groundswell out

Hi everybody. If you haven't heard, it's true: I'm pulling my Groundswell columns from LA CityBeat, the alt-weekly where I've penned dance-music features (and helped organize its annual "e-music" issue) for nearly five years. This is no April fool's joke, unfortunately.

After founding editor Steve Appleford launched the editorial side in 2003 and helped it thrive with less than half the resources of any alt-weekly in a top-10 market, the owners decided to sack him. Here was a guy who wrote cover stories, shot photos, and ran the place in recent months without an arts editor, copy editor or staff writer. (Go ahead and look at LA Weekly's staff roster -- which includes nine staff writers, eight editors, and three copy editors -- for comparison). The workload got so intense at times that Steve got sick (which he rarely does).

It was clear to me that his removal was meant to create a smoke cloud of chaos to divert attention from the true troubles at the publication, which lie on the business side. The paper has been skating by at about 44 pages recently as a result of poor ad sales. Despite years of time, the business side has been unable to properly distribute the paper (even to some of its own advertisers!), collect marketing data from its readers, or even get the paper posted online. (A good example is last week's issue: Try finding my Moby piece). There is virtually zero marketing. Even events at which the paper could sponsor, say, a concert with no out-of-pocket expenses, the business side couldn't muster the organization and manpower necessary to get its name out in the city. In promotional materials the business side couldn't even get the title of the publication correct, listing it sometimes as as Los Angeles City Beat (it's LA CityBeat, or at least it was). As a result, people still tell me they can't find the paper or haven't even heard about it. This is the number two alt-weekly in the nation's number-two media market. In my experience, sales people were not even familiar with the editorial product they were trying to sell. Once a salesman reported to me that a potential dance-music advertiser had turned him down because CityBeat never wrote about them. Not true, I snapped, and quickly pulled up CityBeat's website and pointed out a piece that indeed ran in the paper. This is inexcusable.

Meanwhile, the underpaid, over-producing folks in editorial were the problem? For the less-than-competitive pay, the paper at one time had Steve Appleford (former Reader editor and Rolling Stone contributor), Dean Kuipers (a onetime -- and once again -- Los Angeles Times entertainment editor), Natalie Nichols (a former Reader arts editor and longtime Times pop contributor) and me (former Los Angeles Times staff writer) on staff, giving 110 percent -- giving LA Weekly a run for its money in news (before the paper added some heavyweight writers a few years back) and certainly in music, where we owned dance music. (But the ad department certainly couldn't keep up with the Weekly's club ads).

Steve's firing was a punk move, and it stung even more because it was done right after the annual e-music issue was sent to the printer. The issue is a good example of how things run at the paper: Steve photographed the cover. I helped come up with ideas, helped find writers, helped assign stories and gave the package a light copy edit -- all free; my only pay is for the stories I did, for which I'm compensated at about half the rate of the competition. The result: The paper got a net increase of 10 ad-packed pages over the previous week. Did we get a cut? Nah. The reward for all that work? They fire Steve. No good deed goes unPUBLISHED.