[dropcap size=big]"O[/dropcap]nce the new owners get in here, first things first. We’re getting you full time,” Mat Cooperstein, the then-Publisher at LA Weekly said to me following a October 2017 staff meeting. He had just addressed the pending sale and future of all Weekly employees under the paper’s incoming new bosses, Semanal Media.
Being a lifelong Weekly devotee, I was nervous. I’d been a part time marketing coordinator at the paper for almost a year, and I was excited to hear that the staff under Cooperstein and then-Editor Mara Shalhoup would be working with a new ownership group with reported ties to “Southern California,” and an interest in bolstering our already-great publication.
Things quickly changed, though, on Nov. 29, 2017, when nine of the 13 members of the editorial department were let go, along with staff from sales and marketing. After one of my colleagues was informed that he wasn’t being retained by the new ownership group, I made my way nervously into Cooperstein’s office, clenched jaw and twisted stomach, ready to hear my fate at the paper.