Terry Tang (Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong has appointed Terry Tang, editor of the editorial page, as the paper’s executive editor on an interim basis.
Tang, whose appointment takes effect immediately, becomes the first female editor in the paper’s 142-year history.
The Times laid off about 120 journalists last week to cut costs to reduce the financial losses the Soon-Shiong family has absorbed since they acquired the organization in 2018 for $500 million.
Tang, 65, was born in Taipei, and her family spent a few years in Japan before immigrating to Los Angeles when she was 6. She graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in economics and earned her law degree from the New York University School of Law. She served as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the early 1990s.
Early in her career, Tang worked as an editorial writer and columnist for the Seattle Times and as a reporter at the Seattle Weekly.