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Carla Hall, the last remaining member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board, announced on Wednesday that she is taking a buyout, ending her thirty-two-year tenure at the paper.
“I’m leaving because I did not know what the future was for a one-woman editorial board,” Hall said in an interview. “I loved being an editorial writer, feeling that I had an impact on what’s going on in this city, county, and state. I feel passionately about the things I cover—particularly homelessness. I feel passionately about abortion rights. But at this point I was the last editorial writer on board.”
Hall was the last editorial writer at the Times after owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s decision to withhold publication of an endorsement of Kamala Harris in the run-up to last year’s presidential election triggered a staff exodus.
Mariel Garza, the editorials editor, resigned in protest in October, followed soon after by Robert Greene (who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for his editorials on criminal justice) and Karin Klein (who covered education). Then Kerry Cavanaugh, assistant editorials editor and Garza’s deputy, left for a job doing public affairs for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. In December, Tony Barboza, who wrote editorials on the environment, left the board to return to the newsroom. (Now a City Hall reporter, he too is taking the buyout, after eighteen years at the paper, three of them on the editorial board.)
Over her years on the editorial board, Hall became known for her coverage of homelessness, as the city has struggled to build and maintain affordable housing while dealing with the acute needs of people living in substandard and overcrowded apartments, and of people struggling with addiction or mental illness. Hall has also written on topics ranging from the Oscars to the LA Zoo.
Hall lamented the loss of institutional wisdom, which the Times had used to weigh in on pressing issues. “The city has lost a base of knowledge and expertise on the most pressing and important issues: homelessness, housing, criminal justice, water and drought, environmental issues, and education,” she said.
In recent weeks, as her colleagues left, Hall concentrated exclusively on local issues. “I continued to write about homelessness and, once these catastrophic fires happened, I wrote about how we rebuild in these areas and how we do so with defensible space, replant to avoid flammable brush, and better harden our houses in the face of increasingly severe and frequent fires,” she said. She also wrote a signed column on what it’s like to live in a city that is constantly in the shadow of fire.
“I’ve only had to write once a week,” she told me, adding that the paper’s executive editor, Terry Tang, who oversees both the news and opinion departments, had been totally supportive of her.
Hall joined the Los Angeles Times in 1993 as a metro reporter and was one of three reporters who broke the story, in 2003, that Arnold Schwarzenegger, then a candidate for governor, had faced allegations of groping by several women. (Schwarzenegger was elected governor days later, as voters recalled Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat; Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, served until 2011.)
Hall is also the unit chair for the Los Angeles Times Guild, which reached a historic, first-ever contract in 2019 with the historically anti-union newspaper. Her predecessor as unit chair, technology reporter Brian Contreras, was laid off in January 2024. An election will soon have to be held again, for the unit’s third leader in just over a year.
“This is an intense time for the union as we pass two and a half years of negotiating for a new contract, but I have no doubt that this leadership team will get this contract done,” Hall said. “When I leave at the end of March, vice chair Matt Hamilton will become the de facto chair until an election is held. And Matt is a superb, even-keeled leader. The unit couldn’t be in better hands.”
The Times has faced considerable tumult in recent years. Soon-Shiong bought the paper for $500 million in 2018, relocating it from its longtime headquarters in downtown Los Angeles to a new office in El Segundo, facing the city’s airport. He has said he has invested hundreds of millions of dollars since then, but the paper continues to lose money and to hemorrhage print subscribers. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, the Times saw its daily print circulation drop 25 percent, from nearly 106,000 as of September 30, 2023, to 79,000 by the same date in 2024. The city of Los Angeles has 3.8 million residents, and the larger county (which includes eighty-seven other communities) is home to 9.7 million people.
In recent months, Soon-Shiong has written numerous posts on X praising Elon Musk (who, like Soon-Shiong, is a South African–born entrepreneur), Donald Trump, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has also vowed to remake the editorial board, saying he would hire Scott Jennings, a Trump supporter who appears frequently on CNN, to join it. (In reality, Jennings contributes occasional pieces to the Times, which he has done for years. He is based in Kentucky.)
In recent days, Soon-Shiong has pivoted away from the opinion section to other plans for the paper. On Wednesday, he praised Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and Washington Post owner, for reorienting that newspaper’s opinion coverage around “personal liberties and free markets.” Soon-Shiong said he was working on a new initiative for younger readers, known as LAT Next.
Soon-Shiong and Bezos—who withdrew the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris days after Soon-Shiong did so—have both said that they are seeking to rebalance news coverage away from liberal orthodoxies and to do a better job reflecting both sides in a deeply divided, polarized nation. While acknowledging that the owners have a historical prerogative to set and direct editorial policy, numerous journalists have criticized the timing and the manner of the endorsement decisions, which came days before the general election. A large number of journalists have left both newsrooms, saying they felt uncomfortable with the efforts of both owners to curry favor with Trump. Soon-Shiong, who made his fortune developing pharmaceuticals, will need FDA approval for his latest inventions.
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