Woke L.A. Times Columnist is Shown No Mercy After Announcing Her Layoff on Twitter/X
“I’ve been laid off from my job as a columnist for the LA Times today, with 100 of my best colleagues. It’s a dark day. I was the only Latina columnist for the opinion desk. Trump is looming & I’m author of Hatemonger.”
As a general rule, most people are sympathetic when they hear about others who have lost their jobs due to layoffs, company closings, and the like.
But in the case of the now-former employees of the Los Angeles Times, that sympathy is in short supply among conservatives and others who were frequent targets of the paper’s agenda-driven news and opinion divisions.
On Sunday, Legal Insurrection reported that the left coast newspaper had announced that staff cutbacks were imminent, with around 100 people set to be let go. In response, unionized employees staged a one-day walkout and demanded, among other things, “to swap traditional seniority protections for those related to diversity.”
Needless to say, neither that nor senior editors “abruptly” quitting changed things, and on Tuesday, walking papers were handed out to at least 115 staffers:
The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday laid off at least 115 people, including about a quarter of its newsroom, in a stunning second round of major layoffs in less than a year that underscored broader challenges facing the news business.
Cuts included reporters, editors and columnists, according to the union that represents the newsroom and social media posts from individual journalists. Layoffs fell disproportionately on Black, Latino and Asian employees who tend to have less seniority, the Guild said in a statement.
That employees of color were allegedly “disproportionately” impacted became a media rallying cry as though losing their jobs was even worse than the job losses among white staff members. NBC News was one of several outlets that zeroed in on the Guild’s claim in order to paint the layoffs as an especially troubling development:
“The company has reneged on its promises to diversify its ranks since young journalists of color have been disproportionately affected,” the Los Angeles Times Guild said in a statement Tuesday. “The Black, AAPI, and Latino Caucuses have suffered devastating losses. Voluntary buyouts could have helped prevent this, but that’s not the path the company chose.”
The team behind De Los, a vertical the Times launched in 2023 to cover the city’s 49% Latino population, was gutted. Jeong Park, who was hired to cover Asian American communities in 2022, was also laid off.
Kevin Merida, who is Black, resigned this month as a prelude of what was to come. The Times’ owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, said the paper and Merida had “mutually agreed” to part ways, but the announcement was stunning.
Also among those laid off was anti-Trump columnist/author Jean Guerrero, who announced Tuesday afternoon that she had been let go even though she was the “only Latina columnist for the opinion desk”:
I’ve been laid off from my job as a columnist for the LA Times today, with 100 of my best colleagues. It’s a dark day. I was the only Latina columnist for the opinion desk. Trump is looming & I’m author of Hatemonger. If you're hiring, I’m at [email protected]
— Jean Guerrero (@jeanguerre) January 23, 2024
Though others in the industry offered sympathy and expressed outrage that Guerrero was one of the writers of color who were shown the door, it didn’t hold a candle to the barrage of criticism she received not just because of how she worded her announcement but also over her past works:
Yo, @jeanguerre, who called me a “white supremacist,” you’ve been canned by the broke @latimes. Bet your equally bigoted, but black colleague, @Erika_D_Smith, who called me “the black face of white supremacy,” still has a job. She’d pull out the race card in a L.A. minute.#DEI pic.twitter.com/N3fAvUXxdt
— Larry Elder (@larryelder) January 24, 2024
IDENTITY JOURNALISM
When I left the @latimes (1986) — to take another newspaper job, I hasten to add — it never would have occurred to me to describe myself as the only Anglo-Armenian columnist on the editorial pages. My status as a lonely conservative was exotic enough. https://t.co/3OzT2m72xc— PhilipTerzian (@PhilipTerzian) January 24, 2024
From “MissAnthony” on Twitter:
The business isn’t doing well and it’s not sustainable at the rate it’s going. Have you asked yourself where does your salary come from?
Perhaps if you didn’t stick to so much “hate monger” and division because you’re a “Latina” the paper would actually sell or you wouldn’t lose many subscribers? Why would Soon keep you around when you’ve shown your work is dead weight?
After years of Americanizing your last name it’s really bizarre to see you using race as a sorry ass excuse for your crappy work. It doesn’t sell. Think about that before your next job.
The business isn’t doing well and it’s not sustainable at the rate it’s going. Have you asked yourself where does your salary come from?
