Print, Online and the Creative Class

TODAY I have another piece in Salon, this one about the folding of New York magazine into a biweekly, and the resulting conversation about where the media is (and isn't going.) HERE it is.

People trying to be "counterintuitive" are framing this as a win for journalists and journalism, since more people will read New York related copy on the blogs (some of which are quite good.) It's like saying musicians -- or music -- are thriving because more people listen to their songs on Spotify than ever did in the old record label-and-album model.

If you work in journalism, or the media business, you know that the phrase, "we've moving online" is typically a code word for de-professionalization -- something the creative class has gotten awfully familiar with. David Carr in the New York Times had the right take, I think.

The magazine also plans to bulk up its print publication with more fashion and luxury coverage, at a time when most Americans – among them, the new mayor tells us, a lot of New Yorkers -- continue to emerge only gradually from the Great Recession. (The Bloomberg operation will reportedly cover the arts, despite firing its arts staff, as a subset of luxury.) 

New York magazine – which has always combined the smartly serious with conspicuous consumerism, Frank Rich alongside frivolity – is not the only publication that is upping its fashion and luxury “content.” The way high-end fashion coverage, celebrity-worship and house porn continues to replicate in magazines three decades into flat middle-class wages is a paradox a greater critic than I will have to tackle. But whatever is driving this, it’s not something most Americans should celebrate, especially journalists, who increasingly toil to remain in the middle-class instead of buying $50,000 watches.

Like the David Lowery piece that ran yesterday, this gets into stuff I investigate deeper in my book Creative Destruction, which comes out next year.

Farewell to a Los Angeles Chronicler

SOMETIME during that hazy, gray zone around Christmas and New Year’s Day, one of LA’s finest scribes left town, maybe for good. I’m talking about former Village Voice/LA Weekly/Los Angeles magazine writer and editor RJ Smith. He’s also the author of two acclaimed books, The Great Black Way: LA in the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance and last year’s The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, a deep cultural history which got two rave reviews in the New York Times.

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But RJ has been a startlingly cool cultural journalist for decades now:  When I moved to town, in ’97, he was one of a very few bylines I already knew, from his work in the Voice and his decamping for the LA Weekly during an early-90s heyday during which it employed – I think I have this right – Jonathan Gold, Lynell George, John Powers, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson and many other luminaries. (Manohla Dargis arrived, I think, near the end of that period.) My now-wife worked as an intern around this time, and picked up the phone one day to find Arthur Lee, of the band Love, calling.

When I met him years later, at the old Knitting Factory at what may’ve been a New Pornographers show, I was a bit starstruck. And for all the journos laid off during the dark days of ’08 and ’09, RJ’s dismissal may be the most inexplicable. 

He’s written about death of Elliott Smith for Spin and Steve Martin’s art collection for the New York Times magazine, and recently penned a line (involving Iggy Pop) in his Los Angeles magazine piece on artist Chris Burden that nails a cultural phenomenon I’ve been trying for years to describe half as well. He’s about as perceptive a reporter as I know, with some of the outsider's perspective you see in everyone from Carey McWilliams to the late Huell Howser.

RJ is an elusive cat (“RJ? We don’t even know his real name,” a mutual friend told me the other day), but we managed to become friend over the last few years here. I’ll miss him personally and professionally – he’s been a valuable source of advice on my own book. And I know I’m not the only Angeleno who will miss his decoding of the complex culture of the Southland. With just about every piece, RJ tackled his subjects in a smart, off-center way that never would have crossed my mind, but still made it clear in the writing.

Here at the Misread City, we’re wishing RJ well at his next gig, at Cincinnati magazine, in a city he got to know through the record label that put out some of James Brown's earliest (and finest) recordings. Angelenos’ loss will be Ohioans' gain.

Though part of me wonders – what’s happened to the journalistic scene in Los Angeles if it can no longer hold talent like RJ Smith? Here’s hoping his exile might not be permanent.

Here’s my Q+A.

When you came to LA in 1990, it was before the riots, before Salonen, before Beck’s breakout, and so on. How did the city strike you then: Did it seem wide open in some ways? Culturally sleepy?

I came to Los Angeles in 1990. Jonathan Gold had famously just been fired as music editor at the LA Weekly, and Kit Rachlis, who I had known at the Village Voice before he became editor of the Weekly, brought me in to rebuild the music section.

I thought I would be here a couple of years and then head elsewhere, but LA has a way of redefining your suppositions. We stayed. The early 90s were an amazing time to be here: You could see Beck in a Star Wars helmet playing a vacuum cleaner in a bowling alley; painters were fighting to reclaim downtown inch by inch; Pocho was this heresy of a zine. The coolest stuff was weird, out, then, and when you stumbled onto something good you really felt like you had discovered a treasure.

