By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2012
In early 2012, the wider story of where journalism jobs were appearing — and disappearing — could be read in a single hire.
Then
FishbowlLA reported that Emily Alpert, formerly of the nonprofit news site Voice of San Diego, had joined the Los Angeles Times. Alpert had been one of three Voice of San Diego journalists laid off shortly before the new year, after fundraising shortfalls hit the nonprofit. She landed, according to her own Twitter account, on the LA Times’ WorldNow blogging team, arriving with a strong reputation in San Diego media.
The item captured a transitional moment: a reporter moving from a nonprofit digital startup — then held up as a possible model for the future of local news — back to a legacy metro daily.
Now
Alpert’s career bore out the promise of that hire. Reporting later as Emily Alpert Reyes, she became a long-tenured Los Angeles Times staff reporter, covering City Hall and Los Angeles civic life for years.
The two institutions in the story took different paths. Voice of San Diego survived its rocky early-2010s funding scares and endured as one of the longer-running nonprofit local-news experiments in the country. The Los Angeles Times went through years of turmoil, repeated ownership changes and deep cuts before its 2018 purchase by Patrick Soon-Shiong. Both models — nonprofit and billionaire-owned — became part of the patchwork that replaced the old advertising-funded newspaper.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.