, South Asian and LGBTQ+ staff members.
“As you navigate financial pressures in our industry, we urge you to avoid undoing the diversity that we’ve worked so hard to build,” the Guild Caucus leaders wrote. “Layoffs would be catastrophic, eliminating new and essential voices and diminishing the gains we’ve made under your family’s leadership.”
The newspaper’s management may wish to reflect on Boeing’s recent experiences with the consequences of diversity-oriented employment practices.
Atlas Air Boeing catches fire mid-air.
Didn’t we just have a conversation about Airline Safety and DEI hires? pic.twitter.com/pjxQLhe4Ef
— Liz Churchill (@liz_churchill10) January 19, 2024
Live by DEI, die by DEI.
Needless to say, this drama isn’t stirring sympathy in the hearts of Americans who like their news provided without woke messaging and smears on traditional American values.
Get Woke, GO BROKE….
— Yamil R. Sued (@Yamil_Sued) January 19, 2024
Who needs news stations and papers when I get the news first from X. It’s already old news by the time I see it on any news station or paper such as the Times.
— SusanRealtor (@Susan94508337) January 19, 2024
So will you condemn the actions of its owners, billionaire @DrPatSoonShiong & his daughter, the @DemSocialists activist @nikasoonshiong who openly supports Hamas?
— Houman David Hemmati, MD, PhD (@houmanhemmati) January 19, 2024
Good riddance to the transcribers for the regime.
— Stephe96 (@Stephe96) January 19, 2024
It will be interesting to see what the media landscape is like at the end of 2024.
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Comments
Getting rid of useful idiots, an early step in a communist takeover.
Man-in-the-street interview,
MSM, “Sir, do you have comment on this tragic, tragic situation at the LA Times?”
Mr. Muntz, “Ha ha!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX7wtNOkuHo
Accountability in journalism on display. The consumer abandoned you and hold journalists accountable for lies.
The first to be let go should be the ones who failed to show up for work.
Terminated.
I guess part of the accountability is due to the loss of advertisers who generally provide the bulk of revenue.
The advertisers likely looked at circulation figures, “did the math”, and pulled the plug. An “insert” in a website, based on the browser’s location (IP address?) will likely get more eyeballs than any newsprint ad.
Question for the gang here: how many of you still go out your front door or down your driveway to get a physical paper anymore? Or, send the dog to retrieve it?
This is exactly why newspapers need “free speech grants” from the federal government.
“This is exactly why PRO-GOVERNMENT newspapers need “free speech grants” from the federal government.”
fixed it 4 ya
nope …. been 20 years at least
wud like to subscribe to a digital copy of the local fish wrap. but they want as much for that as for a physical copy.
so nope
I get the local small-town weekly in my PO Box. Their police log is invaluable so we can all keep abreast of which of our neighbors are criminals this week.
(How small a town is it? On Christmas, dozens of our residents pooled cell-phone and Ring videos to thwart a stagecoach robbery in under 10 hours.)
When you get overdrawn at the Bank of Credibility, they close your account.
LA Times is woke joke. There is declining market for that. Real news is happening on social media now, that isn’t afraid to call out fat black mayor bass for defunding police and the street take overs by homeless junkies.
“Our democracy” – meaning THEIRS, not “ours,” and definitely not “our REPUBLIC”….
LA Times is hive mind. DEI hires re-inforcing their negative thought processes. They would rather fail than change their belief system.
Looks like they are going to get their wish. Another one bites the dust.
How will I know what day they don’t publish the LA Times?
To be honest, they could have not published all last year and I wouldn’t have known.
Hodge, I can’t recall the last time I subscribed to a newspaper. I will occasionally get a copy of the Johnson City Press out of curiousity, but in the almost 7 years I have lived here, that’s been maybe five times.
Oh, please…! The Atlas Air engine failure is not something that can be laid at the feet of Boeing, diversity-hires or no.
Engines can fail, and sometimes they do it in a manner called an “uncontained” manner. That means when something goes bang, pieces escape the engine and its nacelle.
