Sacred Disorder

UPDATE BELOW

The plot continues to thicken at Creative Loafing. The paper is back in bankruptcy court this week. Nothing will be decided until next week, since court proceedings will resume on Tuesday.

I’ve found the most up-to-date information on Wayne Garcia’s “Political Whore” blog on the Tampa Creative Loafing site. Former Atlanta Loafer Steve Fennessey is also following the story on the “Resurgens” blog for Atlanta Magazine.

Meanwhile, Ken Edelstein, the former Atlanta editor fired by owner Ben Eason, has started a news blog, “Atlanta Unsheltered.” It includes commentary about the bankruptcy hearing.

Meanwhile, too, Creative Loafing has redesigned its website. I urge you to compare Ken’s site to the new Creative Loafing one. CL’s homepage is almost entirely links to other publications, whereas Ken appears to be developing his own material or at least commenting on the links that he publishes.

And furthermore….

Also, check out this discussion on former Loafer Rodger Brown’s Facebook page. CB Hackworth, another former editor of CL, participates. It’s apparently inspired in part by the rumor that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution management is about to stage a third editorial pogrom, eliminating another 25 percent of the already decimated staff. Rodger remarks that the awful content might have a lot to do with the paper’s failure and cites his own experience:

I contributed a bunch of features back in the mid-90s and the editors consistently cut anything that dared presume the reader was capable of understanding the function of a comma. I still remember an editor grimacing at me while he rewrote paragraphs, saying, “Got to get it down where the cows can get at it.” It’s that low expectation of their readers (which overwhelmed them in the post-Kovach era) that seems to have sent them careening into irrelevance and oblivion.

Oddly, I had just the opposite experience at the AJC when I was under contract to the old Sunday Magazine supplement in the ’80s. For the few years I was with them, the magazine was directed by a crew from Texas Monthly and I got to write 5,000-word stories on everything from cockroaches to mannequins. But those days ended and the magazine was eventually discontinued. (Do any dailies besides the New York Times still publish Sunday mags?)

I have written a zillion columns about the triumph of (usually snarky) style over substance in newspapers and magazines. Clients in my psychology practice often tell me that my complaints about this are generational, making me feel like one of those dinosaurs who whined constantly that TV ruined print media. One client is writing a novel in a blog-like style. Another has begun work on a graphic novel that has the post-linear style of Internet browsing.

I approach psychology from an aesthetic perspective and I’m always interested in what’s being revealed or hidden at depth by the client’s choice of images and words. I must say that clients working in these newer, experimental forms always seem shocked when I reflect subtextual themes and patterns. It’s hard for me, schooled in McLuhan, not to see thought being shaped by media. This is great for psychological inquiry. I’m not so sure about its effect on art itself.

I do work with some clients through blogging with words and images. It is always shocking to see how a single blog post will reveal something, usually unintentionally, that has been effectively hidden in one-on-one meetings, sometimes for years. In this, the blog functions much like a dream or sandtray work. It’s pretty hard to deny unconscious reality when it presents itself in concrete form. (On the other hand, I did have a perpetually annoyed client deny that she was angry, even when she produced a sandtray that featured only an alligator swallowing a baby.)

So my clients argue that what I call “snark”  or see as decontextualized images are meant to evoke associations rather than form an analytical argument or narrative. To a more linear (book-trained) mind, they say, this appears superficial. To the (younger) mind that grew up with the Internet, the image IS the narrative.

As I said, I can see this from an aesthetic perspective. As an approach to journalism, I don’t think so.

UPDATE: Wayne Garcia recounts Ben Eason’s testimony yesterday.

The bankruptcy drama at Creative Loafing continues, with Atlanta Magazine and the Sunday Paper tracking the depressing details on their websites.

I’ve resisted commenting on the latest developments for a number of reasons, but primarily because the unfolding story’s narrative style is just another expression of journalism’s decades-long death throes everywhere. The drama isn’t bringing out the heroic in anyone.

More on journalism and CL below. First a summary of where the discussion stands:

Most of the commentary on the Atlanta Mag “Resurgens” Blog is dishy, personality-oriented crap with certain former CL writers and editors declaring one another the best and brightest in the firmament of Atlanta journalism, forever and ever, amen.  The Sunday Paper’s peeps make the same claim.

