Inside The Crisis At The LA Times

After weeks of negotiations, The LA Times Guild and management have come to an "imperfect" agreement over layoffs.

At around 8 AM on June 7, Maneeza Iqbal, an audience engagement editor at the Los Angeles Times, looked at her phone and noticed that her LAT Union group chat was blowing up. Earlier that morning, the union had received a head’s up from management that layoffs were coming. Iqbal checked her email minutes later and saw that she was one of the 57 union employees who received a 30-day notice that their jobs were being cut (management proposed layoffs of 73 staffers total).

She told Study Hall the morning of layoffs was chaotic: a colleague who got a notice was on his honeymoon; other workers’ notices were accidentally sent to spam; another colleague, who was on vacation, didn’t have access to her work email so had to call her boss to find out the bad news. Finally, around 9 AM, executive editor Kevin Merida sent out an email to the newsroom stating that affected workers would get individual notices, and emergency union meetings commenced.

“We were just so taken aback,” Iqbal said, stressing that having an hour heads up about the layoffs gave her team very little time to formulate a response to the executive editor. Iqbal, who is a union steward and has been working at the newspaper since November 2020, started instructing colleagues not to sign anything and hold firm until negotiations with management were resolved. Amongst other demands, the union wanted to implement a newsroom-wide buyout program that would allow people to volunteer to leave the company in exchange for saving workers off the layoff list.

The recent layoffs are the first round of newsroom cuts since the LA Times made key leadership changes: the newspaper was purchased by billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018 and Merida became executive editor in 2021. Though Matt Pearce, an LA Times reporter and president of the Media Guild of the West, said that Merida isn’t “authoritarian” or a “toxic boss,” he believes that management became “less transparent” under his helm.

In his email announcing layoffs, Merida told staff there would be an all-hands meeting five days later on the following Monday; however, staffers insisted on moving up the meeting to mitigate the confusion and chaos caused by the initial botched announcement, said Iqbal. After that pushback, the executive editor agreed to hold a Zoom townhall the next morning. The meeting itself “really pissed people off,” according to Pearce, who said staffers were unable to get a “clearer view” of the newspaper’s future plans and why the cuts were happening in the first place.

“There was a lot of frustration and anger and questions that just weren’t being answered,” Iqbal said.

Pearce noted that at the townhall, Merida, who is Black, didn’t seem to realize that the layoffs were disproportionately impacting workers of color, particularly Asian American and Latino employees. After the layoffs were announced, both the Asian American Journalists Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists issued statements expressing concern. Iqbal, who is Pakistani American, said that the LA Times targeted digital jobs which historically is “one of the main avenues for women and people of color to get into journalism.”

(Screenshot from analytical data conducted by the LA Times Guild, provided to Study Hall)

During the bargaining negotiations, the union organized both digital and in-person labor actions, including an informational picket in front of The California Club, an elite downtown LA private club, where Merida was giving a speech about the “Future of Journalism” on June 14. Guild members waved signs and handed out flyers to attendees. Meanwhile on Slack, Pearce said there has been a “lot of hostility towards management.”

“It’s not good that people had to erupt like a volcano just to get our managers to listen to us,” he said.

On June 22, after weeks of back-and-forth, the Bargaining Committee and management reached an agreement. That evening, Pearce sent out an email to union members, outlining the “one-time-only deal,” which he told members was “imperfect” and “the product of hotly contested negotiations.” The deal consists of a buyout program that caps “enhanced severance” at 28 weeks which, according to Pearce, would financially disincentivize senior workers — who are entitled to longer severances — from volunteering to resign. Since this decreases the chance of more senior employees volunteering to resign, it’s unclear whether this version of a newsroom volunteer buyout program will ensure that the newspaper’s cuts don’t disproportionately impact younger workers who tend to come from more diverse backgrounds. Management can reject any volunteer resignations, and did not commit to informing the union ahead of future layoffs to try to work out a way forward with the Bargaining Committee.

