Old Times Recalled at End of New Times

Like everyone else--including, I'm told, the people who ran the paper--I found out only Wednesday that New Times Los Angeles was closing. New Times, where I worked for almost five years, was both the most exciting job I've ever had and the most cruel. At its best, the place had a Wild West openness and imagination. Through good times and bad, though, I often thought an office shrink should be part of the benefits package.

My feelings for the paper, which I left this spring, are as mixed as my experience there. The writers--and I was one for more than three years--were given time and freedom to find their own stories, often topics or points of view overlooked by the mainstream media, and render them in depth. I'd like to think that our enthusiasm for our stories--and there are few things more exciting than discovering a scandal or a cultural movement that's under everyone else's radar--gave an energy to the writing.

New Times took an old-school, two-fisted approach to journalism, with an underdog, speaking-truth-to-power attitude, as if "Citizen Kane" had been remade by Sam Fuller. Whatever its alternative culture window dressing and macho swagger, the paper was heir to some of journalism's oldest and noblest impulses.

My own position at New Times was tenuous and inexplicable: As the only writer of arts cover stories, I felt like the guy in the frat house who plays the violin. New Times was best known, I think, for The Finger, the truculent, sometimes hilarious inside-media-and-politics column, and Jill Stewart's contrarian political column. My work, mostly on authors, film directors and pop culture figures, didn't resemble these more celebrated features, and I sometimes wondered if I was part of an affirmative action program for liberal, Caucasian English majors (oddly, the exact type of which most papers have no shortage). At times, I'll admit, I was encouraged to bring a shrillness to my writing--I'd had dirty words removed from my copy at straight papers, here they were occasionally inserted--but I was mostly left alone.

There were no focus groups, no political correctness and only occasional interference from corporate bean counters. We got some crazy orders sometimes--a zillion-part series on the mating habits of the gray whale, a series that ran in its entirety in desert-dry Phoenix--but we more than punched our weight. New Times prided itself on investigative journalism, and The Finger was among those who broke this paper's Staples Center scandal. A subversive sense of humor found its way into some sublime April Fools issues, one of which caused a small stampede by Hollywood types over an imaginary indie-film "scene" run out of a Palmdale steakhouse.