Left out is the fact that this plane was returned safely to the ground, the engine was exchanged, and the plane went on about its business in short order.
Please, Leslie. Don’t make LI just another sensarionalistic, click-bait website.
A reasonably good thread about the Atlas engine failure:
https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1490627
Listen, they pile onto their opponents, justified or not. Turnaround is FAIR PLAY.
That’s OK. They’ll all get jobs in the WH press office where they belong.
After helping to destroy California, their usefulness as idiots has expired.
I recently noticed that a copy of a metro rag, not a Sunday edition, was $3 and was very thin, Holy cow. How do these things manage to not go out of business?
Because as long as they are perceived to have propaganda value their losses are underwritten by leftist billionaires and corporations that understand that they are losing money to push propaganda and their ideology.
The LA Times problem is they no longer have propaganda value, so now the money stops.
“Don’t cut our future” – HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Like I give a flying sh*t about the LA Times’ communist lackeys.
Here’s my suggestion: let’s put together an LLC, buyout the LAT, and turn it into a conservative newspaper.
Not the worth it.
This idea I love.
I’d recommend a market analysis first.
LA Times is already the Grievance News.
It’s called ‘karma’.
And it’s pronounced ‘HA-HA-HA-HA-Fuck-You’
Best if read in Woody Woodpecker’s laughing voice.
Agreed. However, I would add that currently, the LA Times is typical of what we find today in the MSM: a strongly biased press that suppresses voices dissenting from the MSM/Demo/Prog narrative. That is NOT the backbone of our democracy.
I find no reason to regret the layoff of journalists that produced such a biased product.
Is some limousine lib going to bailout LA times, like bezos bailed out WaPo?
A limousine lib has owned the LA Times since 2018. June 2018:Historic sale of the L.A. Times to billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong to close on Monday.
Small potatoes compared to Bezos, but rich enough.
Here is how the journalist numbers for the LA Times were as of 2018.
The current numbers: The layoffs could impact at least 100 journalists or about 20% of the newsroom. Which sounds as if there are currently about 500 journalists, more than the 400 when Soon-Shiong purchased the LA Times in 2018. He apparently tried to increase the newsroom but found it to be a money-losing proposition.
Another damn foreigner, telling us what to think. Screw him!
The perfect word after reading today’s post is “Schadenfreude”!
My take away is the Union would need to have their Senior writers agree to release / waive their rights and accept a retirement package in order to salvage others from taking a layoff and/or discharge in order to maintain the required staffing needed to put out the paper by deferring to their own contractual language of incorporating DEI into their ranks of staffed hires.
Did those jobs get farmed out to AI?
We are going to go on strike for jobs we no longer have and are not relevant anymore. Seems like a winning strategy to me
Wokey, Brokey, no Jokey
two points.
1. I don’t think Boeing and any newspaper make for fair comparisons.
Boeing makes stuff that is either intended to kill people, destroy stuff, or will kill people and destroy stuff if it fails. It is a serious product and must be taken seriously or people die. Period.
A newspaper or any “journalism” outlet can flounder around, be a steady stream of lies (which most have been for some time) and until they actually go broke— it’s basically MSNBC. A lunch table of mean spirited jr girls. No one of substance takes them seriously and the only way I would know what they are saying is the fact that conservative outlets think reporting on the lies of leftwing outlets is newsworthy. It’s not.
2. The only thing interesting about this instance is the fact that their audience has stopped paying to partake in the echo chamber of lies built to fit their world view and advertisers have noticed.
Remember, to a Leftist, diversity (all hail Diversity™!) is only skin deep.
I’d wager that if all the people the LA TImes claims as “diverse” were questioned, their political ideology would all be in lockstep and on the Left.
Headline “World is Ending! Women, Minorities and DEI Employees hardest hit.”
#Learntocode time
I never understood the wisdom of walking out on a day that they are laying people off.
LAT needs to layoff 100% of their employees.