http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/new_times/7943/
Once the best alt-weekly in the nation, ‘L.A. Weekly’ tightens its belt
By Matthew Fleischer
It was a signal week at L.A. Weekly. Two longtime staffers – film critic Ella Taylor and theater writer Steven Leigh Morris – were shown the door shortly after Marc Cooper wrote a brutal 6,000-word “autopsy report” on the paper.
Cooper was an L.A. Weekly politics writer until he was laid off two months ago, part of the paper’s effort to cut costs ahead of purported heavy corporate debt and a declining advertising market.
But Cooper’s essay, posted on MarcCooper.com, cites a third force, something more psychological than economic: the paper’s Phoenix-based corporate ownership, Village Voice Media (formerly New Times), he asserts, gutted the paper out of spite and incompetence.
“The 30-year-old Weekly’s heart and soul has been scooped out by a corporate management that seems hell-bent on a suicidal tack,” Cooper writes. The Weekly “must now conform to the same cookie-cutter format that limits [VVM’s] other 16 or 17 papers across the country to sticking to local, mostly sensationalist, often quick-and-dirty hit pieces.”
The trouble began in 2005, when Phoenix-based New Times (owners of 11 alt-weeklies) merged with Village Voice Media – six papers, including L.A. Weekly, nearby OC Weekly and New York’s flagship paper, The Village Voice. It was a match made in venture-capital hell: New Times took on the Village Voice Media name, but imposed its own top-down management ethos. As part of the company’s “plug-and-play” management strategy, editors, writers and ad directors were moved from city to city within the chain, without regard for local knowledge. Any old-school VVM manager who resisted the metamorphosis was denounced as a “lefty,” a “throwback,” and worse. They were fired or simply fled.
The change was not immediately obvious on the street. In the year after the sale, with VVM’s new ownership busily deconstructing the venerable Village Voice, the L.A. Weekly was largely left alone. The paper was fat – 200 pages fat, the Ron Jeremy of the alt-weekly world. Investigative reporter Jeffrey Anderson was on fire, breaking story after story about corruption in southeast L.A. County’s small, backwater cities. The paper cleaned up at the alternative-weekly awards, taking home more citations than any other paper in history. And culinary guru Jonathan Gold won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism – the first food critic ever to earn that honor.
Since then, the second-largest paper in Los Angeles suffered two of the most disastrous years of any paper in Southern California. After spending more than a million dollars to uproot its traditional Hollywood headquarters to move to Culver City last year, the Weekly summarily laid off or chased away most of its award-winning editorial staff and halved the size of the paper.
The carnage, and its lack of coverage in the self-obsessed Los Angeles Times, led Cooper to pen his epitaph. The post went viral, generating nearly 200 comments – most in solidarity. Strangely absent from the online discussion, however, was VVM owner Mike Lacey, who isn’t typically known for biting his tongue. When faced with similar criticism from departing L.A. Weekly editor Harold Meyerson three years ago, Lacey responded with bile – calling Meyerson a “lefty” and a “hack.” He leveled similar attacks on LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick when Roderick commented on the departure of reporter Anderson in 2007.
Lacey’s reluctance to shoot back at Cooper may have been explained last Friday, when Taylor, Morris and another yet-to-be-named staffer were laid off, their positions eliminated. Taylor and Morris were the eleventh and twelfth Weekly staffers let go in the past 12 months. That followed a 2007 that saw the departure of not only Anderson but staff writers David Zahniser, Judith Lewis, Daniel Hernandez, Linda Immediato and Joshuah Bearman. From its high-water mark two years ago, the Weekly’s once formidable writing staff is now down to five.
In the interest of full disclosure, several City Beat employees have worked for VVM. I was let go from my position as an L.A. Weekly staff writer last October, in the same round of layoffs that swept up Cooper, managing editor Sharan Street, copy chief David Caplan, senior designer Laura Steele and assistant to the editor Pandora Young.
“It’s a madhouse,” says one L.A. Weekly staffer of the bare-bones operation. “People have been practically sleeping here trying to get all their work done.”
The highest-ranking VVMer to comment on Cooper’s “autopsy” was former New Times Los Angeles and current Phoenix New Times editor Rick Barrs – who aside from confessing that he once “got laid” from the L.A. Weekly personals, accused Cooper, among other things, of “Marxist butt-smooching” and of pandering to his “beatnik” readership.
Now that is the tone we’ve come to expect from Phoenix.
But not Lacey’s silence. He did not respond to a City Beat request for comment, leaving the most detailed explanation for the recent layoffs in the hands of departing theater editor Morris, in a farewell post on the paper’s blog.
“After almost 30 years, the Theater Editor position in a city with 2,000 professional plays opening every year was determined by Phoenix to be a fiscal extravagance.”
Morris asserts that leveraged debt assumed from the New Times’ merger with VVM in 2006 is the culprit for the chain’s fiscal woes.
L.A. Weekly publisher Beth Sestanovich says that’s untrue. “We’re simply tightening our belt in response to the economic downturn,” she tells City Beat. “This isn’t about banking or leveraged buyouts. It’s strictly operational. We’re sizing the business to make sure that when this downturn ends – and we don’t know when this will hit bottom – we come out strong.”
Whatever the case, none of this – leveraged debt, a crumbling economy – seems to have affected the Weekly’s sister paper in San Francisco in quite the same way. The S.F. Weekly has lost money every year since New Times took control of the paper in 1995 and owes nearly $15.6 million in damages stemming from a predatory pricing lawsuit. But that VVM paper recently found the cash to hire a new staff writer, bringing the total number of full-time staffers to five – equal to that of the much larger L.A. Weekly.
How is that possible? Barrs, taunting Cooper and the Weekly, perhaps gives some insight. Commenting on Cooper’s blog, he suggests that the L.A. Weekly is the target of an ideological war being waged from corporate headquarters in Phoenix: “We’re still standing. Your old, hippy-dippy paper has gone the way of the dinosaur. Extinct. Bye, bye.”
*An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Jeffrey Anderson was fired from the LA Weekly. Anderson clarifies that his departure from the paper was a mutual decision reached between himself and the Weekly.