San Diego Union-Tribune opinion editor’s firing echoes further evisceration by Alden Global Capital
Laura Castañeda says the decision was “retaliation” from the paper’s parent company for a more diverse opinion page. Her firing comes amid a struggle for editorial independence at the Union-Tribune, similarly playing out across editorial boards nationwide.
In July 2023, employees at the San Diego Union-Tribune were surprised by an email telling them their newspaper had been sold by its billionaire owner to a subsidiary of the Alden Global Capital hedge fund. Staff reductions were coming, staff were told, and many of them went on to take buyout offers. Alden’s reputation for buying clusters of publications in a region before centralizing operations left many in San Diego concerned that the purchase would seriously damage journalism in the nation’s eighth-largest city’s already dwindling news market, and mirror Alden’s evisceration of the Orange County Register.
Two years later, those concerns have been proven valid, with the editorial board now a sliver of what it was in July 2023 due to a round of buyouts that saw some veteran journalists with more than a decade at the Union-Tribune leaving the paper. Union-Tribune opinion editor Laura Castañeda was fired on June 11 in what she calls “retaliation” for her advocacy for journalistic standards and a more diverse opinion page.
“It wasn’t really the people inside the building at the San Diego Union-Tribune who were responsible for my departure,” Castañeda said in a telephone interview. “It was the parent company.”
On the day she was fired, Castañeda and the two other opinion editors had sent a piece on the protests against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids in Los Angeles to their supervisor, Salvador Rodriguez, at the Orange County Register. Hours later, they heard that Ron Hasse — the Union-Tribune’s publisher and president of the Southern California News Group, a subsidiary of Alden — had killed the piece. In a Slack message to an editorial board colleague, she said she wasn’t surprised. A few hours later, Castañeda, who had been at the Union-Tribune for five years, lost access to her computer and email. After trying to contact the IT department for help, she was told she’d been fired.
Castañeda’s lack of surprise at a distant publisher killing the piece came amidst a struggle for editorial independence at the Union-Tribune, one playing out across editorial boards nationwide.
In a statement to KPBS, Frank Pine, an editor at Alden’s Media News Group, said eliminating Castañeda’s position “had nothing to do with any editorial, and in fact she did not write the draft editorial she falsely claims led to her dismissal.”
Castañeda had been outspoken about changes to the publication post-buyout, including the cancellation of its Spanish-language edition and Community Voices segment. Before her tenure, which began under the ownership of Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong before the Alden sale, “the San Diego Union-Tribune did not have the best reputation with communities of color,” she said.
As president of the San Diego-Tijuana branch of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, she worked to change that. She leveraged personal relationships to get a diverse group of writers for the Community Voices project, which gave them the chance to write and have their pieces edited, fact-checked, and published by the Union-Tribune. In one instance, she even worked through a lawyer to commission an opinion piece from someone in immigration detention.
Other former staffers, speaking to The Objective on condition of anonymity due to fears of the impact on their employment, shared that the Community Voices program was part of what they felt was a genuine attempt by the paper to improve its relationship with communities of color and diversify the newsroom following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin and the national conversation on race that it began.
Under Alden, the commitment to diversity seemed to waver. First, the ability of the Community Voices writers to express themselves was severely constrained, Castañeda said: Rodriguez, her supervisor, introduced rules for the pieces, and “one of his new rules was that we could not publish a piece that had the word genocide in it.”
In early 2025, Alden’s approach became even more censurious when an opinion piece written by a UC San Diego student from Jewish Voice for Peace was removed. The piece was later reinstated after the publication received criticism for pulling it while leaving a Tritons for Israel op-ed on its website. “That was unprecedented,” Castañeda said.
Castañeda characterized her treatment as part of a pattern of rude and disrespectful conduct towards women in the newsroom. The paper settled a lawsuit addressing allegations of sexist bias in 1991. Still, under Soon-Shiong’s ownership, Castañeda had positive experiences when contacting Human Resources. But under Alden, she says, a similar complaint “was skirted over. It wasn’t taken significantly.”
Another former Union-Tribune employee suggested the paper has long been a difficult place to work: “They basically don’t give raises,” the former staffer said, citing colleagues who had gone decades without a pay increase. Another staffer confirmed that it was only under Soon-Shiong’s leadership that pay raises brought staff salaries up to market level after years without.
One ex-staffer also noted that previous controversial pieces in the Union-Tribune have not led to their authors’ firings. In a 2019 incident, a racist cartoon which placed Jussie Smollett alongside Maya Angelou and James Baldwin as “Black storytellers” was widely condemned. Cartoonist Steve Breen was interviewed by publisher Jeff Light in an extended display of contrition, but kept his job.
Castañeda’s firing comes at a time when the Overton window for opinion pieces has lurched to the right.
Just this month, Tom Cotton reprised his 2020 New York Times “Send In The Troops” op-ed this month, adding a comma and “for Real” to the title of his new piece advocating for violent suppression of the First Amendment in the Wall Street Journal. In the Supreme Court’s recent Skrmetti decision, which upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care for minors, Justice Clarence Roberts cited a 2022 New York Times piece in the majority opinion. Times stories were cited 29 times in amicus briefs supporting the ban.
Castaneda says she’s “just a normal person in San Diego trying to survive here, and it’s not easy,” she said. She added that she’s taking a break before looking for new opportunities. As for the Union-Tribune, its once seven-person editorial board will now be helmed by just two people.
James Stout is a San Diego-based journalist covering conflict and migration. His book Against The State will be published by AK Press in January 2026.
This piece was edited by James Salanga.
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