Word broke that Staci Schwartz, whose talent has illuminated the pages of The Village Voice for the last eight years, was laid off last Thursday so the paper could cut costs and pass her photo editing duties onto the art director.

Since the formidable merger of the two biggest alternative newspaper chains—New Times, which owned 11 papers, and Village Voice Media (VVM), which owned six papers—back in 2006, there has been an ongoing clash between the unlikely allies. The New Times folks want business done their way—that is, all standardized and apolitical—while the liberals over at VVM want things to remain a little more decentralized and politically progressive in posture. But New Times bought VVM, so we know who has more say in this war. At any rate, many VVM employees either quit, were re-routed, or flat-out laid off (like our managing editor Tricia Romano) in the initial transition process following the merger.

But Schwartz remained loyal, recently had a baby, and then her job got swept under a rug, which seems to be a New Times-VVM trend. I clicked through the mastheads of the various papers the company owns and . . . hmm. I’m not seeing very many photo editors up in there. Photographers—yes. Photo interns—check.

Closer to home, Los Angeles Magazine, in a series of cutbacks mandated by parent company Emmis Communications, trimmed their staff from two full-time photo editors to none. Kathleen Clark recently departed, leaving photo editing duties to people already with full-time responsibilities at the magazine.

Is the pushing of photo editors out of the picture a new trend?

If so, Vince Aletti, the former art editor at The Village Voice who currently writes for The New Yorker, laments:

I feel sorry for the art directors who will now be forced to deal with all this on top of already demanding and complicated jobs—I’m sure taking on this new responsibility would not be their choice. Management is trying to save money without regard for the uniqueness of the positions it’s eliminating and overloading—or the quality of the paper that results.

The Voice has a rich photographic history. Acclaimed shooter, Fred McDarrah was the paper’s sole photographer and editor for years. He chronicled the rise and fall of the bohemian Greenwich Village, snapping shots of Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and the Weather Underground. He hired esteemed photographer (and mother of Academy Award-winner, Adrien Brody), Sylvia Plachy.

Greg Garry over at Radar explained how the duties of a photo editor differs from an art director—just so we know what we’re about to start missing:

On shoots, the photo department does all the pre-production, finding the photographers, negotiating with agents, conceptualizing the shots, casting, hiring crew, locations, contracts, permits. There’s a lot of bullsh*t to wade through before one single frame is taken. Bureaucracy enslaves us all. Then we actually [pull] the shoot off, making sure we get every shot we need onset, acting as a psychiatrist so [our] crew gets along and doesn’t kill each other. Hairdressers tend to be the biggest divas—you gotta keep an eye on them.Then with art and edit, we choose the best images when the shoot comes in, and retouch them. Or in stock photo cases, [we know] where to find the perfect photo of a baby drinking a martini, or Tom Cruise picking his nose.  And we do all this on impossible deadlines.

Garry points out that the photos, not the headlines, attract readers to crack open a particular mag.

And so, if the layoff of hard-working talent such as Schwartz is any indication of a trend, Garry very eloquently concludes, “Don’t sound the death knell for photo yet, magazine publishers. It tolls for thee!”