Many of you may be familiar with Laura Castañeda, who until last month served as the deputy editor of the opinion section at the San Diego Union-Tribune.
I had some great interactions with Laura and her colleagues while running for San Diego City Council during the 2018 and 2022 cycles, during my service as founding president and later vice president for policy at San Diego County Democrats for Environmental Action, and in the course of my work on behalf of the ReWild Mission Bay campaign with San Diego Audubon.
Laura’s team had most recently allotted me space in the Union-Tribune opinion section following the death of former President Jimmy Carter in December, and were extremely helpful with my pieces opposing the construction of an office park beside the city’s Del Mar Mesa Preserve in 2019, and my piece opposing the first Trump administration’s unprecedented “review” of the status of 27 National Monuments in 2017.
As readers may recall, the Union-Tribune came under new ownership in 2023 when it was sold to Southern California News Group, a subsidiary of Alden Capital, a hedge fund that, as the Voice of San Diego described in an Andrew Donohue article on Oct. 31st, 2023, “has for the last half decade been gobbling up distressed local newspapers and relentlessly pillaging them.” The Voice article noted:
“Alden appeared with no warning. One morning, everything was normal. Minutes later, San Diegans were processing, yet again, what a new owner would do to their largest source of news and information.
U.T. employees, meanwhile, were wondering whether they still had a job and, if they did, under what conditions. Working for Alden brings with it not just job insecurity, but also actual health hazards: In the Philadelphia suburbs, workers at an Alden-owned paper said they navigated gross bathrooms, rats, mildew and fallen ceilings. In Denver, where Alden cut the newspaper staff by at least 75 percent, employees that remained reported breathing problems after being moved to a plant with poor air quality. In Monterey, Calif., the hot water got cut from the bathrooms.
The first all-staff meeting 10 days later did little to ease anyone’s jitters. [Alden executive Ron] Hasse did what Alden typically does with its employees and the interested public: He didn’t give them much detail at all. No editorial direction. No idea of how many people Alden would cut or what the organization would look like on the other side. He spoke for about 20 minutes and didn’t take any questions.”
Having been in these exact kinds of painful group humiliation meetings during format changes, ownership changes, sales of radio groups and clusters, lease management agreements, etc. over the years I fully empathized with U.T. staff. Any feelings of job security, no matter your performance, go right out the window in those situations. And mealy-mouthed drones like Hasse spouting corporate-speak have no idea how insulting their language is (“we see ourselves as disruptors”) as it lands on normal people’s ears, and how their insistence on saying nothing only makes things worse — among staff, readers, and subscribers alike — by leaving vast gulfs of uncertainty.
A number of U.T. newsroom and editorial staffers have since exited for jobs in smaller markets, at other papers, or left journalism altogether, but Laura opted to stay, in part to continue her work leading the U.T.’s Community Voices Project. Started in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020, the opinion page, under Laura’s direction, began providing a platform for some 70 San Diego-area writers to submit essays on subjects of their choosing — and with an unprecedented free rein on length. This program, sadly, came to an end following the Alden purchase in 2023, affecting not only the U.T. but similar columns in the San Jose Mercury-News and USA Today.
Laura was then fired by the U.T. in June after submitting an editorial written with her opinion colleagues about the ongoing, unprecedented ICE raids and related Gestapo-style kidnappings by masked men around Southern California. As my friend Paul Krueger wrote in an article in the O.B. Rag following Laura’s dismissal on June 13th, 2025:
It would not be the first time the SCNG vulture capitalists interfered with their newsrooms. My colleague Ken Stone recently reported that the U.T. had declined to run a Sunday Doonesbury strip harshly critical of President Trump.
Paul also mentioned in his O.B. Rag article:
Castañeda has taught journalism at San Diego State University, where she was a lecturer and internship coordinator in the Journalism and Media Studies Department; San Diego City College, where she was chair and professor emeritus at the Radio, Television, Film Department; and Palomar College, where she was adjunct professor.
She has been a highly-respected leader in the regional journalism profession. She served as chapter president of the Latino Journalists of California CCNMA, a board member of the San Diego Press Club, and an advisory council member of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.
When I connected with Laura about her firing, she relayed to me a documentary film project she has been working on with fellow journalist Ninette Sosa about Ignacio “Nash” Castañeda, Laura’s father, and his service as president of UAW Local 2144 in Chicago in the mid-1980s, where he led the fight for the pensions of 19,000 workers. According to Laura, the project is seeking funding now, and she and Ninette recently posted a Zeffy page with an accompanying YouTube clip with details.
According to Laura, any donations are tax-deductible as Media Arts Center San Diego is serving as the project’s fiscal sponsor. The Zeffy page notes in its synopsis of the project:
At 12, Ignacio Castañeda was shipped from El Paso to Savanna, Illinois, a small town two hours away from Chicago, to live with family members. The reason is his mom had too many kids — there were 10.
He was a well-read and street-smart kid. He graduated from high school and joined the Army at age 18. He ended his tour in 1962 and landed a temporary job at Greyhound Bus Lines in Chicago, which was the hub of all affordable travel in the U.S. He was one of a handful of Latino employees.
He’d spent his career as a ticket agent and became involved in the union representing more than 300 workers. He was elected the first Latino President of the United Auto Workers Union, Local 2144, and the first Latino in the entire UAW Region 4, representing at least four states — Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri.
In 1986, Greyhound was sold. The new owners busted the unions and fired the workers, blocking them from retirement.
Essentially, Greyhound fired Laura’s dad for his union activity, but the UAW sued Greyhound and after years of legal battles the union won. In 1993, seven years after the 1986 decision, 19,000 Greyhound workers got their pensions back. Laura’s father filed a grievance and was reinstated with full back pay.
You can contact Laura and Ninette Sosa about this worthy project via email, or make a contribution at the project’s Zeffy page.
If you’re interested in this story, you may also find my grandfather’s story of interest, and his career as a labor leader as the founder of Steelworkers Local 1212 in Midland, Pennsylvania, before being elected northeast director of United Steelworkers in 1942. A meticulously-researched article in The Thistle Archive, a Scottish soccer fanzine, focused on my grandfather’s professional football career with Glasgow’s Partick Thistle Football Club and his labor activities following his World War I service, and just before his emigration to the U.S. in 1923.