While Ochoa remained in charge of the overall operation, a couple of people who worked at the paper told me she effectively ceded control of news to Stewart, a favorite of the Village Voice Media executives who oversee the operation.
Ochoa, the one-time editor of Gourmet magazine, remained in control of feature and arts coverage. And former employees, like veteran writer and commentator Marc Cooper, told me she did her best to protect writers and parts of the paper she felt still had value.
Cooper and others have written about the stark change in political focus that infused the paper after Stewart's arrival. The Weekly's faithfully pro-union, lefty bent gave way to the news editor's libertarian sensibility. "Laughable 'reporters' were brought in," Cooper wrote, "to scribble highly ideological pieces that reflected Stewart's world view."
But to me Stewart's more important, and insidious, influence has been not as an ideologue but as a pedagogue -- pushing for what one writer who has worked with her called "gotcha, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey journalism."
(Like most of those who spoke to me, this scribe declined to be named because he feared Stewart could hurt his chances of writing for the Weekly, a risk he didn't want to take in a contracting market.)
I know Jill from her time as a metropolitan reporter here at The Times. Her strength is intelligence, sharp writing and her passion for local news.
Her weakness, described by several journalists who have worked with her and reflected in several recent cover stories, is that she pushes story lines that make some sense, with arguments that make very little.
It was once fun to read Stewart's New Times column because she painted a cartoonish world. Public policy was either brilliant or shameful, politicians either beatific or (more often) amoral and parasitic. Forget the shades of gray.
I see those same strains in pieces like the one on Villaraigosa's work habits.
The story claimed to faithfully track the mayor for more than two months. But some who follow local politics became instantly suspicious of an analysis that defined the mayoral role in extremely narrow terms.
In one of his prime examples, for instance, reporter Patrick Range McDonald characterized two hours the mayor spent riding a subway and announcing new MTA bus lines as a mere publicity stunt. Using that kind of rationale, McDonald didn't count most of Villaraigosa's public activities as "direct city business." The story therefore concluded the mayor spent just 11% of his time actually doing his job.
