Why former Managing Editor Sara Yasin quit the LA Times

...and what she's doing now.

In this issue, I talked to former Managing Editor of the LA Times, Sara Yasin, who left the paper two years ago in the wake of mass layoffs, an anti-Palestinian persecution campaign, and controversies over the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.

Also inside: What Sara Yasin misses about LA, the resurrection of Hop Louie, the closure of more movie theaters, the LA Metro social team on their “Ride the D” campaign, and more.

Got tips, stories, feedback? Email me at nobaddaysinla@proton.me.

When Sara Yasin was hired as Managing Editor of the LA Times in 2022, she became the highest-ranking Palestinian-American at a legacy American news organization. She’d just left BuzzFeed News—where the outlet landed its first Pulitzer during her tenure—and traded New York for LA.

It didn’t last. Two years, multiple rounds of layoffs, and Sara soon tendered her resignation, following the exit of Executive Editor Kevin Merida. For the last two years, Sara has laid low, disappearing from the media industry. I talked to her about what happened at the Times—and what she’s been up to since—in the first interview since her public departure.

NBD: How has it felt, over these last two and a half, three years, to not be able to express any grief, or talk about being Palestinian, or basically be Palestinian publicly, while all of this is happening?

Sara Yasin: That was kind of the hardest part of being in that position—that suddenly my ethnicity was a liability for my job. I was in this very unique position where no one else was going through what I went through at that moment. Yes, a lot of people were experiencing racism, but as a person who was in a decision-making position at an American news organization who is also Palestinian, no one else could relate to what I was going through. I knew I was being scrutinized in a particular way because of my background, and I didn’t know what the line was. Everything was being interpreted through this lens. I just felt really flattened, like I couldn’t express any of my humanity.

I knew that to show any kind of emotion about what we were covering would undercut anything I had to say, so I really had to divide myself in order to get through it.

It’s very strange to be a person who feels quite strongly that people caring about the impact of journalism is extremely important to making it better—and then suddenly be in a straitjacket. After I left the paper, I felt like I had to disappear a bit, both to process what I’d been through—not just through the genocide, but also before it—and just to have this grief. Not just over being devastated by the genocide, but also over realizing that I didn’t see eye to eye with my peers in the industry when it came to reporting on this issue. The genocide was clarifying, in that sense. I felt othered by people who I thought shared the same values. I will say that Kevin [Merida, the former Executive Editor] was very supportive of me as well as others, the institution was very protective of me, and I was luckier than a lot of people. I have to acknowledge that.

NBD: On the other side, there were your Palestinian family and friends, people who might have been supporters, suddenly asking: why can’t you do X, Y, Z?

Sara Yasin: I think the questions they were asking me were very sobering, actually. I was having a kind of important scrutiny of journalism that I think other people in my position weren’t engaging with. For example, I was talking to one of my cousins after I got attacked—and I got attacked without having actually done anything, without even saying anything—and she was like, “Okay, well, why can’t you say anything at this point? Why can’t you go to a protest?” And I sort of repeated what we always say: we don’t sign letters, we don’t go to protests. And she said, “But they see you as biased just because you’re Palestinian. You’re already seen as biased. So what’s the point in holding to that line?”

I thought that point was valid. But journalists—particularly in legacy places—have this ingrained thing of: put your head down, do the work, and the work will speak for itself. The problem is there’s all this scrutiny of what standards are going into how we’re doing things, and quite literally, people on social media were seeing what was happening in Gaza directly from journalists and people who were actually showing what was going on. That was showing there was a gap. To me, that gap was a crisis. By virtue of being someone who was around people asking a lot of questions—not just about the media, but about these big institutions and their relationship to whitewashing the genocide—I was engaging with these questions in an open and earnest way, differently from my peers. I thought it was urgent to interrogate our approach to building credibility with audiences. It made me feel like I existed in another universe.

NBD: It’s not like Ukrainian journalists had their credibility questioned when they were on the ground reporting, in the way that Palestinian journalists or Palestinian editors were scrutinized.

Sara Yasin: Exactly. And the thing that really rattled my faith was this contradiction laid bare, and this very transparent fear that was dictating people’s decisions—and I’m talking about across the industry. There’s this paralysis because people have a set way of writing about this specific subject that sometimes defies logic, and they’re so scared of controversy, especially because a lot of these pro-Israel organizations are well-oiled machines, and they’re going to make your life miserable for a week or more. And frankly, we’re all seeing how newsrooms have been put in this lousy position of being cut and reduced while their workload doesn’t change. To sign up for a day of these people emailing you incessantly is a form of censorship in itself.

