I read this piece of information in LA OBSERVED a few minutes ago about Steve Lowery (ex-OC WEEKLY) swooning from exhaustion after his first week of editing LA CITY BEAT (the still mildly-progressive alternapaper that appears every Thursday):
Steve Lowery reported as editor in chief on Monday, put out his first issue of CityBeat on Thursday, then tendered his resignation last night. "I felt horrible when I called them. They were nothing but kind and wonderful," he tells me. But Lowery, 46, says the weekly is planning to reinvent itself over the new few months and he wasn't up for the grind, after having recently helped launch the District Weekly in Long Beach and, before that, the OC Weekly. "It's purely personal," Lowery said. "When I got there, it became immediately apparent that I just didn't have it in me....my body and my soul were telling me, hey bud, maybe it's time." Publisher Charles Gerencser told me that "no resignation has been accepted" and that nothing will be official until Monday. [Added: Lowery says they plan to meet then and see if there is some role for him going forward.] There's talk that Rebecca Schoenkopf, who came with Lowery this week, may be elevated to acting editor.
Here's the kind of reinvention that's already happening: Rebecca Schoenkopf, snarkster in excelsis, used to write her COMMIE GIRL column for the OC WEEKLY. If you remember the OC WEEKLY before Mike Lacey (a danger to SoCal-and-elsewhere journalism similar to Dean Singleton) came in and launched a staff purge of both the OC and LA Weeklies, there was a rather odious air of "we're so better than you" last-liberals-in-OC snottiness that made me want to go to the nearest restroom and retch into a commode. Sure, there were some columns (including occcasional Victor Infante entrees) that were good and informative--one being Jaimes Palacio's weekly poetry reading picks--but the paper was at best a poor younger sibling to its elder up north.
Here's a link to Rebecca's first COMMIE GIRL column for LA CITY BEAT, where she imagines herself as Bugs Bunny urinating over all the Elmer Fudds she sees in the nowheresville-to-hercity of Calabasas during the recent Method Acting film festival:
http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/commie_girl/6868/
No comments:
Post a Comment