For many of us, the LA Weekly has been painful to watch in the past couple of years.
The economy and the stewardship of a new set of owners—who seemed to care little about the paper’s traditional journalistic strengths—have done discernible damage to what was once the most successful alternative weekly in the America, and an essential voice in the city of Los Angeles.
Writing and editing talent either fled or were laid off. The fact checkers were fired. Ideas that did not fit a certain mold were stifled.
Yet, recently those same owners (the Village Voice Media) have had the intelligence and/or luck to hire veteran editor Drex Heikes. Drex has run editorial teams for the LA Times on two coasts and is also the guy who remade the Las Vegas Sun into a Pulitzer winner.
Kevin Grant, a talented grad student at USC Annenberg (And, no, I’m not saying that because Kevin is one of my students) has done an interview/profile on Heikes and his plans for the Weekly—which include, Heikes says, starting to expand the emaciated news staff. In other words, the Weekly, is hiring again.
It is posted here at Neon Tommy, and it is definitely worth reading.
Here’s a clip:
“Sometime in the winter, spring, it bottomed out,” Heikes said gravely from his new desk at the Weekly’s Culver City headquarters. “I wasn’t here, but from what I understand, there were sparks on the pavement. The shocks were gone. There was just nothing left.”
The specter of loss still hangs quietly over the Weekly’s offices like stale L.A. smog. The organization has lost or pushed out some of its biggest names in 2009, including former Editor-In-Chief Laurie Ochoa, theater critic Steven Leigh Morris, film critic Ella Taylor, editor and reporter Steven Mikulan, and last week, film editor Scott Foundas.
Once the fattest alternative paper in the county, the rag has indeed looked weaker in recent years. A steep decline in advertising demand has forced the paper to cut out some of its strongest copy as it squeezes into a smaller page count.
The Weekly’s editorial staff is down to six full-time employees: three editors and three reporters. They will report directly to Heikes, a newspaper lifer who brought a Pulitzer Prize to the Las Vegas Sun earlier this year. He edited different parts of the LA Times for 18 years before joining the Sun in 2005.
“The way this’ll get structured is the way I ran the Sunday magazine at the Times,” he said. “Everything will come through that basket right there [knocks on desk]. I’ll read everything.”
More on the Weekly tomorrow, specifically on an areas where it…um....really needs improvement.
(Photo from Reuters)
Big companies gobbled up all of the alternative rags and made them more boring on purpose, to kill them. They want to get us all on TMZ and FoxNews.
Well, I think part of the problem is that you have people purchasing newspapers simply to make money and not report the news. Corporate executives are not trained in journalism, so how would they know how to run a successful paper? And why would they care about journalistic integrity and craft?