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OK, so I finally caught on that all the retrospectives popping up one by one on the LA Weekly website were part of a special issue. I picked up the print version at lunch (radical step, I know) and enjoyed the glimpses into L.A. culture and media over the 30 years since Jay Levin and friends launched the Weekly. Editor Laurie Ochoa's note says this is the first time every editor in chief in the paper's history — her, Levin, Kit Rachlis and Sue Horton — have appeared in the same issue. Ochoa:
I’d arrived at the paper as a college intern and received a four-year education in critical reading, writing and what not to wear to the Anti-Club. I had some of the best teachers money could never buy, in Jay Levin, Bob LaBrasca, John Powers, Michael Ventura, Mayer Vishner, Michael Lassell, Eric Mankin, my future husband Jonathan Gold and four of the strongest female voices I’ve ever encountered — Ginger Varney, Gloria Ohland, Joie Davidow and Helen Knode. Any of these women could and did tangle with the competing male egos that roamed the halls, and I gained strength from their fierceness.What I loved most about the Weekly was its openness — a film or music or restaurant critic was never typecast as someone uninterested in politics; in fact, the Weekly’s critics were often the paper’s best political thinkers. I also counted on the paper’s nurturing of individual voices — there was no house style and no two writers sounded alike. After I left the paper for the L.A. Times, I always felt as if I were still a part of the Weekly. The place gets under your skin.
I also learned, from senior editor Tom Christie's piece, that the recent Barry Isaacson story on Jonestown, “From Silver Lake to Suicide” has been chosen as the monthly “notable narrative” by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.