[Marxism] LA "alternative" newsweekly's downward spiral

[Louis Proyect]

This week's Nation Magazine has an interesting article on the 
degeneration of the LA Weekly, an "alternative" newspaper:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070716/wiener

The article does not mention anything about Jay Levin, the guy who 
launched the paper originally. After he sold out to new owners, the 
paper has gone steadily downhill just like the Village Voice in NYC. I 
got to know Levin a little bit in the late 1980s when I used to visit 
friends in LA. He was very pro-Sandinista, as was obvious from LA Weekly 
coverage.

The Christian Science Monitor reports about his new venture:

from the July 02, 2007 edition - 
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0702/p20s01-ussc.html

Jay Levin tilts at print mills
A tireless editor launches a monthly magazine aimed at L.A.'s 'fusion 
culture' – the city's rising immigrant class

By Frank Kosa | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Los Angeles

No shortage of experts exists proclaiming that print is dying. Magazines 
in particular are the polar ice cap of the publishing world, receding at 
an alarming rate in the face of the superheated Internet. We are told 
there are no readers anymore – just "eyeballs" and "clicks."

On the scorched earth of this media battlefield (if you'll allow me an 
old-era print metaphor) littered with the burned-out shells of once 
mighty magazines, one man is launching a new entry. What's more, he's 
chosen to roll it out in possibly the least reader-friendly location in 
the United States – Los Angeles.

It's a city renowned for its municipal attention-deficit disorder, where 
few people have lingered over anything since the O.J. Simpson trial – 
and that, of course, was televised. In this town, "reader" is a job, 
someone who summarizes scripts, the idea presumably being that no one 
would read voluntarily.

So who is the nut launching a publication in what, if the experts are to 
be believed, may be the most hostile time for print since Gutenberg? 
That would be Jay Levin, a middle-aged man with a medium build and a New 
York accent tempered by nearly 30 years in Los Angeles. His new monthly 
magazine is called RealTALK LA.

Mr. Levin is remarkably soft-spoken – the antithesis of the caricatured 
cigar-chomping editor who is once again being imprinted upon us by this 
summer's arbiter of cultural imagery: "Spider-Man 3."

He is a self-described "pragmatic visionary," with an activist bent and 
a critical eye. That criticism is often focused on the media, and their 
failure to serve their readers.

Now Levin is putting his own theories about serving the reader to the 
ultimate test. Will he prove to be savant or simple failure?

***

Born and raised in New York City, Levin was lured to L.A. in 1978 by, of 
all things, a porn king – Larry Flynt. "It was just after he became a 
born-again Christian," says Levin. "He was a rebel publisher looking for 
something to do with his energy." Mr. Flynt bought a small alternative 
paper, the Los Angeles Free Press, and asked Levin to "make it the 
Village Voice of L.A." Their partnership lasted just 10 weeks, at which 
time Flynt fired Levin over editorial control – Levin says he insisted 
that the sex ads be dropped. One week later, Flynt was shot in an 
assassination attempt, and the Free Press, which had been losing money, 
was shuttered.

The paper was gone, but, according to Levin, not the need for it. "The 
L.A. Times was doing a terrible job of covering the city," he says.

Nine months later, he had found backers to hire a staff largely culled 
from the former Free Press and cobbled together the first issue of an 
alternative paper called LA Weekly. It was 24 pages, with virtually no 
advertising. According to longtime staff writer Steven Mikulan, Levin 
pulled together the disparate elements of an urban-hippie sensibility 
with a young club-scene set. Although Levin was sometimes ridiculed for 
being Quixotic and New Age-ish, the mix found a considerable audience.

"It took someone who was obsessed ... for L.A. to have a literary 
paper," says Mr. Mikulan. "He was in the right place at the right time."

Levin ran the paper for 13 years. He sold it in 1991 to, appropriately 
enough, the Village Voice for $10 million. From there, he set off on a 
series of ventures that included launching a television channel, 
consulting, pursuing a master's degree in spiritual psychology, and 
founding a nonprofit to serve L.A.'s poor.

His nonprofit work and a consulting job with what used to be called a 
"minority-owned" chain of newspapers (there is no "majority" ethnic or 
racial group in L.A. anymore) led to a realization: "I could see 
tremendous growth in the middle and professional classes. I had a vision 
to create a different model for a city magazine."