The adage “last hired, first fired” held true for management’s proposed list of employee cuts, which followed inverse seniority. The layoffs targeted workers responsible for measuring and boosting the newspaper’s social media presence and SEO. For instance, 33 out of 59 multiplatform editors, like Iqbal, were on the layoff list. Pearce noted how since the newspaper’s print readership was declining while the overall media climate is favoring the digital space, this plan indicated that management was prioritizing short term financial goals over the newspaper’s long term online viability.

The audio team, some copy-editors, and the entire team responsible for ensuring foreign correspondents in war zones get crucial equipment such as satellite phones, were also targeted in the layoffs. Now, with an agreement reached, management has a chance to potentially walk back these proposed cuts that both Pearce and Iqbal criticized as destabilizing.

“Life consists of conflict and settlements and you talk to each other and when you have conflict, you hash it out and then finally reach an agreement and you agree to put your swords down and move on,” Pearce said. “But they didn’t want a settlement so it’s kind of like a battle that ended without a peace treaty.”

Iqbal and Pearce aren’t optimistic about the future of relations between management and workers at the LA Times, citing a sense of broken trust. Iqbal said she was well aware that this is a rough year for the media industry, and knew her employer could be impacted. What angered her was management’s initial communication failures and unwillingness to compromise.

“What’s frustrating is that it feels like we weren’t fought for,” Iqbal said, noting how this round of layoffs stands in contrast to the negotiations between the union and management in 2020, when management and the union worked together to implement furloughs and pay cuts over layoffs.

In addition to the economy and social media traffic issues, Pearce speculated that LA Times’s financial shortfalls are also due to Hollywood studios “advertising less in local media” after they refused to negotiate a fair contract with the WGA and brought the TV and film industry to a halt.

Iqbal is now in a liminal period, waiting to see if through the voluntary buyout program, her job could be saved. Her expected last day is July 10, and so she’s preparing for that to remain the case.

“My future is uncertain and so is theirs [her colleagues] because they don’t know how their jobs are going to be changing,” she said. “An uncertain future is not fun.”

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

—Abe Brown is joining The Messenger as deputy editor. He will be “building its sci/tech coverage.”
—Victoria McGrane is now metro politics editor at The Boston Globe.
—Lindsey McPherson is now a Congress reporter at The Messenger.
—Chelsea Hylton is joining the Los Angeles Times as a reporter on the De Los team.
—Hattie Lindert started a new role as associate staff writer at Pitchfork.
—Ethan Fuller will start as a full-time sports producer for The Boston Globe in mid-July.
—Chris Vazquez is leaving The Washington Post as associate Tik Tok producer.
—Eunice Alpasan is moving on from a fellowship at WTTW, Chicago’s PBS station, to join the digital team covering health and communities. Send pitches to [email protected].
—Sudiksha Kochi will become a Congress, Campaigns and Democracy reporter covering the 2024 presidential election at USA Today starting next month.
—Victoria Song will be a senior reviewer at The Verge, starting July 1.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

—Last Thursday, Bookforum, which shuttered in December, announced that it’s relaunching with The Nation as a publishing partner. The literary magazine will stay pretty much the same: it will be published on a quarterly basis by the exact team who was laid off in the winter. “The economics of a relaunch seemed feasible, especially if it was supported by the infrastructure of an existing publication,” Bhaskar Sunkara, president of The Nation, told the New York Times.
—Fox News is filling Tucker Carlson’s 8 PM slot with Jesse Watters, some guy with resting “some guy” face. Carlson was fired in April as part of the fallout of Fox News settling their defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million.
—A group of bidders, including Fortress Investment Group, is set to purchase Vice Media for $350 million. Vice Media’s bankruptcy auction has been canceled. Some freelancers who have worked for Vice have complained about missed payments.
—The PRESS ACT was reintroduced in Congress with bipartisan support, a federal piece of legislation that protects journalists from fines and jail time when protecting confidential sources. The law would also prevent “the federal government from spying on journalists through their phones, email providers, and other online services,” according to The Freedom Of The Press Foundation. The PRESS ACT covers both professional and citizen journalists. It is one of the most important pieces of legislation protecting journalists’ First Amendment rights in a time when journalists are under attack. 

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