The editor and publisher of The San Diego Union-Tribune is leaving the paper after 13 years, he announced Thursday.
In a 165-word email to staff, Jeff Light wrote that he would leave “this week” but didn’t say if it was the result of taking a buyout offered to newsroom employees. On Friday, his last day, he declined to say how he’s leaving.
He thanked “everyone at the U-T” for his “special experience.”
“My idea of the company was that we could all work together, shoulder to shoulder, directed only by our shared love of our work, our belief in one another and our ability to learn together,” he said.
“The Union-Tribune is a special place. Those of us who are leaving will walk away with a sense of achievement that I hope is not missed in all the tweets and coverage of our story.”
An unofficial list of U-T staffers taking the buyout — with nearly 30 names — was circulating Thursday morning, but at least one person on the list said they weren’t leaving.
“There’s still a lot of dust to settle,” the staffer told Times of San Diego 10 days after Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong announced the sale of the 154-year-old U-T to MediaNews Group, a Denver-based operating unit of Alden Global Capital.
The buyout terms are reportedly two weeks’ pay for the first year of employment and one week for each year after that — possibly capped at 40 weeks.
Thursday afternoon, a U-T story by veteran reporter Lori Weisberg said it isn’t known who will take the helm.
“Current managing editor Lora Cicalo will remain in charge of the newsroom as a succession plan for Light’s duties is formulated, the Union-Tribune staff was told in a video call with a representative of the new ownership,” she wrote.
Weisberg quoted Ron Hasse, president and publisher of the Southern California News Group under the new MediaNews Group set of papers.
“With Jeff’s absence, there will be some organizational changes that will need to take place,” Hasse said. “You have an excellent managing editor in Lora Cicalo, there is leadership in place and things are going to continue as expected moving forward.”
In his memo to staff, Light, 62, concluded: “People who have read the Union-Tribune for the last decade are the ones who know the value of our work. People who work here are the ones who know the experience we built together. It has been extraordinary. I believe that journalism is one society’s greatest callings, one of the best things a person can do with their life. So it has been for me.”
Others confirmed to be leaving the paper — some first reported by NBC San Diego — include:
- Greg Moran, investigative and courts reporter
- Joshua Emerson Smith, senior environment reporter
- Sam Hodgson, director of photography and video
- Gary Warth, reporter on homelessness
- Dana Littlefield, public safety editor
- Diane Bell, longtime city columnist
- Deborah Brennan, political reporter
Others leaving the paper are:
- Kate Morrissey, immigration and border affairs reporter
- Merrie Monteagudo, the U-T’s last remaining librarian
- John Wilkens, features writer
- Anthony Tarantino, news page designer leaving in January
- Andrew Kleske, reader outreach editor
- Steve Breen, editorial cartoonist
- Luis Cruz, community and public relations director
- Eduardo Contreras, photographer
- Mike Freeman, technology reporter
- Laura Groch, community news reporter
As of Thursday, the U-T listed 107 editorial employees (including contract worker Nick Canepa, the veteran sports columnist). Staffs of the morning Union and afternoon Tribune, which merged in 1992, exceeded 500 in the 1980s.
Moran, with the paper nearly 33 years, told Times of San Diego that taking the buyout was a difficult decision.
“It is very hard to leave so many talented colleagues and just great people,” he said. “There were a lot of things I considered, most of them pretty personal. I can say that one thing was I was not sure I had another one of these sales/transitions in me; six owners since 2009, it’s a lot.”
- March 2020: Union-Tribune to Shrink Staff With Buyouts, Including Beer Columnist
- October 2021: U-T Publisher Sees Sunday-Only Paper in its ‘Digital Future’
- February 2022: Neil Morgan’s ‘Fatherly Advice’ to Tribune Staff Recalled
Moran — who has won many awards, including for his work on the Gina Champion-Cain Ponzi scheme — said the U-T newsroom would be very different but not necessarily worse, with “still a ton of super talented people there.”
But he said he didn’t think there was going to be a lot of room there to “be the kind of journalist that I want to be and the U-T over these many years has allowed me to be. Going to miss it.”
Wilkens, a tall writer whose profiles and feature stories have enchanted readers for decades, is exiting after 35 years at the U-T and less than two months after taking a top writing prize in state competition.
“My reasons for leaving are pretty simple: I was planning to retire next year, and the compensation in the separation package provides me a comfortable glide path to that,” he said. “I’m confident that the folks who remain to fight the good fight will continue to deliver important journalism.”
On Friday, city columnist Bell wrote a farewell column.
“It is a sad day for San Diego and I wish everyone, both leaving and remaining, the best of luck,” she said before the column went live.
Light came to the Union-Tribune from the Orange County Register in 2010, where in 1996 he was part of the staff of the Santa Ana-based paper awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting on fraud at fertility clinics.
“He led investigative teams that were Pulitzer finalists in 2004 and 2005,” the U-T said in introducing him.
“Light, 49, has been with the Orange County Register and its parent company, Freedom Communications, since 1993. He most recently served as vice president of interactive. His previous positions include stints as deputy editor in charge of the Register’s Web site, and as the editor in charge of the content and quality of the daily newspaper and of the Register’s 23 community newspapers. Under his leadership, the Web site’s traffic and audience doubled in the last two years.”
According to his U-T bio, Light grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., where his father — the late Murray Light — was editor of the Buffalo News.
“Over the last three decades, he has worked for newspapers and their websites. He has been an editor, a reporter, a clerk, even a ‘hopper’ – the person who throws the bundles of papers from the delivery trucks in the dead of night,” said the bio.
Light studied poetry and creative writing at Brown University and has an MBA from the University of California Irvine. He was deputy editor, then vice president for interactive publishing at the Register, where he worked from 1993 to 2010.
He joined the Union-Tribune as its top editor in March 2010, succeeding Karin Winner, and was made publisher in 2016.
Light said expanding the Union-Tribune’s brand as a multimedia operation was crucial to keep up with readers’ changing media habits.
“People’s appetite for news and their expectations for immediacy, relevance and quality are higher than ever,” he said at the time. “We need to have a Web-first model – and we also need to continue to produce an excellent newspaper. My goal is to focus on quality journalism inside the evolving multimedia environment, and by doing so, we can succeed.”
In 2021, Light was interviewed by Point Loma OB Monthly, which said he lived outside Ocean Beach with his wife and their two daughters, then 10 and 17.
What is your motto or philosophy of life? he was asked.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Light replied. “Understanding comes when you see things from different perspectives.”
Updated at 3:37 p.m. July 25, 2023.
