Long before this blog ever came to The American Prospect, long before it ever moved to DC, it was going to be part of the LA Weekly's revamped web site and new media strategy. For me, the offer was heady stuff. The Weekly was a scrappy, profane, angry bastion of post-Clinton progressivism with an outsized role in the political consciousness of Los Angeles. But then the LA Weekly's parent company was purchased by the New Times conglomerate. My editors assured me that the future was bright. I didn't believe them. Nor did anyone else.The New Times was a competing alt weekly chain and a rather different animal: Its papers cultivated an obsessive localism that channeled the dissatisfied yelp of suburban libertarians who thought their roads too narrow. The LA Weekly's web plans stalled, and then died. The LA Weekly's print edition fared little better. Within a year or two, it had lost the attitude that made it relevant to Los Angeles and the writers that had made it great (including TAP's own Harold Meyerson). It's now a shell of its former self.Marc Cooper was one of those writers. And his angry post-mortem is worth a read. The "Decline of the Media" piece is among the healthiest genres in journalism these days (much healthier than, say, foreign reporting), but Cooper's piece stands out for its almost comfortingly retro feel. What killed the Weekly was not the internet, the Craigslist or the YouTube. It was commercial pressures. Mergers and acquisitions. The fundamental truth of the news business, which is that it's not the news business. It's the advertising business. It's the making money business. And you can make more money if you do less good work. Cooper talks about the Weekly's glory days with a quiet awe, recalling the times when "reporters were, not infrequently, sent across the country and sometimes around the world to write 10,000-word cover stories that could be found nowhere else." The Weekly took on stories in South Africa, El Salvador, and Cuba. This was, remember, an alternative paper serving a single city. And it did international reporting. Of course it failed. The market for work like that is small. Certainly smaller than the market for "best of" lists and books about dogs. The papers willing to cut the esoteric foreign reporting, chop the lengthy investigations, and create the leanest, most efficient vehicles for local advertising and movie listings take over. They make more money, the grow bigger, and they eventually gobble up their decorated and self-impressed competitors. No one would suggest the New Times chain ever had papers approaching the Weekly or the Village Voice.. But they had the better business strategy, and that won out, because it eventually allowed them to buy the "better" papers. Nobody wants to read about Cuba. The wall of awards doesn't fend off the creditors. When you're in the making money by selling advertising business, thinking you're in the getting awards for doing good journalism business is an inefficiency that, eventually, a competitor will exploit. THE MAKING MONEY BUSINESS.
Long before this blog ever came to The American Prospect, long before it ever moved to DC, it was going to be part of the LA Weekly's revamped web site and new media strategy. For me, the offer was heady stuff. The Weekly was a scrappy, profane, angry bastion of post-Clinton progressivism with an outsized role in the political consciousness of Los Angeles. But then the LA Weekly's parent company was purchased by the New Times conglomerate. My editors assured me that the future was bright. I didn't believe them. Nor did anyone else.The New Times was a competing alt weekly chain and a rather different animal: Its papers cultivated an obsessive localism that channeled the dissatisfied yelp of suburban libertarians who thought their roads too narrow. The LA Weekly's web plans stalled, and then died. The LA Weekly's print edition fared little better. Within a year or two, it had lost the attitude that made it relevant to Los Angeles and the writers that had made it great (including TAP's own Harold Meyerson). It's now a shell of its former self.Marc Cooper was one of those writers. And his angry post-mortem is worth a read. The "Decline of the Media" piece is among the healthiest genres in journalism these days (much healthier than, say, foreign reporting), but Cooper's piece stands out for its almost comfortingly retro feel. What killed the Weekly was not the internet, the Craigslist or the YouTube. It was commercial pressures. Mergers and acquisitions. The fundamental truth of the news business, which is that it's not the news business. It's the advertising business. It's the making money business. And you can make more money if you do less good work. Cooper talks about the Weekly's glory days with a quiet awe, recalling the times when "reporters were, not infrequently, sent across the country and sometimes around the world to write 10,000-word cover stories that could be found nowhere else." The Weekly took on stories in South Africa, El Salvador, and Cuba. This was, remember, an alternative paper serving a single city. And it did international reporting. Of course it failed. The market for work like that is small. Certainly smaller than the market for "best of" lists and books about dogs. The papers willing to cut the esoteric foreign reporting, chop the lengthy investigations, and create the leanest, most efficient vehicles for local advertising and movie listings take over. They make more money, the grow bigger, and they eventually gobble up their decorated and self-impressed competitors. No one would suggest the New Times chain ever had papers approaching the Weekly or the Village Voice.. But they had the better business strategy, and that won out, because it eventually allowed them to buy the "better" papers. Nobody wants to read about Cuba. The wall of awards doesn't fend off the creditors. When you're in the making money by selling advertising business, thinking you're in the getting awards for doing good journalism business is an inefficiency that, eventually, a competitor will exploit. 
