When the LA Weekly wrote a lengthy story last September about how little Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa attended to his official duties, it wasn't plowing fresh soil.
The mayor's exuberant fundraising and his frenetic campaigning on behalf of presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton had already received plenty of attention, in this paper and elsewhere.
The media, rightly, should do whatever it can to determine if a politician is already measuring the drapes for his next office while sitting in his current one.
But as it has with several stories in recent times, the Weekly didn't let the facts speak for themselves in its Villaraigosa takedown.
Instead, it employed more semantic spin than Kobe Bryant puts on a jump shot, along with a prosecutorial methodology that proved much more about the declining quality of our city's dominant alternative newspaper than it did about our attention-grasping mayor.
I got to thinking about this when the Phoenix-based company that publishes the Weekly forced the resignation of its thoughtful editor, Laurie Ochoa, late last month.
It was the latest departure in a protracted exodus by many of the Weekly's best-known and most accomplished journalists.
Ochoa declined to talk about her exit, but those around her said she had "creative differences" with the bosses at Village Voice Media and long anticipated the ouster.
It's too easy to mark such departures in epochal terms, and I think one of America's most honored alternative papers will occasionally still deliver arresting criticism and a fresh voice our city wants.
(It helps that Ochoa's husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning, octopus-gobbling restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, will remain at the paper, at least through the fall publication of his list of L.A.'s top 99 restaurants.)
Still, the Weekly has fallen far from the days it was required reading for those in the know about the city. In those days, the paper belonged to powerful writers such as Michael Ventura and Harold Meyerson, the political savant who now writes op-ed columns for the Washington Post.
But many who work at the paper attribute its tone and direction in the last couple of years to its news editor, Jill Stewart.
A convoluted history brought Stewart -- a former L.A. Times reporter and flame-throwing columnist for the now-defunct New Times Los Angeles -- to the Weekly to replace popular news editor Alan Mittelstaedt, who was forced out in late 2006.