(clip)

===

Here's another relevant item that I posted a while back:

In the late 80s I used to make occasional trips out to Los Angeles to 
visit friends who were part of a loosely organized Hollywood left. This 
included fairly successful writers like Michael Elias who grew up about 
5 miles from me and wrote "Young Doctors in Love", a memorable parody of 
hospital melodramas. It also included Jay Levin, the founder and editor 
of Los Angeles Weekly, a newspaper that combined radical politics and 
glitzy Hollywood lifestyle material. Like all such "underground" 
publications that were styled after urban weeklies that sprouted in the 
1960s, it walked a tightrope between commercialism and idealism. After 
Levin sold the paper to well-heeled investors, it fell off the tightrope 
and now offers a fairly conventional political analysis--albeit packaged 
in a kind of self-contratulatory "hipness" that reminds one of the New 
York Press. The New York Press never tires of lambasting the Nation 
Magazine for its out-of-date liberalism, but offers instead an "edgy", 
hard-line conservatism straight out of the Dartmouth Review. This 
amounts to bashing Al Sharpton and the Democratic Party on a weekly basis.

In the latest LA Weekly, there is a corrosive attack on the Nation 
Magazine that could have been appeared in the New York Press:

On Bubble Wrap
The Nation vs. The Weekly Standard
by John Powers

An audience is like a broad. If you're indifferent, Endsville.


--Frank Sinatra


AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER THE NATION HAS been the journalistic 
lodestar of the American left. Now, in its 137th year, the magazine is 
on a commercial roll. Its subscriptions have risen steadily in the wake 
of the World Trade Center attacks. Its finances may actually break even 
(a miracle in the world of political magazines). And its publishing 
adjunct, Nation Books, is raking in money from two hot titles: Gore 
Vidal's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Forbidden Truth by 
Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié. Indeed, everything's going 
so well that I feel kind of churlish in pointing out what most on the 
left are unwilling to say: The Nation is a profoundly dreary magazine.

Just compare it to another thin, ideologically driven rag, The Weekly 
Standard, a right-wing publication currently approaching its measly 
seventh anniversary. A few months ago, I began putting new issues of 
each side by side on an end table and, to my surprise, discovered that 
while unread copies of The Nation invariably rose in guilt-inducing 
stacks, I always read The Weekly Standard right away. Why? Because seen 
purely as a magazine, The Standard is incomparably more alluring. As 
gray and unappetizing as homework, The Nation makes you approach it in 
the same spirit that Democrats might vote for Gray Davis -- where else 
can you go? In contrast, The Standard woos you by saying, "We're having 
big fun over here on the right."

full: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/41/on-powers.php


The Los Angeles Weekly made virtually the same kind of attack on 
Pacifica Radio, albeit from columnist Marc Cooper who fairly typifies 
Nation Magazine ideology nowadays. In a positively rancid article on 
Porto Alegre, Cooper also took people like Noam Chomsky and his 
supporters to task for lacking panache. If one has ever seen the gnomish 
Marc Cooper in person or heard his nasal, high-pitched voice, you would 
have to question his harping on style.

In a 1990 brochure to advertisers, here's how the LA Weekly described 
itself;

"Weekly readers like to buy, buy, buy. . . . They want Perrier instead 
of water; croissants instead of toast; Rolex instead of Timex. They earn 
champagne incomes to match their champagne tastes."

In 1994, the Village Voice bought the LA Weekly and deepened the 
orientation to the Yuppie set, both culturally and politically. At the 
time the Voice was owned by pet food magnate Leonard Stern, who had 
already pushed the tabloid toward the center. Today's owners package 
conventionally liberal politics with all sorts of articles about 
alternative lifestyles. In a distinct gesture to rightist politics, it 
contains regular dispatches from Sylvia Foa, a grating Zionist based in 
Israel.

The Voice is lashed from the right on a weekly basis by the New York 
Press, founded in 1988 by Russ Smith. Smith's motivation in challenging 
the establishment left was nearly identical to that described in the LA 
Weekly article cited above. In a profile in the Oct. 1, 1998 NY Times, 
Smith said the Voice had become ossified, full of "stuck-in-the-70's, 
left-wing stuff" and pompous writing. "What about the 20-year-old who 
just wants to hear about the Smashing Pumpkins' new album and doesn't 
want a four-paragraph discourse on Baudelaire or Thomas Carlyle?"

As somebody who enjoys rightwing entertainment, including radio shock 
jocks, I find New York Press simply unreadable. Most of it has little to 
do with NYC and consists of long-winded navel-gazing by some of the most 
boring people on the planet.

For example, in a piece called appropriately "First Person" in the 
current issue, we learn from Rich Rickaby that:

"My family is the black sheep of the family. My mother went through an 
embarrassing battle with alcohol while married to her second husband who 
was alcoholic enough for the entire family. Not that one has to be 
embarrassed about being alcoholic, especially since she overcame it, but 
when Mom has to crawl her way out of the family gathering it leaves an 
impression. Diane has three kids by two different men, both of whom are 
in jail now. One for beating up on whores and the other for conspiring 
with his father to murder someone. Her oldest son, Joe, has already been 
in jail by the age of 21 and has since fled for West Virginia."

I think I'll stick with Thomas Carlyle.