Christian Stone, deputy managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Friday after four years at the paper, TheWrap can exclusively report.
Stone was lead editor on the 101 Power List that was put on hold indefinitely, as TheWrap reported earlier this month.
While an L.A. Times spokesman told TheWrap the list of the 101 most influential people in the Los Angeles region had been rescheduled from its planned pub date, there has been no sign of the piece on which Stone had been the brainchild.
Stone joins a long list of high-level editors who have left the paper in what has been a tumultuous year so far. Executive editor Kevin Merida stepped down ahead of historic layoffs to the newsroom in January, as did editors Shani Hilton and Sara Yasin.
Among the 100-plus staffers cut on Jan. 23 were Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington, D.C., bureau chief Kimbriell Kelly; Angel Rodriguez, general manager for Latino initiatives at the paper; and Angie Jaime, who was the head of 404, the Times’ social media content team.
“Today is my last day at 2300 East Imperial,” Stone wrote Friday in an internal email obtained by TheWrap, referring to the newspaper’s address in El Segundo, California.
“I grew up in a newspaper family, and knew from age 7 that I wanted to be in newspapers, like my father … At some point I fell in love with the idea of a California newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News and Orange County Register, in particular, both of them fierce, flourishing papers when I entered the profession in the late ’80s. The Times? It seemed an impossibly high bar.”
Stone continued, “I started at The Times in February 2020, two weeks after the Kobe [Bryant] crash and six before COVID shut down everything. It was The Times and journalism at its best.”
The Sports Illustrated veteran was hired four years ago as an executive sports editor. He said in his note, “I’m proud to have worked alongside and collaborated with so many talented, generous and resolute colleagues, first in Sports, then in Studios and, more widely, with a world-class newsroom on the forthcoming ‘L.A. Influential’ project.”
He added, “Many of my career highlights came here, and many of them had nothing to do with my work, but instead yours and the pride that comes from being able to tell the world, to borrow from Thuc Nhi Nguyen, ‘That’s my paper!,’” he wrote, citing his former sports writer colleague.