Hard as it is to imagine today, there was a time when people talked about attacking the citadel of the Music Center.  Or maybe it was the LA Times. These days there is no death star to conveniently focus on; the Times and the Center are just flavor-bringers, their monolithic status long gone.

There’s a feeling that a lot of stuff is going on and not much feeling of a target worth hanging your ambitions on. (Other than New York, always an inviting target to LA: I think why the fate of MOCA is crucial to watch is not tied to the idea of “high culture” vs. “pop culture” but to the question, who will define the LA art world: New York or LA money?)

Your James Brown book, The One, got better reviews than just about any non-fiction book I can remember. What was the best thing about writing that?

Connecting with the south in a way I never had before. It was amazing to be traveling across South Carolina and Georgia just as Obama was getting elected the first time. That, and getting invited over to Bootsy Collins’ house for dinner.

You wrote incisively about the press for LA magazine. When you arrived here, the city had three alternative weeklies, one with a whole research and fact-checking department. There were other reasons to think our publications might compete with those in New York. How does the print journalism scene compare these days? Are there fewer forums for serious or personal work than when you arrived?

To speak the obvious, there are as many or more outlets today, they’re just not paying what they used to. Or, just not paying. The LA Review of Books is a still promising project, and Arthur is up and running again. KPCC and KCET have been hiring journalists, and Slake showed what was possible with literary journalism at least until a better paying job comes along. It did good stuff.  

Hard to say if people are better or worse informed than they used to be. I’m still waiting for somebody to call bullshit on Gangster Squad’s glorification of Chief Parker!

You’re headed back to your native Midwest. What attracted you to Cincinnati magazine?

Well, first of all it’s nice to be living in a big city that has a football team.

I grew up in Detroit, and I suppose from a few angles Cincinnati reminds me of that place. A great editor is getting rarer and rarer, and in Jay Stowe, Cincinnati has somebody I was eager to work with. I’ve known his reputation since he was at Spin, and from there the New York Observer and on to being editor in chief at Outside. I started talking to him when I would come to Cincinnati to research King Records for the JB book, and the more I saw of the city the more interested I got.  

It’s a place with a mix of north and south, tea partiers and anarchists. Plus it has, in Wussy, the best band around right now, and I got to see them play in Over-the-Rhine last Saturday night. Working in a town with a humane cost of living gives me the chance to conceptualize, and write, the next book, and maybe the next one too.

What will you miss most about LA?

I would drag any stranger or friend I could to Watts Towers upon arrival in town, hoping they would see what I saw: an amazing upwelling, a monument to the individual and the community.

LA is a great place to build crazy stuff in your backyard without criticism orperhaps interest from your neighbors. Call it freedom or a lack of care, but LA gives you a lot of space to make stuff up.

Culture and Criticism

TWO of my favorite journalists, film critic A.O. Scott and media reporter David Carr, have gone back and forth about a number of important issues lately. Some of this is analog vs. digital, print vs. Internet stuff.

Some of it has to do with the nature of the press, of DIY/artisanal culture, or the revival of vinyl records. And in this swirl of new and old, they ask, what is the role of the culture critic?

(Cue chin-stroking music, please.)

I wrote about a fading golden age or arts criticism a few years back, in a story -- eventually titled "Critical Condition" -- that drew so many letters, pro and con, that the LA Times added a Sunday letters page to contain them. Norman Lear responded to the article in a speech. That kind of thing.

My piece tried to look back, and to speculate on what was coming next. Here it is.

I'd like to think that what it said has held up pretty well, and that things are, if anything, bleaker than I forecasted at the time. How have things changed since then?

More Trouble at the LA Times

THIS week saw the fourth (or fifth?) wave of executions since I myself was sent to my bitter end in October 2008. My heart goes out to my old colleagues who've suddenly lost their jobs -- you deserve better.


Unlike a lot of former Times people, I still get the paper delivered and derive some -- though it looks like in the future, less -- of my income, from the place. (The company that gave Cereal Killer Mark Willes, David Hiller and others who helped sink the ship multi-million dollar golden parachutes has just cut all freelance book coverage: Man, those $500 book reviews were bleeding the place dry!)


And today's front page piece by Scott Gold on the Jupiter mission shows just how good the Times' coverage can be even in these difficult days.


But what I'm struck by is the kowtowing, go-team! farewell notes that fired LATimes staffers write as they're on their way to the gallows. I wrote one too, on the day I was told, out of the blue, that I had til 5 pm to leave the premises or be escorted out by security.


Jack Shafer at Slate penned a piece not long ago about what angry employees write when they are cashiered. 


