Los Angeles Times — California

What you're reading

The Los Angeles Times is California's paper of record, founded in 1881 and the dominant daily in the second-largest U.S. metro. Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the paper from Tronc in 2018, returning it to local ownership after a turbulent corporate-chain era. This profile covers the LA Times in its capacity as a California regional paper — Los Angeles city and county government, LAUSD, LAPD and the Sheriff's Department, housing, transit, the entertainment industry, immigration, climate and wildfires, and the broader Southern California region. The Sacramento politics desk is profiled separately in our lineup.

The paper publishes in print and digital, with a metered paywall, an active iOS and Android app, and a substantial podcast and newsletter operation. The newsroom is one of the largest in American journalism, with several hundred journalists. The audience is national for politics, business, and entertainment, and primary for the LA basin on civic and breaking news. The paper has won more than forty Pulitzer Prizes across its history, with consistent recent wins in investigative and feature reporting.

Ownership & funding

Patrick Soon-Shiong (private). Funded primarily through subscription + ads.

Subscription-plus-ads is the standard major-metro model: digital subscriptions reward depth and reader stickiness, while ad revenue still pressures the homepage toward what holds attention. Soon-Shiong's billionaire ownership removes some of the quarterly-earnings pressure that hammered the paper during the Tronc years and has allowed continued investment in investigative reporting, but it also concentrates strategic decisions in a single owner whose business interests touch healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and California politics. The owner has occasionally intervened on editorial-page decisions — most visibly killing the 2024 presidential endorsement — which raises legitimate questions readers should weigh, even as the news desk has operated independently.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places Los Angeles Times — California at Lean Left with a factuality rating of High.

The Lean Left rating reflects topic mix and editorial-board posture more than reporting style. The news desk files documented, document-anchored coverage of LA city hall, LAUSD, LAPD, and LA County, and quotes across the political spectrum on procedural stories. Stories on the council corruption scandals, on Mayor Karen Bass's homelessness program, and on Sheriff's Department leadership have been adverse to Democratic incumbents and reform-progressive officials alike. Police-accountability reporting and immigration coverage source extensively from affected communities and advocates but also include law-enforcement and policy-restrictionist voices on the record.

Where the page-level rating tilts left is in the editorial-board endorsements and the columnist lineup, which run from establishment-liberal to progressive with a thin presence on the right. Story-selection on social-issue beats — abortion, immigration, LGBTQ policy, climate — gives more sustained attention to progressive framings than to conservative or restrictionist ones. The High factuality rating reflects long-standing investigative discipline: corrections are flagged prominently, named attribution is the norm, anonymous-source political scoops are independently confirmed, and the paper has stood up major investigations (the council-recording fallout, USC scandals, LAPD use-of-force series) with full document and audio support. The bias surfaces in topic emphasis and editorial line, not in fabricated detail or distorted facts.

Editorial vs news side

The LA Times has a clear and well-known split. The news desk reports straight and quotes across party lines. The editorial board is center-left, has historically endorsed Democrats in California races, and runs unsigned editorials that take liberal policy positions. The opinion section publishes a mix of columnists, mostly center-left to progressive with a few centrist and conservative voices. Soon-Shiong's intervention to block the 2024 presidential endorsement was a high-profile reminder that owner influence on the editorial page is a live question. nwsly cites the news reporting, not editorials or opinion columns, and labeling on the site makes the split easy to follow.

Why we include them in nwsly

California paper of record; news desk straight, editorial board center-left.

The LA Times is the deepest LA-area newsroom by a wide margin, with investigative bench depth and a national reporting reputation no other California regional paper matches. nwsly pulls it for Southern California briefs because it files first and most thoroughly on city hall, county government, LAUSD, entertainment-industry stories, and wildfires, with corroborated documents and named sourcing. Pairing it with LAist gives our LA coverage both the legacy-paper depth and the digital-native neighborhood specificity.

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