While Mark Twain famously said, "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," and Steve Jobs yesterday had to issue his own "I'm still here!" statement, author and journalist Marc Cooper today released the LA Weekly's autopsy report, on the body of the paper as we knew it. Perhaps mostly of interest to Weekly/news wonks. A few clips:
[T]he 30-year-old Weekly's heart and soul has been scooped out by a
corporate management that seems hell-bent on a suicidal tack. The
Weekly once distinguished itself by being, alone with the Village
Voice, the only major metro weekly in America willing to focus on
national and international coverage beyond the local boho bar scene. It
had a real and substantial editorial budget. The Weekly was read avidly
for 30 years by an audience that relished not only its excellent
cultural, film and music coverage, but primarily its bold and prominent
political writing-- including a rich menu of commentary and opinion.
Its reporters were, not infrequently, sent across the country and
sometimes around the world to write 10,000-word cover stories that
could be found nowhere else. It now boggles the imagination when I
remember –in a different era—reporting from South Africa, El Salvador,
Cuba and from within various national presidential campaigns—for the
L.A. Weekly. And these were not just second-rate self-absorbed wannabe
writers who were on the road. I'm in great company when I note that
those of us who wrote those stories also worked for The New Yorker,
Harper's, Vogue, and the Sunday magazines of the Los Angeles and New
York Times. We wrote for the Weekly because we chose to write for the
Weekly – certainly not because we had to...
For nearly 30 years, the L.A. Weekly had been a crucial launching pad
for budding local (and sometimes national) writers. It was a place you
got started, where you found your voice, where you made your chops and
maybe even a name. That possibility is just about completely foreclosed.
I've written near a 100 pieces for the Weekly; hell, I'm writing one now (and, full disclosure, I consider Jill Stewart a friend). Two days ago, I wrote an an essay called "After the Hangover," dealing with the issues of which Cooper writes, as well as some editors/publications' of my acquaintance who have so little trust in their readers that the truth of stories is slaughtered at alter of facts, and brevity; shoved (no matter how many limbs must be amputated) into tiny little boxes for tiny fearful minds.
Yesterday, I spoke on the phone with a brilliant writer and editor in Seattle, who said, "It must be hard to be a long-form journalist and live in Portland," meaning, where the publications don't run many (if any) long-form pieces. "Even in the New Yorker," he added, "the articles are rarely more than five thousand words."
Go ahead, sit there and read this and think, aw, poor wittle Nancy and all those other windy feature writers, wasting our time with 10,000-word pieces; who needs 'em? To which I say, you do. I will end this post, which has made me unexpectedly angry, which something my sister-in-law, a fine fine writer with a fine brain, wrote the other day, when I was blogging about the latest fake memoir:
Storytelling is our culture’s digestive system. We process
experience by trying to recombine it in ways that make sense and
provide us with mnemonics–myths, legends, tragedy, comedy, fiction. My
16 year-old son asked for two things this Christmas: Nietsche and
Dostoyevsky, so I know that this tradition, this healthy process, is
alive and well. Anyone who watches Battlestar Gallactica or The Wire
knows that myth-making can be as powerfully cathartic and uplifting
today as it was for those who first took in Shakespeare’s plays.
The “true stories” that have been exposed as false lately aren’t
stories that carry the moral weight of powerful fiction; instead, they
are reductive and sentimental. There is a stench rising from these
stories; they are rotten. We spent the first part of the Bush era
debating whether or not we were lied to about weapons of mass
destruction, which was the wrong debate: The question wasn’t whether or
not this were true, but whether it were plausible. Was it salient, or
just noise? We were so caught up with the “truth” that we failed to
look at the real story.
The truth is synergetic, it’s more than the sum of a collection of
“facts.” The truth has weight and momentum. Not all facts weave into
our stories, and not all improbabilities are created equal. The
existence of weapons of mass destruction was a mere improbability. The
election of our first black president was a miracle–one that Oprah has
every right to celebrate, and will and should. It’s crucial that we
understand the difference as we move forward. We need to tell the
stories, both true and fictional, that allow us intelligence and
complexity, not those that gloss over and sentimentalize that which is
difficult to digest, or distract us from our pursuit of our own
betterment.