Dying By A Thousand Paper Cuts

Talk about a letdown. I don't just mean the fact that for about the last decade, the L.A. Times has been sinking as an institution, and the for the last year or so has been the unofficial poster boy for the distressed state of the newspaper industry. I mean a letdown much more personal than that. I grew up reading the Times and assuming that doing so was my civic duty. It was also my way of keeping abreast of what was happening in parts of town I almost never went to, like South Gate and East L.A. and just about anywhere in the Valley (I had one uncle who lived in Woodland Hills, and visiting him was like going away on vacation, or at least a day trip). My father read the paper religiously at the breakfast table and marked articles he wanted to clip for future reference; I often clipped them for him. Not only was the paper read in my household, it was preserved.

I got my first big journalism job with the Times, back in 1992. I made the leap from writing for a small (but ambitious) independent newsmagazine operating out of a mid-city apartment to the massive Times operation. Of course, I was writing for a satellite section called City Times--one of the long-departed zoned sections--that was born out of a crisis of media conscience stirred by the riots. (How long ago and far away that seems, the Times acting out of conscience.) I was thrilled. I was a complete unknown who was entrusted with illuminating and humanizing the inner city, or at least that's how I saw it. The mighty Times was giving me the chance to show L.A. to itself, and I took the charge seriously. The City Times bureau down the street from USC may have been one more generic-looking office among many, but to me it was like a state capitol. I felt like part of a functioning, reformist government. I belonged to a workplace in a way I never had before.

It wasn't too long before reality set in. After three years, City Times (along with some other ethnic-minded sections) quietly folded, a victim of recession and shifting political priorities. But my dance with the Times wasn't done. Ten years later, in 2005, I was invited to be a weekly columnist for the opinion page. Though I'd grown much more cynical about the paper and media in general, I was taken aback. I would be the first black weekly opinion columnist in the paper's 125-year history. I would have a much more rarefied spot in the paper than I'd had as a City Times stringer--I would be somebody! In fact, I would be paid not to cover things, but to speak my mind. There was no greater validation.

You all know how the story ends, more or less. I was cut as a regular Times columnist in 2007, not quite a year and a half after I accepted my second big mission there. Again, it was a matter of shifting political and demographic priorities, though this time there was a bigger context of the meltdown of print journalism that accelerated at the turn of the 21st century. But I still hold the Times responsible for letting all of us down. It is still a civic institution, albeit a shaky one at this point. It may be losing money, but we have all lost our faith in it, to some degree. That's going to be much harder to recoup.

The image associated with this post was taken by Flickr user suburbanslice. It was used under Creative Commons license.