It’s now a very common occurrence to scroll through X (formerly known as Twitter) and learn of another round of media layoffs from the pained tweets of newly unemployed journalists. It happens frequently, and it’s brutal every time. Because of what it means for the livelihoods of the journalists. Because of the talent that we lose across the industry. Because of how often newsroom leaders choose to carry out layoffs in the most callous way possible—immediately locking reporters out of their work accounts and then dangling severance in front of them through a non-disclosure agreement. Because of the near-constant reminder that, in the end, the quality of our work and our commitment to the communities we cover make little difference to those holding the purse strings. 

This painful cycle continued last month when more than a hundred supremely talented journalists from the Los Angeles Times took to X to announce they’d been laid off. I cried at my desk as I watched their names flash across my screen—Jack Herrera, Alejandra Molina, Jared Servantez, Chelsea Hylton, Jean Guerrero, Christian Orozco, Suzy Exposito, Jie Jenny Zou, Jonah Valdez, Andrea Flores, Steve Saldivar, Steven Vargas. In the days since, I’ve found myself obsessing over a singular question: If industry leaders do not value quality journalism produced by reporters who reflect the communities they serve, how can we expect the American public to?

The Los Angeles Times layoffs rightly received a great deal of media attention. It is significant that the largest newsroom in the western U.S. laid off 120 journalists, which translates to a more than 20% reduction of the paper’s workforce and one of the largest staff reductions in the paper’s history. In the days leading up to the layoffs, the paper also appeared to be navigating internal chaos. 

Questions have been raised about the paper’s billionaire owner and the role his interference in reporting may have played in the recent resignation of Executive Editor Kevin Merida. Before the union representing the newsroom’s journalists held an unprecedented day-long walkout ahead of the layoffs, the paper also saw the resignations of managing editors Sara Yasin and Shani Hilton. The mainstream media has mostly glossed over the racial and ethnic makeup of the reporters who are resigning or being laid off. 

According to the L.A. Times Guild, people of color were largely the targets of the recent layoffs. More than 60 of the 120 people who lost their jobs were journalists of color. The paper’s D.C. bureau was gutted during an election year, and multiple Black political reporters were laid off. Also laid off was Jeong Park, the only journalist on staff focused on reporting on the state’s diverse and growing Asian American communities. Exceptionally hard hit were the paper’s Latinx journalists, including the only Latina columnist for the opinion desk and most of the staff of De Los, a new publication by and for Latinx people that the paper launched just six months ago.

In the mainstream media, De Los represented a radical idea: That Latinx journalists, many of them born and raised in the communities they covered, could have a dedicated space inside of a legacy publication to report stories that spoke directly to their communities. This effort is even more significant when you consider that despite our growing demographic power across the U.S., our realities are rarely reflected in the media, we remain largely absent from most newsrooms, and we experience serious disparities in representation across every iteration of media. It’s also worth noting that over the years, the Los Angeles Times has cranked out some abhorrent coverage of Latinx communities while being rooted in the largest Latinx city in the country.

Each and every Latinx reporter who worked at the LA Times was cognizant of this history. In 2020, they penned a letter to the newspaper’s owner and upper management, admonishing the paper for failing to recruit, retain, and promote Latinx journalists and for reporting on our communities in “dehumanizing ways, painting us as criminals or victims or simply ignoring us.” At the time, only 13% of the paper’s newsroom was Latinx, and of its 109 editors and managers, only 11% were Latinx—an abject failure when you consider the makeup of Los Angeles, where nearly 1 of every 2 residents is Latinx.

Some of the people who signed that letter were just sacrificed for the bottom line, and the future remains unclear for De Los—the publication that was a stepping stone to address the paper’s failure to hire us to report on our people in our city. 

If all this sounds personal, it’s because it is. 

I am a Mexican American journalist born and raised in Southeast Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times was my paper of record, and it was a staple of my home. I dreamt of one day writing for the publication, so I cannot express how meaningful it was when longtime Los Angeles Times editor Angel Rodriguez reached out to me last year to discuss my interest in contributing to what—at the time—was an unnamed project focused on Latinx communities. 

Before De Los even had a name or a release date, Rodriguez accepted my first pitch: A story about my hometown Downey, California, and the journalism classes offered in K-12 public schools that introduce working-class Latinx kids to the field of journalism. After almost a year of reporting that included doing classroom visits and speaking to student journalists at my old middle school and high school, I filed the story on Jan. 19. Four days later, Rodriguez and almost the entire team at De Los were laid off. My story is an important one, and it’s one of many that are at risk of not getting told because there are fewer and fewer homes for this kind of reporting, and it’s clear the powers that be do not believe we are worth the investment. 

Both LA Times leadership and the Guild have said that people of color were disproportionately laid off last month because they were more likely to be young and hired recently. Ostensibly, these are journalists who were hired in the wake of the media “reckoning” after the murder of George Floyd when our industry was forced to take a hard look at itself and vowed to finally make real movement toward diversifying newsrooms. Less than four years later, our industry is still overwhelmingly white, and journalists of color are the ones getting the rug ripped out from under them. 

In January, Univision also laid off about 200 employees, and last year, Futuro Media Group gutted teams across its organization. More broadly, more than 20,000 jobs were cut from the media industry last year. Heading into an election year, fewer Latinx journalists translates to fewer reliable sources of information for our communities—communities that are already disproportionately targeted by misinformation and disinformation campaigns. We are already wildly underrepresented in newsrooms, so when our reporters are laid off across the industry, the message it sends to young Latinos interested in journalism is clear: Don’t even try. This industry isn’t for us. It doesn’t want us. It won’t support us. It is unsustainable. 

Because let’s be real: We talk about journalism in lofty terms; it’s about speaking truth to power; it’s a vocation; it’s the lynchpin of our democracy. It’s also a fucking job in an industry experiencing its death rattle. I don’t need to tell you how important quality journalism is, but I do need you to know that most journalists are questioning how long we can hang on. 

Getting laid off is truly the stuff of nightmares; it’s traumatic and destabilizing. I keep thinking about how devastating these layoffs are to marginalized reporters, people whose paychecks were already spread thin because they supported multiple households, sometimes across borders. I also can’t help but think of the young Black, Latinx, and other journalists of color who may be pushed out of the industry for good by these layoffs before they even had the chance to find their footing. 

I am thinking of all the stories that never get told when we prioritize profits over public good and how the dire consequences of decimating and devaluing the journalism industry will engulf us all. 

But who will be left to report on the aftermath?