Economic constraints may have called for firing one of these two, but presumably political considerations or judgment of competence are involved in firing the more senior of the two.
Which of them is more liberal, or are they indistinguishable? Or is this just a desperate rearrangement of the deck chairs?
Media news (my employers) consolidates upper management routinely. They do not have a political bent but rather let papers they own reflect the editorial flavor of their area. When they took control of our paper they combined many functions and positions with our sister papers in the region. This move at ANG's newly aquired papers sound very familiar to me. Don't expect much else to change from a reader's standpoint. Except it might look a lot like other MediaNews product around the state.