In late July 2011 the LA Times went through another round of layoffs. California editor Ashley Dunn sent his Metro desk a pep-talk memo that has, in retrospect, become one of the small canonical artifacts of how working editors held their newsrooms together across the post-bankruptcy decade.
Then
Dunn’s memo to the Metro section opened plainly — “As most of you have heard, there were layoffs today. We’ve all been through this before, but it doesn’t make it any easier.” He listed who was missing and what was left. He framed the question as a return-to-work problem: “the hard task ahead is getting back to the business of reporting the news. It feels like rushing back into battle after a hellacious ass whipping.”
Then the line that got the memo circulated outside the newsroom: “To those who are understandably feeling a bit down, I say: We don’t get our asses whipped, we whip asses. We don’t get ulcers, we give ulcers.” Dunn pointed at the Metro budget for that day — Nita Lelyveld writing about Post Office closures, Sandy Banks on a Sunday column, the standard local file — and asked his desk to keep working.
The original FishbowlLA framing was that the LA Times’ recent Pulitzers (the paper had won the 2011 Public Service Pulitzer for the Bell corruption coverage) now seemed a long way from the day-to-day reality of newsroom decimation. Dunn’s memo, in the FBLA reading, was the kind of leadership writing that didn’t get itself printed but did get newsrooms through the worst days.
Now
Ashley Dunn continued at the LA Times for years afterward, including time as one of the paper’s senior editors through the Soon-Shiong-era transition. He has since moved on from the paper but remained a respected voice in California journalism circles. The 2011 layoffs were not the last; the paper has been through subsequent rounds — including the 2023 and 2024 cuts under Soon-Shiong ownership that hit roughly 25% of editorial staff.
Nita Lelyveld continued her LA-features writing for the Times for years afterward, including a long-running column on city characters and small daily stories that became one of the paper’s distinctive voices. The Metro section as a structural unit has been reorganized multiple times since 2011 — under different masthead labels, different print-section sizes, different digital-first editorial frameworks — but the core function of covering city government, schools, public safety, and local life has persisted, with continually smaller staff.
The memo itself has acquired the cultural status of a documented artifact. Journalism schools, newsroom-management seminars, and oral-history projects on the post-bankruptcy daily-paper era have all cited it. “We don’t get ulcers, we give ulcers” is now a quote in the recorded history of how California newsrooms talked to themselves on the bad days of the long contraction. The contraction is still happening; the memos are not as quotable anymore.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: July 2011 snapshot