I guess I'm not thinking anger, but honesty. How bout this: 


"Today is my last day at the Times. Those of you at your desks: I will miss you all. Someday, when you least expect it, this will happen to you, too, and you will be writing one of these stupid notes as you madly pack your belongings and shuffle toward the guillotine. 


"And you will, as I soon will, struggle to keep your marriage together, to keep your kids in school, to keep your house from being repossessed. You may not sleep straight through the night for months (or years). 


"If the economy continues to limp along as Congress obsesses over the deficit and ignores unemployment, you might not work for years. Some of you will never hold a job again. For some of you, things will go a bit better, but the chances of you regaining your current salary are almost zero.


Meanwhile, Tribune brass are giving themselves bonuses and Sam Zell is griping about how hard the deal he cooked up ended up being to his net worth.


Have a bitchin' summer..." 


Journalists pride themselves on "speaking truth to power," so I'm scratching my head as to this docility. (My friend Steve Wasserman describes picking up "a whiff of the good commissars being sent to the Gulag and thanking the Party for the privilege of serving.") 


Part of it is just confusion -- I was so blindsided that day that I was in a kind of low-grade shock, and mostly just remember a good friend buying me lunch and another friend helping me get out of the building before security dragged me out.)


My wife, who works in the school system, says teachers, librarians and others work their fingers to the bone until the very minute they are laid off -- and with few plans as to what to do next -- because they see themselves as working for "the kids," not some uncaring bureaucracy that will fire them in the blink of an eye. 

I did the same thing -- I was toiling for "the reader" whom I idolize and revere, staying up late reading the books I was covering, or obsessing over my stories while I was taking a shower or clearing the table or watching a movie, so that reader could have the very best work I was capable of. "Go, Scott, go!" my editors said. "We love what you are doing! Keep it up!"

But as with these "classy" farewell notes, it's all a lie. To the people who fire you, you are a number on a spreadsheet. 

If you still work at the Times -- and I have many friends left at what is still, most days, quite a good paper -- please protect yourself. Take it from me: No amount of good evaluations, no number of high fives, no apparent love and support from your bosses will save you.

And my best wishes to those now launched on the dark adventure I've been on for almost three years now. Good luck -- you will need it.

Newspaper Layoffs and "The Disposable American"

IN 2007, a mean-spirited robber baron bought an important american media company with money that wasnt his, in a deal that no responsible anti-trust division would have permitted. over the next two years, hundreds of journalists were laid off from the LA Times and other newspapers. in october, i became one of them. departing with me were the deeply talented writer lynell george, the best editor i've ever worked with (maria russo) and many others.

i was given a few hours to clear out my stuff and get out of the building. i was offered a measly two months severance pay and -- thanks! -- free career counseling at the onset of the worst economic downturn since the 1930s.

earlier this year, after the company declared bankruptcy, another wave of layoffs hit, taking my other favorite LA Times editor, craig fisher, with it. today is yet another wave, which has already felled the talented reporter tina daunt. (the LAT now has less than half the staff it did when i was hired in '02. let me point out too that the tribune executives who sold the chain and let the paper fall behind walked away with golden parachutes in the tens of millions.)

one of the most salient explanations i found to this madness was contained in louis uchitelle's "the disposable american: layoffs and their consequences." this excellent 2006 book, by the veteran new york times economics and labor reporter, looked at the phenomenon in historical terms. what he finds it that the huge wave of american layoffs is not inevitable -- a natural way of responding to the up-and-down cycle of prosperity -- but rather the result of years of legislation favoring big business. if the laws are written for the corporations, they will see the people who work for them as disposable. (and they have.)

some of the layoffs in LA and elsewhere, of course, have to do with the slumping economy and the collapse of newspaper's income source. even the new york times, as was announced yesterday, may be doing some serious laying off. gourmet magazine just closed.

for now, i'm praying, in my agnostic way, for my friends and former colleagues.

LA WEEKLY, NEW TIMES, VILLAGE VOICE, ETC

Readers and media-watchers here in LA have followed the dismantling of the LA Weekly as editors like Joe Donnelly (who i once worked for) and film critic Ella Taylor were shown the door... here's a long, provocative "autopsy" by longtime lefty journalism Marc Cooper that is a kind of mini-history of the alt press, perhaps the bookend to the elegantly written but somewhat puzzling louis menand piece on the village voice in the recent new yorker... 

scroll down for comments by donnelly, former new times LA editor rich barrs, and others.

and i will maintain my policy of not taking sides in the endless new times vs. LA Weekly battles -- having worked for the former (and been weirdly both fired and rehired) and later marrying a former freelancer associated with the latter it's just full of too many weird contradictions for me... but here is a first-person column i wrote in 02 when new times LA suddenly shut down. i think parts of this are still pertinent today...

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