LA Times’ big financial, subscriber losses in 2024 coincided with conservative shift

The Los Angeles Times reportedly lost approximately $50 million in 2024 under owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, following a roughly $30 million loss in 2023.

The paper’s financial struggles coincided with several contentious decisions that moved the paper politically rightward, including the addition of conservative writers and Soon-Shiong’s move to revoke the paper’s presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris in October. The latter decision reportedly triggered the loss of some 23,000 digital subscribers by January.

According to internal metrics reported by AdWeek, total subscribers had fallen to about 335,000 by early 2025, far below the publisher’s goal of 5 million readers. The Pacific Palisades fires further damaged revenues by destroying homes in wealthy neighborhoods with high concentrations of valuable print subscribers.

Soon-Shiong, who has reportedly become more hands-on with the paper’s operations, previously defended his editorial decisions. In a March podcast interview with far-right host Tucker Carlson, the 72-year-old billionaire surgeon and inventor defended his decision to pull the Times’ endorsement of Harris. “I said, ‘This is unacceptable.’ And as you can see, because it’s a left lean, they wrote terrible stories about President [Donald] Trump,” he said. “So my statement to them was, ‘You may have an opinion, but all of us should have opinions based on facts.’”

Soon-Shiong admitted to Carlson, “We lost a lot of viewers. Thousands of people unsubscribed. But I don’t think it’s right that we should be this canceling society.”

In an earlier letter to readers, Soon-Shiong announced new digital initiatives including AI-generated “Insights” features to offer “a wide range of different AI-enabled perspectives” and “Voices” labeling to distinguish opinion content from news reporting. He also stressed the publication’s mission statement, which said, “We strive to take into account different perspectives, particularly if they don’t align with our own, to inform our views.”