Nearly everyone posting reviles Ben Eason, the owner of CL, for both alleged financial mismanagement and continuing the long habit of trying to solve economic problems by heavy-handed tampering with editorial content. Eason most recently infuriated many when he fired editor Ken Edelstein, leaving the paper with literally no editor in charge.

Eason submitted a reorganization plan last week. The main creditor wants the court to eject Eason, which it refused to do in the most recent hearing. If Eason is eventually excommunicated, many are hoping that Edelstein will be rehired. John Sugg, CL’s former senior editor, seems meantime to be teaming up with the Sunday Paper, where he published a column that turns out to have been rejected by CL because it did not disclose his own competing plans.

Patrick Best, publisher of the Sunday Paper, has made the absurd offer to buy CL for $1 million while also announcing that he is going to expand into the Charlotte and Tampa markets, further nailing shut the CL coffin with – what? — columns by Ann Coulter, comic pages and weather maps.

Commenters on the Atlanta Mag site point out that Best can barely meet his Atlanta payroll – he’s apparently behind on paying freelancers – even as he assumes the empire-building ambition that is part of the reason CL is in such trouble to begin with. Naturally, he says it’s different when he does it. He does make the appropriate utterances about the importance of content. But, believe me, the same utterances have been made over the years at CL.

Myopic analysis

Much of the discussion on Atlanta Magazine’s website is painfully myopic. The newspaper publishing industry’s problems began well before the current recession. The usual reason given is the continued rise of (not-so-) new web-based media.

Some of the commenters at Atlanta Mag are making absurd claims that Eason has an “old-man” mentality and failed to respond to trends by instantly creating the perfect online presence. These commenters also blame current web staff, the CL bureaucracy, the business model, ad infinitum, for CL’s economic woes. But the fact is that practically no existing print publications have made a successful transition to digital presence. Almost all publications, regardless of web presence, have suffered huge losses in staff and income.

A more salient critique is Eason’s decision to borrow $40 million to purchase the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper. (And why did anyone loan him that amount to begin with?)  He enraged those papers’ readers by putting the editorial staffs on an anorexic diet, firing longtime investigative reporters. Borrowing a huge amount of money to buy a publication you then proceed to castrate is a bizarre business plan.

The argument that precipitated Edelstein’s firing apparently pertained to his angrily pointing out Eason’s failure to make any cuts to the upper-management organization. Apparently, there is a thriving corporate culture at the top of the CL hierarchy, replete with all the usual perks and protections that have always made life as a publisher more secure than life as a reporter.

The expansionism and strange disregard for substantial editorial content replicate the same approach of Ben Eason’s mother, Deborah Eason, the founder of the paper. Keep in mind that Ben set up the Tampa paper back in the ‘80s, so his own participation in CL is a product of expansionist thinking. There’s also a Charlotte paper. At one point, there was a group of “suburban Loafs” in Atlanta, too. Most of this was financed with income from the Atlanta paper, which made huge amounts of money.

How huge? One of the more unpleasant memories of my tenure as editor of the Atlanta paper was sitting through many adversarial meetings with Debbie Eason over editorial salaries. My staff had independently surveyed other alternative papers in the country and CL was by far the lowest-paying. I had to find ways to supplement my income during most of the 7 years I was editor.

Meanwhile, it turned out that CL’a comptroller had embezzled in the neighborhood of  $1 million, which was not even noticed. He happened to panic and admit what he’d done. I well remembered his telling me, time after time, with a worried look on his face that he knew CL’s editorial employees were vastly underpaid but that, honestly, there just wasn’t the money there to pay them more.

Eventually, Debbie struggled to do the right thing by increasing salaries and paying more attention to editorial content. Much of what was problematic about her was also her asset – persistence, loyalty to longtime contributors and staffers, and, seriously, a visionary attitude toward the Internet.  I have plenty of respect for her.

Another myopic aspect of the discussion is the apparent belief that CL has ignored the changes in journalism. I find this claim staggering. The reason I decided to go back to school for a master’s degree in psychology (and, later, a PhD) was because journalism ceased to be intellectually challenging and fun. I’ve raged about this too much, no doubt, but journalism has been deteriorating at least since 1982 when USA Today began publishing telegram-length news stories and analysis, all gussied up with colorful graphics.

