By FishbowlLA Staff
A one-week sweep, June 19 through 26, and the through-line is money — who isn’t paying it, who’s about to lose it, and who’s handing out trophies for the work that survives anyway. The paper of record stands accused of stiffing its own stars, Los Angeles County put a number on the jobs a studio megamerger could erase, and the LA Press Club gets ready to crown a year of Southern California journalism.
The L.A. Times is reportedly stiffing its vendors — even as it courts IPO money
The awkward optics of the week belong to Patrick Soon-Shiong. Oliver Darcy’s Status reported Tuesday that the L.A. Times has, for months, routinely paid contractors and vendors late, settling up only after disputes got escalated to senior leadership. Among those said to have gone unpaid: Catherine Herridge, the ex-Fox and CBS correspondent the paper hired in November to anchor an investigative series, who reportedly waited months for checks before the Times made good.
The detail that lands hardest for anyone who’s worked the building: the thriftiness is said to come straight from the top, even as Soon-Shiong angles to raise as much as $500 million to take the 144-year-old title public on a planned fall listing. A Times spokesperson called the reporting inaccurate, saying the company is current on most of what it owes. But “current on most” is a strange pitch to make to investors — and a stranger one to make to freelancers who’d like to be paid before the IPO roadshow, not after.
L.A. County puts a number on the Paramount–Warner Bros. fallout: ~2,495 local jobs
We’ve tracked the Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery merger through its EU filing and its surprise DOJ approval; this week the story came home to City Hall’s neighbors at the Hall of Administration. A report from the county’s Department of Economic Opportunity, filed to the Board of Supervisors, estimates the roughly $111 billion deal places about 2,495 jobs in Greater Los Angeles — and some 6,000 globally — at potential risk, concentrated in the duplicative corporate, tech and real-estate roles that mergers tend to eat first.
The county is careful to say the figure “should not be read as a layoff forecast,” only a map of the most exposed roles. But the political subtext isn’t subtle: supervisors directed County Counsel to file formal antitrust comments with the DOJ and to track California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s investigation. When the county that is Hollywood’s company town starts lobbying federal regulators over a studio deal, that’s no longer a trade-press story — it’s a local one.
The LA Press Club hands out its 68th SoCal Journalism Awards this Sunday
Amid all the contraction, a night to remember why the work matters. The Los Angeles Press Club caps its awards season Sunday, June 28, at the Millennium Biltmore downtown, naming winners of the 68th Southern California Journalism Awards from a field built on more than 2,700 entries. The honorary slate alone reads like a state-of-the-craft: Maria Ressa, the Nobel laureate, takes the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity; NBC’s Craig Melvin gets the President’s Award; ABC7 mainstay Rob Fukuzaki receives the Joseph M. Quinn Lifetime Achievement Award; and civil-rights attorney Carol Sobel is honored with the Guardian Award for her work defending press freedom — a pointed pick in a year when LA reporters have spent a lot of time arguing about their right to cover a protest.
Expect the usual heavyweights — the L.A. Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, PBS SoCal, Spectrum News 1, Capital & Main — to dominate the categories. We’ll have a look at the winners next week.
Read more at the Los Angeles Press Club →
That’s the week
That’s the week in LA media. Hear something move — a hire, a layoff, a newsroom shake-up, a check that bounced, a tip from inside the building? Send it our way; FishbowlLA runs on whispers.