The decline of the LA Weekly is a particularly depressing thing for your contributing editor, and I imagine for a good number of us Arthur contributors. Though your contrib editor’s arrival in Los Angeles in the late ’90s post-dates its true heyday as a bastion for long-form journalism, checks from LA Weekly put plenty of food in this freelancer’s refrigerator. The editor I worked with most — regular Arthur contributor and heroic Diamanda Galas profiler John Payne — still contributes, but is long gone as a staff editor, and many fine editors, writers and fact-checkers have fallen since.

Political columnist Marc Cooper left a couple months ago, and though he’s been kinda “meh” lately, dude used to report from Central American warzones and managed to weather several years under the noxious heel of New Times management. He finally spilled all the beans on his blog just the other day. Even if you’re not from Los Angeles it’s a worthwhile read when it comes to laying out how shitty newspapers have gotten in the last decade. As Cooper points out, the Weekly used to be mentioned in the same breath as Harper’s and The New Yorker. What’s this week’s cover story? Something about porno dudes and their dumb meth-erection feud with a headline that I can’t even bother to decipher. If genius food journalist (and the author of the 1989 NWA cover story up top there) Jonathan Gold would just start his own web-log we could be done with that fishwrapper forever (via LA Observed).

Choice quotes after the jump, or go read the whole infuriating kajillion word account over at Cooper’s blog.

When the L.A. Weekly and I parted ways two month ago, I promised a more detailed report. Here it is. It’s more like an autopsy on a paper that once was.

I thought many times about spending the time to write this over the past few weeks. In the end, I wondered, who cares? And worse, this can come off as sour grapes.

I can’t really answer the first doubt. As to the second question, let me be very clear. I lost most interest in the Weekly a couple of years ago when it was taken over by the New Times chain and I made it a very small part of my professional and personal life. I wrote the income from it out of my personal budget and diverted all Weekly checks into a retirement fund.

Indeed, I was so turned off by what I saw happening that I visited my Weekly office exactly three times in the last two years, mostly to pick up accumulated checks in my mailbox. During election week in November, I was given a layoff notice with a generous settlement.

They had lost interest in me and I was too expensive. With very few exceptions, I had long lost interest in them, too. It was a miracle, in fact, that I had lasted the two years since New Times took over the Weekly. Fair enough.

…

The paper has fired, pushed out or let go its top deputy editor who managed most of its cover stories over the last five years. It fired its managing editor — and with no intention to replace her ( this is a first in newspaper history I think). It fired its dazzling News Editor — and my friend Alan Mittelstaedt– and has shrunk and twisted its news gathering operation which took more than a decade to build into a competitive and credible local watchdog. The paper’s two prize-winning investigative reporters quickly bailed to other papers. Other long-time staff writers have been fired. Others have chosen exile. The Weekly’s fact-checking department has been abolished. Its copy editing department has been decapitated. It design staff decimated. Its free-lance rates — once competitive with any other publication in town — have been chopped and the overall free-lance budget has been almost obliterated. Writers’ rates that once topped a dollar a word have been cut by half or more (for the few writers who can still squeeze out an assignment).

More to the point, the 30-year-old Weekly’s heart and soul has been scooped out by a corporate management that seems hell-bent on a suicidal tack. The Weekly once distinguished itself by being, alone with the Village Voice, the only major metro weekly in America willing to focus on national and international coverage beyond the local boho bar scene. It had a real and substantial editorial budget. The Weekly was read avidly for 30 years by an audience that relished not only its excellent cultural, film and music coverage, but primarily its bold and prominent political writing– including a rich menu of commentary and opinion. Its reporters were, not infrequently, sent across the country and sometimes around the world to write 10,000-word cover stories that could be found nowhere else. It now boggles the imagination when I remember –in a different era—reporting from South Africa, El Salvador, Cuba and from within various national presidential campaigns—for the L.A. Weekly. And these were not just second-rate self-absorbed wannabe writers who were on the road. I’m in great company when I note that those of us who wrote those stories also worked for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Vogue, and the Sunday magazines of the Los Angeles and New York Times. We wrote for the Weekly because we chose to write for the Weekly – certainly not because we had to.

…

The results of all this? Fairly catastrophic, I would say. And that’s with the full-on debacle yet to come. The L.A. Weekly press run is currently down about 30% or more from its peak of 210,000. That means they can’t even give away as many copies as in the past. The weekly number of printed pages has fallen to just above 100 when in the past it hovered at and beyond 200 (once even touching 352 pages). Even special editions, ones that carry years of tradition and loyalty, like the recent restaurant edition, are but shadows of the past. One of the most savvy of long-time New Times watchers once told me — years ago– “the guys who run these newspapers run them like they already know the shut-down date.” It seems they now might finally get their wish.

Keep reading over at Marc Cooper’s blog.