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Patrick Soon-Shiong spent decades trying to cure cancer and made a fortune in biotechnology, making him one of California's most successful enigmatic billionaires.
Born in South Africa to Chinese parents and ended in Los Angeles where he flourished as a surgeon, scientist and entrepreneur. "The richest doctor in the history of the world," said Forbes magazine in 2014.
A shrewd and agitated mind, Soon-Shiong now seeks to address a very different source of malignant metastasis: the new .
superficial news, clickbait news, strident news, gaudy, polarizing, he plans to tackle all these diseases in his latest incarnation as a media mogul.
Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times and a handful of California 500 million dollar newspapers, propelling him into an exclusive club populated by Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos and a handful of other owners.
"I'm a drug addict, a drug addict," he told the Guardian in an interview at the LA Times' new home, a 10-acre campus under construction in El Segundo, 20 miles south downtown. "It has nothing to do with business analysis, it has to do with an analysis of what is important for humanity."
A flamboyant claim of a man from business that drags applause as well as controversy. He is widely regarded as brilliant and sometimes emphatic, with promises going beyond reality.
The LA Times is a formerly big newspaper and beaten by its former master of business, a Chicago-based company called Trunk. Cutbacks, layoffs and a revolving executive door left the 136-year-old newspaper weak and rudder earlier this year. Journalists voted for unionization for the first time.
Soon-Shiong bought it in April for twice what Bezos paid for the post. He has also obtained the San Diego Union-Tribune, Hoy in Spanish language and several small community newspapers, now grouped under a business nickname, the California Times.
Soon-Shiong, 65, wants to turn his flagship into a multimedia leviathan of independent and innovative journalism at the time of Trump – a source of reading, viewing and listening essential to rival the Washington Post and the New York Times.
"Can we compete with them? We can not, must, we have to compete with them," he said. Compete in a positive way for everything to prosper. "We must all be the bastions of democracy in this country.We must be this fourth state – institutions that will tell the news."
The doctor's mogul has an ambitious agenda to redress not only the false news – the " cancer of our time "- but also the short periods of attention … hyper-partisan speech.
" Because of this mobile device, you now have an absence of what I call a quiet reading " he said, patting his phone. "You have a generation (of which) brains have been wired to watch short pieces with no attention spans – a part of a physiological change in your brain, literally. "
After trying in vain to 39: Attracting Dean Baquet from the New York Times and Martin Baron from the post, Soon-Shiong hired Norman Pearlstine, a 75-year veteran of Bloomberg, Time and the Wall Street Journal, to be the newspaper's editor. [19659002] A solid choice to stabilize LA Times and chart a new course, Ken Doctor, a media analyst, noted in a NiemanLab article. "With Pearlstine, Times staff and readers should be assured that the Times cover is it will not fit the interests or convictions of the owner. "
LA reporters celebrated the end of the Trunk era – nightmare, says – with champagne. And they reserved a warm but distrustful welcome to the new owner.
"I hope Soon-Shiong promises to increase the staff and the reach of the newspaper, because the city and the state need more watchdogs, d & # 39; eyes and ears in places where there are no daily witnesses, lives, "wrote columnist Steve Lopez." We will work hard. We hope everything will be fine. "
" I'm Looking at a Centennial Plan, Literally "
Soon-Shiong, an elegant and dapper figure with an anglicized South African accent, declined to itemize future expenditures and staffing levels or pattern He said that he envisioned the LA Times not as a philanthropic or commercial enterprise, but as a "private institutional public trust" similar to Harvard or Stanford. to be profitable, he said, quoting his Catholic missionary teachers. "The nuns said," no money, no mission ". We need to find ways to really evaluate the content … it means that people understand cloud computing, software architecture, games, livestreaming, podcasting. I'm looking at a centennial plan, literally. "
He intends to continue printing. Young boy in Port Elizabeth, he delivered newspapers and fell in love with printing presses and the tactile and inimitable experience of reading on paper, which he considered an antidote to attention durations shorter. "The hieroglyphs have begun, I do not think it will end.I am determined that the print, this paper, must continue to exist."
Print generated lucrative advertising revenue. And it can come back to fashion. "Kids today want to buy vinyl records, so you'll have hipster kids wanting to see the paper soon," he said, a half-joke. "I do not think that touching the paper and the reading will actually disappear."
It is also urgent to tackle blatant partisanship by providing balanced views on the opinion pages, a novelty for many followers of Fox News and MSNBC, according to Soon-Shiong., who calls himself an independent politician.He envisions liberal and conservative views expressed with a "great civility" in a "double chamber of echo"
For example, if the debate on immigration was framed differently, both parties would surely agree to grant asylum to a scared woman and toddler to bar a rapist. " It's repairable without anyone shouting at anyone, is not it? "
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