By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Kate Coe on FishbowlLA, June 2009
In early June 2009, LA Weekly editor-in-chief Laurie Ochoa announced she was leaving the paper. The FishbowlLA framing was characteristically blunt — “no idea if she was fired or finally just lost patience with the tomfoolery of the paper’s owners.” Ochoa’s subsequent career has substantially outshone her LA Weekly tenure.
Then
Ochoa had been running LA Weekly through the Voice Media Group era — a period when the alt-weekly was already navigating ownership-driven editorial pressures that would intensify across the rest of the decade. Her exit came months after Jonathan Gold (her husband and the LA Weekly’s Pulitzer-winning food critic) had already left for the LA Times. The Ochoa-Gold pair leaving the Weekly within a year of each other was one of the documented signals that the paper’s serious-editorial-talent retention problem was structural.
Now
Ochoa landed back at the LA Times soon after her LA Weekly exit — initially as a Times senior editor, eventually as editor of the paper’s Food section, where she ran one of the country’s most-cited food-journalism operations across the rest of the 2010s. Jonathan Gold continued at the LA Times until his death in July 2018 at 57; Ochoa edited many of his pieces during their concurrent tenure at the paper. She has continued in senior LA Times roles through subsequent ownership transitions.
The trajectory from LA Weekly EIC to LA Times Food section editor turned out to be one of the more substantive examples of post-2009 alt-weekly talent migration — the kind of move that the broader Voice Media Group editorial losses produced as recurring outcomes. Ochoa’s continued institutional presence at the city’s flagship paper through the Soon-Shiong-era transitions has been one of the durable LA-media editorial careers of the past fifteen years.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.