It also pissed me off that we were even having the debate about why it was wrong to embed with the Israeli army. Literally one of the conditions of embedding with them is that they review your materials and your footage before it goes out. You’re essentially giving them the power to control what you’re publishing. Throughout my career, I have experienced interactions where, whenever I made critiques or said things, it was heard through me being Palestinian—not through the fact that I’ve been a journalist for a long time, that I’ve overseen Middle East coverage, and that I actually do know quite a bit about Palestine. This was especially surreal once the genocide began: Suddenly everything I said, everything I’d done, didn’t matter because I happened to be from the group of people that’s getting genocided. That defies logic to me.

NBD: Talk me through the things that led up to your decision to leave the LA Times.

Sara Yasin: There’s not a lot I can say, but I didn’t leave over Palestine. I did not see my professional future in newsroom leadership anymore. I felt too far away from the coverage. I also just didn’t want my life to be executing cuts. And I think the thing people don’t realize is that editorial leaders aren’t actually running the business, because of the separation of church and state. You have no control over the business, and you’re dealing with the fallout of whatever’s happening with it. It broke my heart to have to rebuild after cuts so many times at BuzzFeed, so I couldn’t bear to do it again. There was also Kevin’s departure. He was my biggest advocate and quite possibly one of the best bosses I have ever had. Him leaving made it even more impossible for me to imagine staying.

That said, I was also feeling tormented over the idea of staying in a mainstream newsroom. I felt like I was complicit in my own people’s genocide by staying within that space. I was doing this calculus: is there power to someone like me being in the room? Does it improve coverage? And for me, I felt like the cost—which was the silence, not being able to actually express myself—wasn’t worth it. I wasn’t actually free to execute the coverage that I thought mattered, like any other editor because of looming scrutiny, and I wasn’t actually able to make real and genuine progress in making the coverage more objective. The fundamental issue is that there is a contradiction at play that harms the credibility of this reporting. As a journalist, you’re just sitting there going, please make this adhere to the standards that we talk about all the time, and you’re not even getting that.

The original headline made more explicit accusations.

NBD: What was it like getting attacked by a trade publication that really had no business reporting on your tweets or what you were retweeting?

Sara Yasin: It’s actually quite widely accepted in our industry that CAMERA attacks people—people take CAMERA’s attacks with a grain of salt. But then, for some reason, it became news when they attacked me. And if you actually look at what they said, it was completely bogus. The Wrap writes the story, and I believe the initial headline said that I made pro-Hamas tweets. Not that I was accused of it.

What was really difficult was that I was attacked without having actually done anything, while just upholding the same standards as anyone else. I was retweeting news and everything I retweeted had news value. And it was just so obviously a racist, bad-faith attack, and there was no actual reason to write about it. Even after the paper so clearly defended me, and others in the industry defended me this publication published more stories including me, seemingly to rehash these same, bogus allegations as some kind of a scoop. The ease with which this news cycle was created—without any reporting on how I function as an editor, my job performance, or anything like that—and the fact that it was even published in the first place is an embarrassment to the profession.

I think I always knew something like this was going to happen, especially after I entered that job at the LA Times. But the fact that it was so unbelievably dumb and transparent broke something in me. I was like, as long as I continue to exist in this industry, I’m going to be attacked in this kind of way. The fact that it even became a thing made me lose respect for people in my industry. Your bias is so strong that you can’t see unfair reporting when it happens.

That said, I was lucky that the paper defended me so strongly, and unlike a lot of other people, nothing actually happened to me. The difference between me and a lot of other people who were in that position in October was that I literally said nothing. There was an entire news cycle about me, and I hadn’t said a word. And the blessing in disguise of it was that it just laid everything bare. I was like, I don’t want to be in another environment where I have to make people feel better about the fact that I’m Palestinian, or make them forget it.

NBD: You retweeted an essay by Raz Segal, who’s a Holocaust scholar.

Sara Yasin: Yeah. And the thing that was difficult for me in that moment was feeling like everyone got to decide what it meant for me to be Palestinian in my job, apart from me. That really made me feel muzzled and flattened.

And I think truly seeing the gap in values—not just at one place, but across the entire industry. AMEJA did a survey where 85% of the Arab and Middle Eastern journalists they spoke to were held to a higher standard of neutrality. Seeing people being monitored, people being punished. And seeing the way that there were these witch hunts inside of newsrooms, whether it was the New York Times or other places—it made me lose so much respect for the industry. It made me feel a lot of despair. Because this whole conversation we’ve been having about newsroom diversity, about pushing forward and making things feel more equal and more safe—this actually never included Arabs and Muslims. Because our identity is political, or viewed as political. I always thought that, but it really crystallized it.