Perhaps if you didn’t stick to so much “hate monger” and division because you’re a “Latina” the paper would actually sell or you wouldn’t… https://t.co/GIRLKI1R4h
— MissAnthony (@NC2020Anthony) January 24, 2024
There’s a way to write this without narcissistic ethnic identitarianism creeping in but this isn’t it https://t.co/uQamxZoEvc
— Gary (@plzbepatient) January 23, 2024
And the best advice of all:
Well instead of plugging your race and hoping for a DEI pickup, you should probably demonstrate talent and work ethic. Just a tip.
— TruthHammer4EVA (@TruthHammer4EVA) January 24, 2024
Imagine that?!
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Learn to code, Latinx Karen.
Karentita. (appropriated from Bab B)
Karina or Carina is the Spanish for Karen.
Yes but “carina” means pretty in Italian, it really doesn’t suit a Karen.
She forgot to add her pronouns, poor thing.
Was/Were?
Brilliant suggestion!
Touché!
I’m the only Latina female born in the fourth month to sit in the northwest corner of the building and leave at 4:59pm every day…you can’t can me! DIversity!
Aww, what a shame!
Victimhood is her dream, and she is SO close!
Your boss just went broke, now you get to go broke. I don’t see any Injustice in this
That first broke was supposed to be woke, sometimes I hate voice dictation
But it totally works the other way too
“In response, unionized employees staged a one-day walkout and demanded, among other things, “to swap traditional seniority protections for those related to diversity.”
Oh, I’m sorry, but this race card has been declined…
DEI hires need to be fired because of their own union rules. Even the owners asked to change those rules and the union employees said no.
Unions must be raaaacist!
Quick! Someone call the waaaahmbulance!
‘Hey guys, you know that CONTRACT that we signed? We’re arbitrarily demanding that you change it to satisfy our current whim, without actually giving you anything in return’.
The LA Times decided to go into the new hotness of ‘advocacy journalism’. They are unprofitable as are many other media institutions who took the same route. Even Billionaire owners with a woke/lefty outlook (or at least pretending enough to get an indulgence from the woke Marxist mob or perhaps to assuage misplaced guilt for being successful) have a limit on how much money to piss away.
Billionaires don’t become (or stay) billionaires by pissing away their money. They do it by pissing away other people’s money.
Even Dr Evil George uses his foundation and not all of his own money.
In some respects they do it for an ego boost like owning a Bugatti. It’s a status symbol of sorts. Bezos bought the Washington Post and is losing about $100 million per year. Marc Benioff bought Time Magazine and is losing about $20 million per year. Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times and is losing about $30 million per year.
All are restructuring their organizations and laying off employees. So while they may choose to make a purchase for vanity or ego they do have a limit to how much money they are willing to piss away. IMO, they arrogantly believed themselves immune from the old adage that the best way to create a small fortune in the newspaper/publication business…. is to start with a large fortune.
In addition, I have read that the biotech billionaire owner of the LA Times has seen his biotech stock drop in value from $6 billion to $1 billion. Which means that after having increased the number of journalists by about 100, he isn’t inclined to continue those big losses.
The wokesters need to blame their union for entering into a contract that put their positions at risk before the long term white employees. You have no one to blame but yourselves. for agreeing to that contract.
Exactly! The employer is laying off people in accordance with the bargaining agreement. Maybe the union should take a vote of its members to see how many of the senior people want to get fired to save the jobs of the newcomers? Why in the world would the newspaper spend extra money on voluntary severances, when the union already negotiated seniority based layoffs? Plus I love the line “along with 100 of my best colleagues.” Does that mean that the seniority based layoffs targeted the best employees and retained the “worst colleagues”? The “best” Claudine Gay wants to know.
One of those “best colleagues” was the resident “recipe tester”. That was a job title.
With all due respect, a “recipe tester” can make a valuable contribution. They catch gross error like those I found in the New York Times cookbook. (That was a while ago). I don’t have the book any more because the resulting food wasn’t good.
The work product of the LA Times had the same problem.
Democrat-sucking union whores say what?
Two things. First, valuation is determined only at time of sale. Something might be worth 6 billion dollars if he sold it, but he did not sell it. It might be worth 1 billion dollars now, but until the transaction is completed that is only an estimate. What is the next sucker willing to pay for it? That number changes.
Second, the numbers are nonsensical. Each employee must contribute to the profitability of the ongoing business and provide services that are essential to the business surviving. Otherwise, the business fails and all are left jobless. If the business loses 30 million dollars a year now, having a staff that is 150 people less would mean that the savings per employee is 200,000 dollars and the business breaks even if the revenue stays the same. I suspect that the business will need to employ several hundreds less to break even. Newspaper advertising revenue today and the revenue from publishing of legal noticed is much less than it was decades ago.