CL has for years been part of that movement. Ken Edelstein managed to build a highly competent staff that has done some great investigative reporting. I think he’s the best editor the paper’s ever had. However, I think it would be wrong to say that CL hasn’t been part of the movement away from the writing of depth that characterized much of alternative media’s original mission. (The Chicago Reader, as I recall, was infamous for printing a hugely long story on beekeeping back in the ‘70s.)

A final observation about the discussion on Atlanta Mag’s site: Back in the mid-‘80s, following my first stint as editor of CL, I moved to Houston to edit the nation’s largest regional design magazine. (It ended up merging with the city magazine.) Houston’s economy was already crashing when I got there, but it was well over a year before the magazine’s revenues were affected. This was in great part because our readership was mainly the wealthy. The crash eventually hit the magazine, too, and I lost my job.

Might we not see something of the same with Atlanta Magazine and the crop of northside publications (like the Atlantan)? They’re going to feel the effects of the tanking economy later than publications with less prosperous readers. Then, perhaps, we can blame their failure to develop the right web presence too.

Personal: Headcase

As I reported last month, the paper discontinued my Headcase column after more than 15 years in order to “save money.” I was in need of a break, so I wasn’t as upset as I might have been. I’ve been shocked by the number of people who have approached me personally to ask about my disappearance from print.  I’ve also gotten a zillion emails and I’m pretty tired of explaining what happened.

I have to say that I was very annoyed when, after so many years, Ken Edelstein did not respond to my request to write a farewell column (for free) to run in the usual online space for Headcase. I wanted to do that, so I could point people there and thank my longtime readers.

Now, I do find myself collecting stuff for commentary, so I may look for a new publisher soon. I’ve been twice contacted by syndicates in the past, so maybe I’ll look into that, too. Anyway, I appreciate all the email.

I hope Creative Loafing comes through this period. It’s been part of my life for over 20 years and, despite its ample shortcomings, I still think it beats the competition by a mile.

I’ve been involved with Creative Loafing for over 25 years. I was editor for 7 years back in the ’80s and I’ve written my food column, “Grazing,” for them for more than 20 years. “Headcase” is nearly as old.

This week, the paper laid off several of its top writers/editors. I also hear that Atlanta Magazine laid off eight people and two more quit. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s editorial staff underwent its own pogrom earlier. And today, Cox Enterprises, which owns the AJC, announced it was selling all but three of its many newspapers. The AJC is among the survivors….for now.

Magazines and newspapers have seen their ad revenues steadily decline, along with subscriptions, for quite a few years now. With the general downturn in the economy — a downturn I believe is much more severe than is being reported — things have only gotten worse. Then too there’s the fact that people are relying more and more on the Internet for their news coverage. Many publications, including Creative Loafing, are scrambling to increase their online presence.

I find this depressing, to say the least. It has never been easy in our culture to make a living as a writer. You have to really love the work to try to make a career of it. Part of my own disenchantment was always that, to make a better salary, I had to work as an editor instead of as a writer. It was a see-saw existence.

Like many people, I tried to bail. I went back to school in the ’90s for advanced degrees in psychology. The turning point for me was that, even though I always had more freelance offers than I could accept, story length was so truncated that it just wasn’t much fun to write any more. When I was writing regularly for the AJC’s Sunday magazine supplement, Atlanta Weekly, I routinely wrote pieces up to 5,000 words on some pretty damn arcane pop-culture phenomena.

That’s unheard of now outside a few national publications. People argue that you don’t need “length” to pursue a subject in depth. That’s just absurd. It may be that this shortening of news and features to sound-bytes is a reflection of what has occurred in the general culture. But the media have certainly reinforced it, so that critical thinking of any depth is virtually nonexistent in the so-called mainstream media.

I rarely watch television, but when I do, I’m always stunned by the apparent collaboration of guests and hosts to pass off fact-free assertions of opinion as “truth.” Alleged journalists repeatedly fail to confront politicians with hard questions.

