Morris did a good job on the theater beat and The Weekly did help give the theater folk a sense of community. I was once in a five dollar comedy show that got pick of the week. I mean, still nobody came to see it, but it did get pick of the week. I thought Morris’s article taken on Tim Robbins showed a lot of guts. See what you’re missing, Woody?

Is this the mission in life for people like Jill Stewart? Raining on other people’s tiny parades so She can hand out advertising flyers? Oh well, Ella Taylor was pretty good too.

The difference between the editorial staff and the publishing side of alt-weeklies, alas, is that many of the former are among the very best in the world at what they do while the latter are at best fourth-rate. There are many reasons why a fine journalist might not want to write for Vanity Fair or the Los Angeles Times; very few reasons in the post-ideological age why a salesperson would settle for $80k if he or she could make $250k somewhere else.

Scott Foundas — who is wonderful guy and a talented writer– does not hire or fire anyone. Ella Taylor was eliminated strictly by demand of the Phoenix-based home office which controls all major HR decisions.

My understanding — un-verified– is that editor Laurie Ochoa and publisher Beth Sestanovich staunchly opposed the sacking of Morris and probably that of Taylor. But they don’t make the final decisions. Phoenix does.

You are under no obligation to either enjoy nor even read Ella Taylor’s work. But it is a demonstration of gross disrespect and, I would say, ignorance to affirm that a reviewer of her stature with 20 years worth of work is not read by anybody. Please, show some common sense.

When the dust clears, there will be demand for news and commentary. Those who can produce it well enough will do so, and, most likely, under far more agreeable terms, or at least ones that are not dependent on ad salespeople and all the corporate compromises it takes to keep them selling.

Ad reps, on the other hand, are not only out of a job, but, most likely, out of a career. The emerging world of online journalism has devoured whole their six-figure incomes…

Guess we’ll have to look elsewhere for a real autopsy.

James: Just a thought: Spend the 5 minutes it takes to start a “We Love Ella” groups at Facebook, Myspace and the dozen or so others like them. Then ask all members to send Ella $1 a week if she’ll keep writing those movie reviews.

Then make the first $50 contribution to get the ball rolling.

Show, don’t tell, they say.

For those who do care about more salient economics, and for those who actually give a damn about alt-weekly staff who have been losing REAL WORLD not hippy-dippy jobs: I will say that traditionally top sales reps at LAWeekly have made much more — sometimes twice as much or more– than staff writers. Six figure earnings were not uncommon in the halcyon days.

{if Mike Sigman is still tuned in he might be able to more precise about this as he was long time publisher)

I have held various positions at LAWeekly and have NO problem saying revealing what staff pay levels were. My first job there was a staff writer in 1983 and my paycheck was $20,800 per year).

Under the old L.A. Weekly regime up till 2006, staff writers started at about $52k a year. Editors made $70-85K as a general range, with some making a tad less or in a few cases something more than that. Very high profile columnists might earn more like an editor than a writer. Other, lesser profile columnists were paid very low rates, as low as maybe $300 or so per contribution.

Freelance article rates at LAWeekly topped out at about $1 a word for well-established feature writers doing cover stories– meaning that a month’s work might pay about $4-5 k, equivalent to a schoolteacher with no seniority. Freelance cultural reviewers were paid less. Freelance, quick hit news pieces usually paid about 50 cents a word, sometimes more. Those are the general terms, with a LOT of exceptions and wide margins.

ALL of these salary levels and rates have been pushed down and cut by New Times. Way down.

And bunkerbuster, did I tell you already to bugger off? Oh yeah, I did.

If you’re really a top-flight journalist who knows what it takes to make the Weekly fly editorially, then you need to explain why you made the choice not to do so. And, having made that choice, why you now feel free to drop such vituperation on those who tried and are failing.

If you don’t really know or can’t really do what it takes to make the Weekly fly, well, same story, where do you get off others for being in the same boat as you?

“Cubicle jockey”? Presumably this is the term of abuse you apply to the journalists or designers or ad sales reps or administrative people who stayed and fought and put their everything into trying to keep the weekly alive, while you were selling your wares to the highest bidder, a fact you seem so unwittingly proud of.

How about a real autopsy instead of the muddy carnival of blame/shame and backscratching you’ve come up with so far?

First and foremost, just how much money do you make? The word transparency has been bandied about a bit here and how about a little from yourself. You’ve boasted of making “thousands” from this or that magazine and of being “too expensive” for this or that publisher, so why not let the reader decide on which adjectives supply? A little factuality on this point might go a long way.

And let’s not forget ad revenue. What are the LAW ad revenues now, versus what they were pre-Sept. 15 (the day Lehman Bros collapsed)? and pre August 2007 (when the sub-prime mess first surfaced.)

If you don’t even know, your “autopsy” needs a “just my two-cents” disclaimer it doesn’t have. If you do know, but aren’t telling, its even safer to assume you’re just trying to settle a few scores on the cheap.

So is your column worth two weeks wages for an ad rep, or a month’s for a lowly “cubicle jockey” staff writer who has to lower himself to routinely showing up in the office? Or is it “more affordable” than that?

Do the math, Marc, or admit that you’re either not a qualified coroner on this case or, at best, not willing to be.

Oh, and a tad, more seriously… Im a writer not an cubicle jockey. I have made tens of thousands of dollars from publications to whose offices I have never set foot in once, let alone three times. So cut the bs.

I do pass judgment on the mortals running the business of the L.A. Weekly. They are failures in their own terms. THEY, not me, have run into the ground and just about off the cliff.

If “mortals” want to pass judgment on how others perform, then the mortals should actually know a little about those fields and, in this case, the business end of publishing.

As much as I like Marc, L.A. Weekly wouldn’t have survived as long if he had been charged with its management. An executive has to go in more than three times a year to pick up his checks. My guess is that he would have turned it over to the government to run.

I guess it was over before it was over and now even more so.

“Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.” ~ Rex Stout (1886 – 1975)

Hearst Corp. put Seattle’s oldest newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, up for sale on Friday and said that if it can’t find a buyer in the next 60 days the paper would likely close or continue to exist only online.

Denver’s Rocky Mountain News recently put itself up for sale in the face of steep losses and could close if a buyer isn’t found soon.

Also Friday, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis ended talks with a union representing employees after being unable to agree on a request for concessions, setting the stage for a possible bankruptcy filing by Minnesota’s largest newspaper.

Word on the street is that Metromix has also been exterminated.

Something is happening.

My question is to my fellow journalists….what are WE GOING TO DO?

I don’t want to sit here and take it!

Read Upton Sinclair’s book, The Brass Check, published in 1929 in which he thoroughly investigates the leading daily newspapers (inc. the NYT) and it is the same tired old chamber of commerce shit that you see today from the Honolulu Advertiser to the New Times-mutated LAW. Sinclair’s ‘brass check,” btw, referred to the brassy token given by cashier-madams to johns who then traded them for blow jobs with the sex workers.

We modern journalists need to get honest: most of us are hard-working whores. Lacey and Zell are just the pimps. But we can break with this failed model. People really will pay for non-partisan, ad-free journalism. And we sure need it.