Attendance in theaters had collapsed, and studios were sending their films directly to streaming instead of giving them an exclusive theatrical window. On Monday’s Daily Show, Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong told host Jon Stewart that he wants to take the challenged news outlet public, an unusual maneuver for a media company of that scale. (As part of Tribune Publishing, and then Tronc, it had been housed in a publicly traded company until its sale to Soon-Shiong in 2018. So the opportunity for us is to provide a paper that is the voices of the people,” Soon-Shiong told Stewart. But is that commitment about giving the community a stake in its news, or is it about giving the Times a potential financial lifeline (or, frankly, could it be both?).
