• by Melynda Fuller , October 3, 2018

Since buying the Los Angeles Times earlier this year, new billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has been bulking up the paper’s staff. The move is a noted departure from other long-running news outlets that have been scooped up in recent years by similarly wealthy owners or investment firms, only to be stripped of resources and staff. Soon-Shiong seemingly wants to grow news coverage.

To that effect, the L.A. Times announced it’s creating a Singapore bureau and reopening its Seoul bureau. In news that came via the Poynter Institute and reported in a tweet by the L.A. Time’s national/foreign editor Mitchell Landsberg, the Singapore office will be headed by Shashank Bangali and David Pierson, while Victoria Kim, who currently cover’s L.A.’s Koreatown, will switch to covering Seoul instead. 

Prior to this news came word from The New York Post that Soon-Shiong was backing a McClatchy Company bid to take over Tronc, of which he owns 25%. According to the report, if the deal goes through, Soon-Shiong could become chairman of the newly combined Tronc/McClatchy. 

The Post speculates that part of Soon-Shiong’s interest lies in two of McClatchy’s holdings: the Sacramento Bee and Modesto Bee, which would round out his other California publications. McClatchy, Tronc and a spokeswoman for Soon-Shiong declined to comment when approached by The Post. 

Just this past August, The Nieman Journalism Lab reported on the chaos surrounding a potential shakeup at Tronc, with one likely outcome being that investment firm The Donerail Group had pulled together funding to purchase the belabored company, before selling off its parts—or publications.

According to The Post’s report, Soon-Shiong initially backed this development before falling out with Donerail Group head Will Wyatt. 

But with McClatchy and Tronc both struggling to stay afloat, and the further reports of the gains being made by Soon-Shiong at the L.A. Times, one has to wonder if the current publishing model has hit a brick wall, one where newspaper groups are no longer sustainable. 

Is the future of journalism in the hands of the few who have the personal resources to invest and sustain it? The threat of personal interest influencing a free press is reason enough to be skeptical—and even a billionaire owner failed to save the recently shuttered Village Voice—but the wider picture being painted shows a new, or perhaps resurrected model, that relies less on centralizing operations and more on deepening those on the local level.