24. Paper, scissors, rock

I was part of a panel the other evening convened by Dr. Fernando Guerra of the Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. His students and those in two other classes heard from Ruth Galanter (former Los Angeles City Council member), Brendan Huffman (formerly president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association), and Ron Kaye (former editor of the Daily News). I offered some historical perspective.Dr. Guerra led with a question about the future of Los Angeles Times, prefaced with a show of hands from a hundred or more undergraduates. A very few had read the Times that day (a Thursday). Significantly more - to the surprise of the panel - thought of themselves as Times readers, at least occasionally. The newspaper habit, it seems, had not entirely died out among these local 20-somethings.

When it was his turn to comment, Ron Kaye was passionate in his disdain for what the Times had become, how it had failed the city even in the decades when it was becoming the most important newspaper of the West, that its reach had never included the rapidly changing region it had sold into existence. Kaye expected the paper's ongoing death by a thousand cuts would make the Times unrecognizable in five years, that the familiar slap of its newsprint on suburban front steps could be heard no longer.

[Ron Kaye correctly notes below that it was Dr. Guerra who suggested that the paper might be gone in five years.]

I grew up with Times. To crib from KCET's promotional ads, I could say that I became the sort of writer I am because of the Times. I read its columnists - Jim Murray, Matt Weinstock, and Jack Smith. I read its cultural opinion makers - among them, Art Seidenbaum and Charles Champlin. I learned from all of them: the power of voice, the centrality of place, and a hunger for stories.

So the kid of 10 or 11 who read Jack Smith while wolfing down Rice Krispies before riding his bike to school eventually became an occasional writer of opinion for the Times. Who wrote through several régime changes since 1997. (Too many régime changes.) Who wonders now which voice in the Times will beguile other young readers, will stoke their longing for stories, will make this place appear to be the most important subject of their wonder and speculation?

Mere information is everywhere. Opinion comes in torrents. Voices are rare. Attached to the discipline of telling stories -- harder to find. And in sympathy to a place and its ordinariness - perhaps no longer possible.

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