It's unclear who instigated the move. But VVM didn't make life easy for Ochoa.

Critics say LA Weekly's quality began declining after it was merged into New Times (now VVM) in 2005. The alt-newspaper chain reportedly went over Ochoa's head in late 2006 to install an unpopular news editor.

There's no word yet on what Ochoa's next move is — and the Weekly has no replacement lined up.

UPDATE: Marc Cooper, a former LA Weekly senior editor now on faculty at USC, writes:

It was inevitable. Laurie defied laws of gravity for four years. She protected the little she could and kept the peace. When everyone was gone and she was no longer needed they disposed of her as well.

(Again, we haven't verified that this was VVM's decision.)

(Pic: Ochoa, right, celebrates a Pulitzer Prize for food critic Jonathan Gold, left. Via On The Media.)

"For those of us who are making work that requires a kind of intellectual conversation, we rely on that talk to do the work of getting people interested," said Mr. Rudin, who produced No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, two Oscar-nominated and critically championed films last year. "All of the talk about No Country, all of the argument about the ending, kept that film in the forefront of the conversation" and helped it win the best picture Oscar. ...

Mr. Lacey added that the [New Times] chain still has five full-time film critics and that worrying about whether each city had its own critic seemed silly at a time when major metropolitan dailies can't afford to cover the presidential race. (The loss of a critic in New York, where some films see their only light of day, would seem to be more problematic.)

We, too, went on the record with Carr today to espouse our only slightly obvious belief in the power of the Web, where much of Rudin's beloved "intellectual conversation" actually took place and where old-schooler Lacey would do well to invest resources as opposed to slashing them. When "new media" like the Internet finally take off one of these days, we'd hate to see such progressive cultural pillars caught ill-prepared.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• Now on the Endangered Species List: Movie Critics in Print [NYT]