By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally reported by Pandora Young on FishbowlLA, 2011
Staff departures at the LA Weekly were routine newsroom news in 2011. In hindsight, they were also early tremors.
Then
In February 2011, FishbowlLA noted that Erin Broadley was leaving the LA Weekly after two and a half years as the alt-weekly’s web editor. Broadley announced the move in a note to colleagues, calling her years at the paper some of the most rewarding of her career and saying it was simply time to pursue other opportunities. Her last day was set for February 25.
It was the kind of small personnel item FishbowlLA ran constantly — a single editor moving on, nothing dramatic. But the web-editor role itself was telling: by 2011 the alt-weekly’s digital operation was central enough that its leadership turnover counted as news.
Now
The quiet 2011 departure looks different against what came later. The LA Weekly spent the 2010s under mounting financial pressure, and in 2017 the paper was sold to a new ownership group that laid off most of its editorial staff in a single stroke — a move that became a national symbol of the collapse of the American alt-weekly.
The LA Weekly survived, in reduced form, but the deep newsroom that once employed beat reporters, critics and a dedicated web editor did not. Erin Broadley’s routine 2011 exit reads now as one of the early, undramatic departures from an institution that would, within a decade, be hollowed out almost entirely.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.