[contextly_auto_sidebar id="9SH7Jz0T3AVOjswZ9pMhaO2BBpIbBBbX"] ONE of my all-time favorite social critics is the late, great author of Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. (I'm even fonder of his book Technopoly, which came out in the early '90s but remains one of the great books about what the Internet would do to us.) So my senses were stirred when I … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]