Former Voice of America journalists find new jobs at Trader Joe's
Former Voice of America broadcaster Danila Galperovich ended up at Trader Joe's after the outlet’s 2025 upheaval, a striking landing spot for a newsroom veteran.
Danila Galperovich, one of the former Voice of America broadcasters displaced by the outlet’s upheaval, was working at Trader Joe’s by July 12, 2026. He was among a small group of international journalists who had moved into ordinary service-sector and frontline jobs, including a coffee shop, a military hospital and a real estate firm.
The path to that grocery aisle started with the Trump administration’s March 15, 2025 order to gut Voice of America and other federal agencies. By June 20, 2025, the cuts had become severe enough that jobs at VOA’s parent agency were being slashed by 85 percent, and layoff notices had gone to 639 employees, effectively shutting down the broadcaster’s output at the time.
The layoffs did not end there. In September 2025, a judge reinstated more than 500 Voice of America journalists and staff. By March 2026, another judge had voided 2025 actions taken by Kari Lake as VOA CEO, including the job cuts, and days later a federal judge ordered more than 1,000 VOA staffers back to work. The sequence left the broadcaster in legal and operational limbo for months, and it is that instability that pushed experienced reporters and editors to look well beyond journalism for paychecks.
For Trader Joe’s crew and applicants, Galperovich’s move is a reminder that the chain’s hiring pipeline sits low enough in the labor market to absorb people with very different résumés when other industries break down. A former foreign correspondent landing as a grocery clerk does not just reflect personal reinvention. It shows that store jobs can become one of the first stable options for professionals who need immediate work, even when their old careers were built in newsrooms, not retail.
That matters inside a company known for strong culture and above-average pay, because the applicant pool can change fast when layoffs hit other sectors. Trader Joe’s is not only recruiting students or lifelong retail workers. It is also drawing people like Galperovich, whose careers were interrupted by federal action, court rulings and months of uncertainty at Voice of America.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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