TO LIVE AND DIE AT THE L.A. TIMES
The cyberattack that crippled the Los Angeles Times’ production system a couple of days after Christmas at first appeared to be just a glitchy computer server. But then the virus struck again, much more seriously. By the time the malware had worked its way through the Times’ technology infrastructure, it had completely befouled the connections between the newspaper’s editorial computers and its printing presses. Thousands of Times subscribers got their morning papers late or not at all.
The attack was attributed to Russian cybercriminals. Press reports called it a harbinger of potential wider threats to U.S. computer and industrial infrastructures. But for the Times, the malware attack late last year was a pungent metaphor for its recent past. The virus struck computer systems left over from the paper’s 2018 decoupling from Tribune Publishing Company—and was the latest in a chain of calamities to bedevil the Times since Tribune’s purchase of the paper in 2000.
Newspapers everywhere have it tough these days: the internet and changing consumer habits have cratered their traditional readership and business models. But over the past couple of decades, few papers have had as tumultuous a ride as the Los Angeles Times. The paper has been plagued by mismanagement, sharp declines in circulation and advertising, staff cutbacks, a revolving cast of publishers and editors, employee dissent, a headquarters relocation, and internal scandals.
Most remarkably, given the paper’s historically antagonistic stance against organized labor, the Times’ newsroom staff voted early last year to unionize—a defiant act that, perversely, may have helped to finally break the corporate grip of Tribune. A few weeks after the union vote, the paper was suddenly sold to Los Angeles billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong. The new owner has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the paper, pledged to make further investments, begun to replenish the newsroom, and spoken about the need for a strong, independent newspaper—indications of his aim to restore the Times to the ranks of the nation’s best. Given the paper’s recent history, Soon-Shiong’s rescue seems almost too good to be true.
“It’s truly amazing the paper continued to do the good work that it did, considering the bozos that were running it,” columnist Robin Abcarian, a 28-year veteran of the Times, says of the Tribune years. Now, she says, “I just feel like we’re on the brink of a golden era.”
In some ways, Soon-Shiong signals a 21st-century throwback to the ’ 19th-century roots. As an ethnically Chinese, South African–born physician who made his billions as a biotechnology entrepreneur, Soon-Shiong represents the diversity and progressiveness of modern-day L.A. in much the same way that the paper’s patriarch, Harrison Gray Otis, embodied the swashbuckling frontier town that was Los Angeles in the 1880s. During the 20th century, Otis and his descendants, the powerful Chandler family, made the into a dominant Southern California economic and political force. But much of that was undone after Tribune