There’s always the same rationale: “I’m entitled to my opinion,” people say, leaving unstated the implicit assertion, “even if it is a mixture of distortions of the facts and outright lies that appeal to people’s primal fears.”

You see the same thing on newspaper editorial pages now. The AJC, in its bid to be “fair and balanced,” can’t even bring itself to take a stand without allowing someone to write a cliche-ridden, unresearched, oppositional rant in immediate reply. Time and again, studies have demonstrated that a consistent percentage of people are swayed by fact-free emotional assertions, especially if they arouse fear.

What is “fair and balanced” about allowing people to lie and distort the truth? It was almost shocking when the New York Times recently rejected John McCain’s reply to a column by Barack Obama. The reason, the editors told him, was that his reply didn’t address anything of actual substance in Obama’s column. (Of course, this leaves one wondering why they print Bill Kristol’s column once a week.)

I’m ranting.

My columns in Creative Loafing have been repeatedly truncated like all else in print journalism. I’ve tried to adjust but it was particularly hard with “Headcase,” whose earlier incarnation as “Paradigms” allowed me to take up some really complex subjects pertaining to psychology and culture.

Ironically, during the last two years, after completing the seven-year ordeal of getting a PhD, I’ve done more writing than psychological work, becoming poorer than I’ve been in many years.

The thing that stupefies me about the layoffs at Creative Loafing and the changing content of the paper is that it’s a complete reiteration of the ’80s. Back then, when I was editor, we continually battled over whether we should be doing reporting and analysis or focusing on so-called directional copy — telling readers where to go to do what. Judging by the homepage that CL has created, that is the direction it’s moving again.

I’m not saying this might not be necessary. When I edited Creative Loafing’s main competitor, the Atlanta Gazette in the late ’70s, as the market got more competitive, we moved more and more in the direction of celebrity journalism and directional copy ourselves. The Gazette eventually died but CL survived (after undergoing bankruptcy reorganization).

It goes without saying that directional copy is a lot cheaper to produce than original news and feature stories. This may be grandiose to ask, but who the hell is going to take the notion of the Fourth Estate seriously anymore? Time and again, we’ve seen how the media participated in the Iraq invasion by failing to challenge any of the (faked) data the Bush administration produced. The media continue to broadcast and print assertions of public officials without bothering to check them out.

And we all know that journalism, whether broadcast or print, is dedicated to entertainment now. It has very little to do with the Fourth Estate’s demand that journalists’ relationship to government officials be adversarial. Content is based on what (publishers think that) people find amusing. The only muckrakers around now are bloggers like Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. Even comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart do a better job of exposing the corrupt underbelly of the political class. True, their work adheres to the notion of journalism as entertainment, but employs biting satire (of the media themselves) instead of the maudlin or sensational that typifies most content today.

The Internet is the ideal place for the “new journalism.” I’ve cited McLuhan a good bit in my writing lately. His famous dictum that “the medium is the message” is pertinent here. With the Net, you mainly get not only the replacement of deep thinking by sound bytes and the gradual loss of substance. You also get the abiding sense that nothing is true. Anything you read in cyberspace can be immediately refuted, factually or not, by a site three clicks away. You also get so-called “trolls” commenting on a lot of stories. One of their favorite devices is to write scathing replies to assertions that the writer never even made, further eroding any notion of the truth.

I came of age during the Watergate era of investigative journalism. Arguably, our republic was saved by the work of journalists who exposed the corruption that had overtaken the White House. Incredibly, though, Nixon’s offenses were tiny compared to Bush’s, and the media, far from exposing Bush, has enabled his administration’s criminal and destructive actions, rarely reporting the truth until they are cornered by embarrassment. An example is the recent revelation that most of the “military specialists” employed by broadcast media directly benefit from painting a rosy picture of what’s happening in Iraq. With the exception of CNN, nobody would comment on this. See? The truth isn’t nearly as important as a gratifying lie.

I know this is a basically formless rant. I guess these layoffs at CL remind me of the diminishing quality of journalism everywhere. That in turn evokes a blend of nostalgia for journalism that took itself seriously and a terrible regret for the difficult life writers have in our society, especially those who want to do more than amuse readers with glib language and stenographic “reporting.”