Biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong on Monday completed his purchase of The San Diego Union-Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, an ambitious bid to alter the course of a troubled industry and cement his own legacy of civic involvement.

First announced four months ago, the $500 million deal with Chicago-based Tronc returns the two historic publications to private ownership, putting them in the hands of a 65-year-old physician who has read and admired newspapers since he was a child in South Africa.

“Now starts a new era,” said Soon-Shiong, whose purchase also includes a string of community newspapers in San Diego and Los Angeles. “It’s a great opportunity to bring stability to the papers so they can sustain and thrive.”

Soon-Shiong lives in Los Angeles, where he oversees a group of health care and technology companies known collectively as NantWorks, but he also has longstanding ties to San Diego’s medical, biotech and academic communities. One of his firms, NantKwest, has facilities here.


He is the fifth owner in the past 10 years for the 150-year-old Union-Tribune, San Diego’s oldest company. He joins a handful of billionaires in various American cities who have waded into the middle of an industry grappling with the readership and revenue disruptions of the digital age.

Like Jeff Bezos with The Washington Post and several of the other recent buyers, Soon-Shiong sees his investment as more community-oriented than financial – a safeguarding of institutions essential to a functioning democracy, especially in an era of “fake news” and disinformation campaigns on Facebook and other social media.

“These guys are stepping in to save these institutions for the greater good,” said Needham & Co. media analyst Laura Martin. “They are rescuing the Fourth Estate.”

Soon-Shiong said he doesn’t intend to make any changes in the leadership of the Union-Tribune, which is headed by editor and publisher Jeff Light. Soon-Shiong will take on the role of executive chairman.


No layoffs are planned, he added, welcome news to a staff of about 275 that has seen its numbers dwindle significantly over the past decade.

What is planned, he said, is “transformation” — adapting to the breaking-news demands of the Internet while protecting the traditional core print strengths of in-depth reporting, investigative journalism and immersive storytelling.

“We have an opportunity to take our fantastic brands and find a way where they work as a voice for their local communities, but also stand up as a strong voice for California,” Soon-Shiong said.

That means concentrating coverage in areas that are important and unique to the region, he said, places where “we can lead and be a window to the future.” He mentioned science, technology, health, the environment, immigration and entertainment.


“Now is the time to become more relevant, not just to California but the nation,” he said.

He’s promised not to influence coverage of his own sometimes-controversial health and technology companies: “The news has to be news. It is what it is. It’s honest, it’s truthful, unvarnished and untainted by interference by anybody, including the owner.”

Politically, he describes himself as an independent, supporting politicians of any stripe “as long as they are going to make an impact that is truly, truly, truly for the common good.”

Soon-Shiong has also pledged to invest in the news products, tapping the technological expertise at NantWorks to help build an infrastructure that allows content to be moved quickly and seamlessly onto the array of platforms (print, web, mobile, podcast, video) that people use to consume information.


About 45 percent of U.S. adults now learn about news through a smartphone or tablet, compared with 21 percent in 2013, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey.

Soon-Shiong is moving the Times from its longtime home in downtown Los Angeles to El Segundo, where he and his wife, Michele B. Chan Soon-Shiong, are creating a 21st-century newsroom that encourages collaboration and will be available to the Union-Tribune staff.

But all that is meaningless without robust journalism, industry analysts said, especially as newspapers move toward a revenue stream that relies more on paid subscriptions and less on advertising.

“He has got to invest in the newsroom,” said Douglas Arthur, an analyst with Huber Research Partners in Greenwich, Conn. “The future of a once-great and a potentially great newspaper is to have great journalism. You have to give readers a reason to buy a digital subscription.”


Although Soon-Shiong’s main interest is his hometown paper, the Times, he said he’s committed to the long-term viability of the Union-Tribune, too, and sensitive to this region’s wariness about being overshadowed by Los Angeles.

“San Diego has its own little ecosystem of importance,” he said. “It has science, technology, a unique climate, it’s close to the Mexican border, it has a unique perspective that we don’t have in Los Angeles. And that unique perspective has to be shared.”

The deal with Tronc, a publicly traded company formerly known as Tribune Publishing, was expected to close in April. It was held up, Soon-Shiong said, by “the literally thousands of elements” that had to be negotiated as the two sides figured out how to de-couple the California News Group from a chain that shared human resources, information technology and other services.

“I don’t think anybody realized how difficult it was going to be to do the carve-out,” he said.


Then, a couple of weeks ago, there was a last-minute “distraction,” Soon-Shiong said — an attempt by former Tronc executive and key shareholder Michael Ferro to modify the sale.

“Happily, we were able to close the deal and move forward,” he said. Soon-Shiong, whose NantCapital bought a nearly 25 percent stake in Tronc two years ago, retains those shares.

He’s traced his interest in newspapers to his childhood in apartheid South Africa, where as a son of Chinese immigrants he faced segregation in his neighborhood and his schools, and relied on the dailies for information that, in his words, spoke truth to power.

“I understand the impact a newspaper can have on a community,” he said.


Trained as a surgeon in Johannesburg, he moved first to Vancouver and then, almost 40 years ago, to California to work at UCLA. By the early 1990s he was on his own, developing pharmaceutical companies and eventually selling two of them.

The transactions made him wealthy — Forbes listed him No. 55 on its 2017 list of America’s 400 richest people, at $8.3 billion — and put him in a position to pursue what’s been called “Medicine’s Manhattan Project,” an attempt to revolutionize the treatment of disease, especially cancer, through a combination of science, data and technology.

Last year, he bought six financially strapped California hospitals, including St. Vincent and St. Francis in Los Angeles.


A basketball fan and recreational player, he also owns a nearly 4.5 percent stake in the Lakers.

With no previous experience in media ownership, he termed the last three months “one of the steepest learning curves I’ve ever had.” He brought in Norman Pearlstine, a former executive with Time Inc., as an adviser and has been conferring with journalistic heavyweights, including Dean Baquet, executive editor at The New York Times, and Marty Baron, executive editor at The Washington Post., to better understand the challenges ahead.

“It emphasized for me the important need to establish not only stability but strength,” he said. “Our industry, this whole institution, is really at a precarious point in history.”

When his purchase of the papers was announced in February, he said he saw robust news organizations as crucial guardians of American freedom and democracy. Nothing that’s happened since has changed his mind, he said.


“I think what I’ve learned is that this was exactly the right decision for us,” he said. “This is the kind of challenge that I think I’m going to thrive in.”

The paper that would become the Union-Tribune was first published on Oct. 10, 1868, as the San Diego Union. It had a string of owners, including the tycoon John D. Spreckels, who also eventually bought the Evening Tribune, which had started in 1895.

In 1928, Col. Ira C. Copley, a retired congressman from Illinois, took ownership of the Union and the Tribune, and they remained in family hands — merging into one publication, the Union-Tribune, in 1992 — for 81 years.

In 2009, the paper was bought by Platinum Equity, a Beverly Hills firm, which turned around two years later and sold it to local real-estate developer Douglas Manchester.


His ownership lasted until 2015, when Tribune Publishing, later renamed Tronc, bought the newspaper for $85 million.

The Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.


john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com