A little before noon yesterday, a 5.4 magnitude earthquake hit Southern California, with an epicenter 29 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, according to the US Geological Survey. The quake, which was the largest in SoCal in more than a decade but apparently caused no major damage, was felt in AAN-member offices from San Diego to Santa Barbara, judging by a quick perusal of blogs. "[It] felt like I was standing on a rocking waterbed for at least 12 seconds. The building swayed back and forth. A large corkboard fell off my office wall," the OC Weekly's R. Scott Moxley reports. "An energy drink can stupidly placed (by me) on top of a file cabinet flew three feet in the air. The staff quickly evacuated the building and found phone lines dead." Up in Culver City at LA Weekly's offices, Mark Mauer notes: "The new LA Weekly building shakes like a leaf (at least around my desk) every time a car enters or leaves our garage, so it took a few extra seconds to figure out this was an actual earthquake and not just an SUV trying to find a parking space." The Santa Barbara Independent's Matt Kettman reports feeling a "long, rolling sensation," while San Diego CityBeat's Kinsee Morgan wins the award for brevity, simply noting the quake was the "biggest one I've felt yet."
The "Commie Girl" columnist and former OC Weekly staffer was named editor of Los Angeles CityBeat this Spring amidst a relaunch of the paper. She says she's already receiving hate mail. One person wrote in to ask: "'Who's this inane, vulgar, rambling, trite girl who's a terrible writer and has a potty mouth'," she tells the Guardian. "And I was like, 'You live in Los Angeles, are you really that sheltered?'" Schoenkopf also says that she's now realized she willing blinded herself about notoriously conservative Orange County while she was there. "It's not the conservatism that bothers me: it's the nastiness," she says The nattering classes I'd thought were fringey were in fact the decision makers."
CityBeat has filed a federal lawsuit against a number of local government officials and a coalition of local religious and nonprofit leaders led by Citizens for Community Values (CCV) who last month publicly asked the paper to stop publishing adult-oriented classified ads. The suit charges the coalition with violating the paper's First Amendment rights, conspiracy to violate its First Amendment rights and tortious interference with its business relationships. "When government officials use their position of authority to threaten a media organization with implied legal action unless a certain demand is met, that's wrong. And when CCV, ministers and nonprofit leaders conspire with government officials to threaten the media, they're wrong, too," writes CityBeat co-publisher and editor John Fox. "We've decided the only way to prevent permanent damage to our business is to ask a federal judge to intercede on our behalf and protect our right to exist."
Citizens for Community Values, a group that "promotes moral values," is leading a coalition that yesterday held a news conference to publicly ask the paper to stop publishing adult-oriented classified ads, CityBeat reports. The group's letter is signed by various local sheriffs, county attorneys, pastors and others. "I do find it interesting that this organization wouldn't choose to reach out to us and to communicate to us in advance versus going about it in a public way, which strikes me as somewhat self-serving," general manager and co-publisher Dan Bockrath tells the Cincinnati Enquirer. "We cooperate with authorities in every instance when they're investigating one of our advertisers." CityBeat also released a statement to the press, which notes that "just about every public official" in this coalition has been the subject of negative stories in CityBeat, and that Citizens for Community Values has worked to get distribution points to drop the paper. "We make decisions about our business every day and on our own terms," the statement reads. "We won't be bullied or intimidated by any outside force that thinks they can make those decisions for us."
The paper will unveil a new design, logo and lineup of columns and features when it hits stands this week, LA Observed reports. Changes include: Content from Wonkette, a biweekly Neal Pollack column on sports, the return of editor Rebecca Schoenkopf's Commie Girl column, and a weekly news-in-review column from recently departed editor Steve Lowery. The redesign was overseen by new art director Paul Takizawa (formerly of LA Weekly), and CityBeat is throwing a celebratory party this Friday.
Steve Lowery, who reported as the new editor of Los Angeles CityBeat last Monday, resigned late last week. Publisher Charles Gerencser accepted his resignation today and named Rebecca Schoenkopf acting editor. "It's purely personal," Lowery tells LA Observed. "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." In an email to AAN News, Gerencser says Schoenkopf, who had just begun her tenure as the paper's arts editor last week, "is very passionate about creating a must-have; must-read newsweekly. I am looking forward to working with her on our effort to re-launch CityBeat with the June 12th edition." LA Observed is reporting the retooled paper will have "more of a magazine sensibility."
The paper's founding editor Steve Appleford has been replaced with alt-weekly veteran Steve Lowery, who'll begin his new gig Monday. Lowery comes to CityBeat from the District Weekly, where he was senior editor. He's also been a senior and interim editor at OC Weekly, and a staffer at New Times L.A. He'll reunite at CityBeat with former OC Weekly staffer and "Commie Girl" columnist Rebecca Schoenkopf, who has been named the paper's new arts editor.
Kinsee Morlan "lays her head down in one country, earns her bread and reputation in another, and co-runs an arts collective somewhere in between," SignOnSanDiego.com, an online project of the San Diego Union-Tribune, writes. Morlan has lived in Tijuana for close to two years while working at CityBeat. She says while working at the local NBC affiliate to supplement her CityBeat income, she was asked to do a story on a waterskiing squirrel, and realized she had to figure out a way to "not have a horrible part-time job and just work at CityBeat." Moving to Tijuana, which has much lower rents than San Diego, was her answer, and she's been there ever since.
"I didn't want to end up the creepy 40-year-old taking notes in the corner of The Casbah," Troy Johnson tells KPBS. "It's a crisis in music journalism that I wanted no part of -- the aging rock critic who never goes out except to 'marquee shows,' but occupies space as a music editor because that's all they know." Johnson, who has been with CityBeat for five years, will be the new senior editor at the glossy RIVIERA magazine. "There's a lot to miss about CityBeat," he says. "That's a small paper built on chewing gum, bailing wire and severely passionate, severely talented, severely underpaid editors and writers."
