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?

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