In Defense Of Shameless Pleasures: Part One
So: if newspapers are relatives, they wouldn’t be Grandpa - already resigned to being nearer to the end than the beginning, and thereby not worthy of our attention at all - they’re gonna be more like Mom or Pop, with a lot more to lose: feeling for lumps in the shower while the Miley Cyrus party music thrums through the bathroom walls; breaking out in a light cold sweat that sticks like Velcro and the shower water can’t quite wash away.
Basically, if you’re a parent who has started that weirdly subtle process of beginning to maybe consider forming an exploration committee to select a task force to balance your options in the realization that the whole life thang might just be throwing you more curveballs more quickly than you’d anticipated at this point in the scheme of things…
… then you’re the newspaper of relatives.
The Sunday July 27 2008 issue of the Los Angeles Times is another relaunch for a failing organ going through a mid-life crisis. This is not a new phenomenon for the print media - launched from city and town papers from Atlanta to Zion Heights - that has seen the spurting ubiquity of the Internet redefine some basic ground rules. For the last four years or so, as media-consumption patterns have become increasingly habituated in favor of electronic mediation as the norm, the Internet has been flashing its skirts at traditional print media even as it sprints away gaily laughing, leaving the old duffer panting in the gutter, ashamed at playing such a public display of catch-up.
Only back in 2005 the LA Times danced a significant sidestep shuffle, a spastic polka that even Lawrence Welk would have had trouble composing the backbeat for: in which it made its Calendar section re-accessible (having removed it at one point from the purview of the casual newspaper purchaser) to those who hadn’t paid a (short-lived and soon aborted) additional online subscription fee.
The identification of a so-called online community prepared to pay extra monies for exclusive access to what they had previously received for free was only the latest mirage in a series of subscriber-reduced hallucinations. The already (now in retrospect) quaint “gosh golly” hubris of an idea in which Internet surfers would want to pay for anything at all was foreshadowed in the relaunch claim that the “new” LA Times would soon rival Craigslist in its mix of user-generated content, original material and classifieds. Well…
Three years later, and on a bright Sunday morning (as I recover from the tribulations of fallen arches from my endless Comic-Con wanderings) my wife sets up coffee and croissants on our balcony, and the hummingbirds buzz around my ears like frantic interior designers already measuring up the drapes for Michelle Obama, as I stagger under the weight of the Sunday edition and let it land with a dull thunk on the table.
Ellen and I then begin to sift through the latest re-launch of the Los Angeles Times like we’re CSI detectives (I am the good cop, wanting the re-launch to actually work, possessed of the belief that my adopted city has displayed a considerable commitment to journalistic verities over the last hundred years or so. You may invest in the Machiavellian intricacies of the water-stealing plot of Chinatown, but you should at least know that the real scheme was actually busted wide open; and not by Jack Nicholson but assiduous local reporting that stirred up a critical mass of local revulsion. Ellen, on the other hand, is the bad cop who wants to beat the LA Times with a rubber sap for daring to continually reduce the book review section over recent years like it’s a French consommé stuck on high heat. As a longtime LA-inhabitant she loathes almost everything about the city I’ve forced her to live in, and is just waiting for the scales to fall away from my eyes and stump up for the New York Times.).
Regardless of our personal prejudices, we do at least agree, without coming to blows, that this relaunch marks the latest manifestation of a downsizing sensibility disguised under some vague peripatetic bullshit rubric of consumer-responsivity. A newspaper is, lest we forget, a daily manifesto for a corporation, and announcements of “downsizing” or “streamlining” are simply the ways that corporations normally polish a turd; even one that you can wrap tomorrow’s fish and chips in.
Beyond the hype and the shiny platitudes, the model for the current corporate response to recession, confusion and turmoil is actually quite traditional: you simply lay off a shitload of people, reduce the overhead, scare the bejeezus out of the rest whom you haven’t laid off yet (America is SO COOL for this in terms of the whole health care dynamic), and then offer to let them continue in their jobs if they take on the responsibilities of the recently departed. In the meantime, as a corporate head, you cross your toes, swing a dead cat around your head, and wait for some phenomenon so bright and shiny to come along and save your business that bloggers like me will have run out of snide labels for it long before you finish the last sautéed banana on your tsunami-monitored Maldives beach.
But: forgetting corporate parsimony, the naked fear of executive people who might lose their season tickets to everything, and the crushed hopes of all those wives of all those journalists who thought they could both make it as long as she kept teaching in the inner-cities and he kept writing about conceptual art in a gay new way; forgetting all that passion and perspective, what does a re-launch that very specifically announces itself as “In Defense Of Shameless Pleasures” actually mean for us as a society (even if only for us on this side of the country, and ignored by all those fucking book-readers in Manhattan)?
PART TWO: the relative that is the LA Times darts back into the party, grabs you by the arm and pulls you into the hallway, barking “we need to talk” in your ear whilst trying out the most stoical of semi-smiles.