This week, as I was meeting with Washington Post sources in the nation’s capital, my phone kept buzzing with dismal—indeed, funereal—updates from my own hometown paper, The Los Angeles Times. Two weeks after the abrupt departure of executive editor Kevin Merida, and days after the subsequent evacuation of top editorial executives Shani Hilton and Sara Yasin, the paper was now embarking on a new round of layoffs targeting roughly 115 journalists, or 20 percent of the newsroom—and doing so in unpleasant fashion, with reporters and editors being informed of their terminations via Zoom, then immediately locked out of their email and Slack accounts.