The Los Angeles Times is downsizing its newsroom, making it the latest news outlet to shrink amid economic pressure from a declining readership for advertising and print.
The Times will cut 74 posts in its newsroom, about 13% of its total.
Full-time and temporary workers, including a small number of managers, will be laid off. Reporter jobs will be cut, but support staff, including news and copy desk editors and audience engagement teams, will be cut. Some sound producers will also be cut.
The Times’ editor-in-chief Kevin Merida announced the job cuts Wednesday in a note to the newsroom, saying the decision “has been made more urgent by the economic climate and industry-specific challenges.”
“Decisions that result in talented staff losing their jobs are painful,” Merida wrote. “We are saying goodbye to some great colleagues.”
The reorganization marks the first major tightening since Dr. Patrick Sunsion and his wife Michelle bought the paper from the now-defunct Tribune Publishing five years ago. Since then, the Times’ newsroom has largely been shielded from the massive layoffs that have plagued many other news outlets.
Under Sung Siong, the newsroom added more than 150 journalists and achieved significant revenue growth by early 2020. But the coronavirus pandemic derailed the paper’s path to monetization, and the pandemic’s shutdown wiped out the paper’s advertising.
Since then, the Times has struggled to recover financially amid sluggish advertising sales and subscriber numbers across the industry.
“This restructuring stems from similar persistent economic headwinds facing news outlets across the country,” Merida wrote. “We have made tremendous efforts as a company to address budget and revenue challenges head-on. It will require even more radical changes in the newsroom, and our mission is to become a modern media company that is more agile, more experimental, more ambitious and creative than it is today. is.”
The move comes just weeks after The Times celebrated two Pulitzer Prizes. Officials were honored last fall for covering the Los Angeles City Hall scandal after leaked audio recordings of casual racist jokes by three then-city council members emerged. The Times also won the Featured Photo Award.
“The Los Angeles Times is one of the greatest journalism institutions in this country and, frankly, in the world,” Merida wrote. “We have a unique location west of the Mississippi River. I believe we are on the verge of achieving something extraordinary, transforming newspapers into true next-generation digital powerhouses that serve the people of this city and the world in a unique way.”
News publishers across the industry have been hit hard as social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter have scaled back the promotion of their news stories.
Last year, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Vice Media and Insider fired journalists. Buzzfeed News and MTV News were shut down. Tech giants such as Amazon and Google and entertainment giants such as Walt Disney, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery cut thousands of positions last year.