NBD: Since you left, there’s been some change in the discourse—more honest reporting, public opinion has swayed radically. How does it feel to see that happen? What does it feel like?

Sara Yasin: I think that’s exactly the problem, right? That because of public opinion, it creates a safety—which makes sense. But as journalists, your job is to tell the truth. In October 2023, when you had all of these experts giving warnings of genocide, including the UN—genocide is not a light term. And I think there were two things that made me feel the media was toothless. One, there was the ability to name things what they are. Naming things what they are has an impact—it matters. And the other thing was the silence over Israel targeting journalists in Gaza. The inability to be clear and brave in those moments felt like such a destruction of credibility.

That is what journalists should be doing: telling the truth when it’s uncomfortable. And this cowardice is a real problem. Even look at what happened with Venezuela—the fact that the Washington Post or the New York Times knew in advance and held off on publishing the story.

NBD: It’s cowardice, and it’s also racism. It’s a dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims, this idea that we’re just born to die.

Sara Yasin: No, absolutely. And if you are Arab or Muslim in a newsroom, your success as a journalist depends on your ability to make people forget that. It doesn’t have to be that way. At BuzzFeed News, I never felt like people wrote off what I had to say because of my background. In fact, I felt like people engaged with me as a full person.

During the beginning of the genocide, the thing I kept thinking about was—when the Brock Turner case happened, women in newsrooms had to deal with everyone in our lives being really upset because we were publishing headlines that didn’t call him a rapist. We were going to our bosses, torn up about it, and they said: “He was convicted of aggravated sexual assault. Your job as a journalist is not to make that judgment call.” We had to defend that line.

And yet the same kind of carefulness was not applied to the Israeli military narrative. The Israeli military verifiably lies, verifiably plants fake news, verifiably spreads disinformation—just like they did with the Al-Ahli Hospital attack in October 2023, which they tried to put on Hamas or Islamic Jihad, and all of that was bogus. Especially when an entity verifiably lies, you don’t take that information on face value. You report it out. Because the lesson I took from Brock Turner was: my job is to tell the truth and to be as specific and clear as possible. So why didn’t it matter here? And all of us who were saying this were being treated like activists hanging out in the newsrooms. If you’re in that position, you’re always dealing with that threat, and it screws with your brain.

NBD: One of the conversation topics that was really recurring between the both of us was the state of local LA media. Even in the years since you’ve left LA, things have changed rapidly, for better and worse. What’s your assessment of the environment today?

Sara Yasin: Los Angeles deserves a more robust media landscape, because there are so many stories that need to be told, and there are so many talented, hard-working journalists there ready to tell them.

The thing that has been good about the explosion of Substack is that it’s created a lot more independence. One of the hardest things for me to see in the LA media space is the way that the trades are kind of in the pocket of the studios—which really limits their coverage. Coverage of Hollywood needs to be more varied and three-dimensional. It also needs accountability.

You really saw that during coverage of the strikes, so much was focused on the tick tock of the negotiation rather than the way that this significant event was impacting the city culturally and socially. That does mean more coverage opportunities for independent reporters and independent outlets. LA deserves more of that. And the most depressing thing about what’s happened to the LA Times is that the LA Times is desperately needed. There has to be a news outlet that properly caters to southern California. There are still so many reporters there who continue to report on the most important things that need to be seen and heard in this city, but they deserve better. It’s a very sad state of things.

NBD: When you moved here, you were riding so hard for New York. You weren’t sure about your relationship to LA.

Sara Yasin: Yeah, totally. I was thinking a lot about how Eve Babitz felt that Joan Didion wrote about LA in a way that was meant to pander to New Yorkers. If I look at the city expecting its culture and politics to be legible to me in exactly the same way as New York, I’m going to completely miss it. I had friends who were born-and-bred Angelenos who were like, no, this is what this actually looks like. And because I was coming into a local paper, which has seen its fair share of pretentious New Yorkers who look down on LA. I felt like I had to go into it wanting to learn about the city, wanting to be open to letting it change me. And I feel like it did, in the best way possible.

NBD: You experienced LA just like I did for a long time—as a carless person. You were probably the only senior management taking the bus or train to the office.

