That's freelance writer Seth Hettena's take. "Week after week, I pick up the Reader hoping to find something worth reading over a cup of coffee only to fling aside moments later in disappointment," he writes on the Voice of San Diego website. He roundly criticizes the Reader for a variety of sins, saying editor and owner Jim Holman shows "contempt for his readers." He concludes: "The Reader is considered an alternative weekly, but it's not really much of an alternative to anything." However, not everyone agrees with Hettena's assessment, as the robust discussion unfolding in the story's comments section proves. "Thank God for the Reader and for the 164,000 members of its weekly audience who keep it alive and kicking the hell out of the bad guys in San Diego each week," says one commenter.
"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."
"I can't lie to you -- this business is a struggle," CityBeat editor Dave Rolland writes. "Whereas we're dying to get into the neighborhood of 72 to 80 pages each week, we're still slogging along at 48 or 52." Looking back on the reasons behind the paper's Aug. 21, 2002, launch, Rolland writes: "There was no publication that represented the city's politically progressive population, no publication that focused on street-level arts and culture and no publication that told stories with lively, conversational flair. It's in these three areas that I believe CityBeat has done its job particularly well."
Troy Johnson, the music editor at the San Diego alt-weekly, has been the host of the Emmy Award-winning Fox Rox for its run of nearly five years, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. "[The cancellation] was purely a financial decision," says the station's general manager Richard Doutre Jones. "I can't keep losing money on it." Fox Rox's last broadcast is scheduled for March 29. "The media exfoliates itself and it's our time to be shed," Johnson says. "Our ratings were on the slender side. We were Jared post-Subway."