The LAT is racist just like every Democrat.
Hiring minorities based on race is a disaster waiting to happen.
Every employee of the LA Times has advocated for losses of employment in every single sector, particularly in petrochemicals, mining, farming, transportation, timber and mills, construction, and metals/smelting. Often this has led to the destruction of millions of middle class and executive jobs.
Now it’s your turn.
Starbucks wants your sort.
Doubt Starbucks would want her.
The term in my world is “what goes around, comes around”. But Mom said “if you’re going to dish it out, you had best be able to take it.”
They didn’t teach that in J-school, I presume.
I’m old enough to remember when parents routinely and regularly
insisted that their children remember to always have a Plan B,
and to usually have a Plan C.
Why? Because “one neva knows, do one.”
———
I’m reminded of the first US tour of the Beatles in 1964(?). At one of their first press conferences, a reporter asked a young Ringo Starr what he intended to do after all this current excitement had died down. “Well, I’d like to be able to open up my own hair salon.”
———
To me, this jeanguerre character seems clueless about life. And she betrays an attitude that would be corrosive/toxic in most any workplace. Yuck
Jean Guerrero looks to be more Conquistador-Spaniard than Mezoamerican. In fact, it’s obvious she’s not Meso. Her DNA screams “white girl” all the way down.
Woke red guard puritans are power hungry fabulist-zealots.
Like AOC, another Spaniard trying to pass a “person of color”.
Spaniards. The only white Europeans who claim to be POC
Seriously. Whenever a form asks if I am a member of the Hispanic persuasion, I look for the box that says, “Maybe and maybe not, it depends entirely on you, not on me.”
What makes it even more absurd is that it is not difficult to find Caucasians south of the border who have racist attitudes towards those of non-Caucasian ancestry. I remember being told in Mexico that “India” was another way of saying “prostitute.” Or consider a saying common in Argentina: “The Brazilians came from the trees, the Bolivians came from the hills, and the Argentines came from the boat.” (trees- monkeys) . Or, “South America begins north of Cordoba.” I worked in northern Argentina, an area with a lot of Indigenous/Indians. It was not difficult to find Caucasian Argentines whose attitude towards Indigenous/Indians resembled what a white Southerner would have said about blacks in the Jim Crow era.
Anti Semitic? How about portraits of Hitler in the living room? I saw two. Or the retired professor in Peru, who claimed to have met Che during his motorcyling days, who without any prompting spewed anti-Semitic venom.
At the same time, Jean Guerrero ,AOC, or anyone of Spanish ancestry did not create the current race card rules. They simply took advantage of them.
Your post is a wake-up call to many Americans who expect foreigners to share the same values, regardless of which language they might speak. Peron of Argentina was a fascist. As was the long-ruling Franco of Spain. Argentina, and other South American countries, were well-known escape destination for desperate German Nazis after WWII. But Americans seldom keep inconvenient facts in mind. Many seem to consider our open southern border a highway to freedom for desperate human rights advocates!
https://twitter.com/mattbilinsky/status/1574571045029224448
Great twitter thread.
There is no such thing as a free lunch
Ain’t. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
TANSTAAFL
And credit Heinlein.
When there is a free lunch, the lunch has enough salt in it that you have to buy a beer or two to get it down.
People abd especially Leftists have this outward belief that if an industry unionized, their jobs will be protected forever and they’ll be on easy street. It is so nice when reality smacks them on the face when unions end up being useless or, worse, are the negotiators of their firing.
Get woke, go broke. It should be a natural law with so many examples at this point.
So Latinx Karen is laid off under control of a Union Contract negotiated by her union that forgot to negotiate DEI constraints and is likely following the old time of service layoff method. Karen should join a woke union.
walking papers were handed out to at least 115 staffers
I wonder if that included everyone who walked out the other day?
Also, I wonder if they aren’t laying off all those “diverse” folks because they’ve figured out that ChatGPT does just fine at spewing forth DEI carp. Automation comes for those who write with macros.
She is the columnist who called Larry Elder the black face of white supremacy
DEI at work…
Taylor Lorenz is white knighting for this now……irony of all ironies
Honey, you might need to consider Only Fans. Or maybe doing it the old fashioned way…getcha some heels and a short skirt and go suck it.
Do any of them do windows?
Union rules, honey. Not to mention your writing was trash and you probably even embarrassed your mother.
I don’t think employers will be lining up to hire you. If anything, they’ll be toasting your unemployment and descent into irrelevance.