Sara Yasin: Yeah. Feeling strongly about public transportation wasn’t really a core part of my politics before I came to LA. But then I started taking it there, and it actually did become one—because I was like, this city would be improved so much if its public transportation were functioning better. I think the Metro is great; it just needs to come more frequently. But having more train lines and increasing these systems would make the city so much more accessible.

And as a journalist talking about a place and trying to tell stories from different perspectives—you want the perspective of the people who use public transportation. If I’m reporting fairly about transportation in Los Angeles, I should be able to think from the perspective of someone who takes it regularly. So it kind of accidentally became a statement. And I was okay with that. There have been so many fat-cat, evil leaders who’ve walked through the Times doors—being one who liked the bus was maybe a good thing.

NBD: You’ve spent the last couple of years keeping a low profile. But you’re jumping back into the public eye now as—as what?

Sara Yasin: So I disappeared because I was trying to think about what I wanted to do, and to understand what it meant for me to be in my profession. I’ve also been working on a novel, which is a kind of a twisted and funny story about identity and working in digital media in the 2010s. But for the last six months or so, I’ve been working on building a publication for the Palestine Festival of Literature called The Key. It’s going to be in newsletter format, going out every two weeks, focusing on covering the genocide through the lens of literature, art, and culture.

Part of the inspiration was two things. One, I got tired of saying, “Why isn’t anyone publishing anything on this?” And I was like, I literally have that skill. Maybe I should use it. And then also, PalFest is one of the most important and exciting organizations to me personally—it’s literally how I got to go to Palestine for the first time, in 2013. After the genocide, PalFest was organizing events in London, New York, and other places, to engage with different cultural questions—giving space to people from Gaza and their work, talking about censorship and repression in institutions and cultural spaces. At every single one of these events, people would come up to me afterwards and say, “I needed that. I haven’t seen anything like this.” Omar, the director, and I thought that a publication would be a very cool way to do something about this.

The Key was also born out of thinking about how cool it would be to see the writers and journalists I’ve known get to write about Palestine in a clear and accessible way on their own terms, without watering down their perspectives. This is also not about arguing with traditional media, it’s about imagining a different kind of publication for the future, one where, for example, there won’t be arguments about whether or not what’s happening is a genocide. We say it’s a genocide because it’s verifiably true. I have been in the room for discussions about calling things a genocide. You lean on international organizations to define that language, and every single credible international organization has used that language to describe what’s happening in Gaza. So starting from that point—I’m not wasting my energy arguing with someone who thinks that’s up for debate. I’m asking: what kind of reporting will I do if that’s the starting point of the story? What stories can we use the energy spent litigating words in headlines to tell instead?

NBD: One of the things you’re going to be covering is the almost McCarthyite list-making that is happening in Hollywood. What does that coverage look like?

Sara Yasin: There’s a real fear to talk about these things. A lot of that fear has to do with worrying about retribution, but part of it is also not really trusting the journalists who are writing about these things. Because what’s been happening—especially with Hollywood—is you’re out with people and they’ll tell you these stories, but then you don’t see the reporting around it. Creating enough trust, and also fearlessness. I’m not scared of anybody. I’m scared of my mom. But we’re not going to hold back based on being afraid. I think we’re going to be able to get trust that others might not be able to get.

I have been working on a story where I’ve been speaking to journalists in mainstream outlets, of all sorts of backgrounds, who have been telling me stories about what has been happening in their newsrooms around Gaza. I’m keeping their names and outlets anonymous to protect them. If more people want to talk to me, they should reach out, because I’m still looking for more sources. To hear some of the stories I’ve heard is very astonishing. And it really solidified the feeling that I can’t go back into one of these places again.

What Sara Yasin misses about LA

• Taix and Gay Guy Night at Taix.

• Watching movies alone at the Los Feliz 3.

• The horny farmer’s market in Atwater

• Horses. I love it so much and it is still my favorite. They once posted a photo of me on their Instagram not knowing I was the one who assigned out the coverage of the crazy divorce claims. [Ed. Note: Horses is closed, but their former chefs are currently popping up at Justine’s Wine Bar.]

• Tacos. I don’t care how many good taco places open here, I miss tacos.

• The Smoke House but especially being photographed at the Smoke House.

• Solates by Samantha, the only pilates class where everyone accepts that you’re going to talk the whole way through.

• Go Get ‘Em Tiger membership. I feel like I talk about it the way film bros talk about that one glorious Movie Pass summer.

• I miss Hamlet, everyone’s tailor, who truly could fix anything.

• Raffi’s Place.

• Look, I miss Erewhon unironically. I will not apologize for loving it and its stupid smoothies!

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