By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, August 2011
In mid-August 2011, FishbowlLA covered two parallel LA Times stories. Freelance photographer David Strick had filed a lawsuit against the paper. And — separately — reporter Brent Lang had run an item that the original FishbowlLA framing called “a bit of a stretch”: a vaguely-sourced insinuation that LA Times columnist Tim Rutten might have been laid off because of on-the-job mistakes, a charge Rutten gently denied.
Then
The August 2011 moment was deep in the LA Times’s long contraction era. The broader friction between the institution and both its staff and its contractors was a recurring story.
David Strick was a freelance photographer whose copyright dispute with the LA Times was the kind of contractor-versus-institution conflict that the contraction era produced.
Tim Rutten was one of the LA Times’s most-cited columnists. The Brent Lang item insinuating Rutten’s layoff was performance-related was, in the original FishbowlLA framing, under-sourced.
Now
The LA Times’s contraction continued well past 2011 — additional rounds of layoffs across the 2010s under Tribune ownership, and further substantial reductions even under Patrick Soon-Shiong’s post-2018 ownership, including significant 2023-2024 layoff cycles.
Tim Rutten left the LA Times and continued in columnist work at other outlets, including the Los Angeles Daily News.
The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented moment of the LA Times’s long contraction.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.