citybeat down

LAObserved reports today that the publisher of LA CityBeat, the alt-weekly paper where I was a founding staff member, is "leaving." It's sad, not for him, but for a paper he left in ruins. Not to slight any of the remaining staffers who, as always, work too hard for too little money, but the CityBeat we started is not the CityBeat of today. That's largely because the publisher, boasting that he would make the paper better, laid off its most-valuable assets, people like it's founding editor-in-chief, while slashing salaries and forcing some staff members to take on two positions. Freelancers were cut. Editorial standards were reduced in the name of cost efficiency. Stories that were rejected by the former editor were picked up and run by the new regime. A publicist was allowed to write a story about an establishment she took money from.

Now, that's all well and good. If I publish a paper, I'm going to run things as I please. But the thing is, this particular publisher continually spun his disaster as an improvement, calling his gutting of the editorial staff simply a change in direction, and continually feeding local media blogs with tips about how his paper was fighting the good fight journalistically. Here's a publisher who had the nerve to bad mouth the founding staff members, yet who continually used the good will they fostered -- connections with local media writers, advertisers, club impressarios -- to his benefit. A "re-launch" with a new look for the paper happened in June. Glossy covers were added last month. At each step, the publisher promised that CityBeat would turn a corner. It didn't. It's advertising -- the core of its problem, and the core of the publisher's responsibilities -- remained dismal, its page count staying in the 40s most weeks. Those who predicted last spring that CityBeat would sink within six months may have been right. In any case it appears to be on life support. (I heard a rumor that its circulation has been cut, too). Like they say, you can't polish a turd.

This is especially bad for local dance music fans, because CityBeat was the only newspaper in the nation's second-largest media market -- maybe in the United States -- to publish a regular dance music column. To make matters worse, the day the publisher fired the founding editor (and the day I pulled my dance music column), was the occasion of its annual dance music issue, a unique special issue that I helped start and continued to help organize even after I had left my fulltime position at CityBeat. I'm going to guess that the issue, published in March, brought them more ads than anything since then.

Someone who I believe is connected with the paper commented here in June about the closing of Ciudad magazine, where I worked for three years as staff writer. Because I had been critical of the changes at CityBeat (rightly so, as it seems), they wanted to call out the demise of my own home base. As if getting laid off in a down economy wasn't punishment enough, someone wanted to rub my nose in it. Only one person at CityBeat ever had anything bad to say about Ciudad (it won't last more than a year, he once said), and that person was its publisher. The commenter stated, "How do you like CityBeat now?" I think it just got a little bit better.

[Above: Who put club promoter Dave Dean on the cover of CityBeat in 2003? It sure wasn't its publisher].