Friday, September 13, 2002
 any time i post to metafilter i get more and more depressed.
there used to be a time when i thought that many of these people were some of the smartest people around. now i just wonder.
i know it's friday the thirteenth, but it still worries me when others just dont get it.
and strangely enough, even smart people dont understand the beauty of blogs like this one.
i dont say that in a conceited way, i say that in a stylistic way. what i think this blog represents, as chris c. (who turned me on to that LA Times story first, thanks Chris) stated one of his comments, is that it fills the gap between analyzing hard news and talking about very mundane personal trivalties.
one of the best things about blogging, in my opionion is that you can get a glimpse of a real live person and what theyre up to and how theyre living, minus their personal politics. not everyone wants to know these things, but i do. i totally love people. i love humanity. i want to know what it's like for 16 year old Nay who is being homeschooled in Orlando. i want to know what its like for thirtysomething year old flagrant to be 6 feet tall and 97 pounds and yet still jet setting.
i couldnt give a rats ass what life is like for Bob Greene, or Oprah, or Dr. Phil or Sally Jesse because in lots of ways i think those people are huge fakers who are living a life so removed from me that i couldnt identify with them or learn from them if i wanted to-- and i dont want to!
on 9/11 i was watching mtv and suchin park was on one of the phones and she was talking to a teenage girl who lived in new york and she was asking her "what is it like to be 16 and living in the wake of all this?" and i wanted to yell at the tv and say, "suchin, just get on the damn web and check out a blog, or an open diary, or live journal and it is so easy to see!"
hell, kids today tell you what theyre listening to, what theyre wearing, what their boyfriends got in a fight with them over, everything.
here we are in the Information Age and you're using a corded telephone on national tv to ask someone a mile away "what is your life like?"
and the girl on the other end said just like i said,
"uh."
where to begin.
one of the metafilter kids questioned my preminition that the LA Times will go down one day if they keep writing crappy articles like the one i will shut up about. that worried me.
in the last twenty years we have seen a lot of things fall, literally and figuratively, that we would have never expected. communism, billion dollar companies, oj, michael jackson, the berlin wall, russia, and the twin towers.
no one could have ever predicted any of that.
we've also seen in the last 20 years the rise of things that were equally unpredicatable: free music, free porn, the Internet, cheap long distance, $50,000 pick up trucks, white rappers winning grammys, and the incredibly inept bush family dominating american politics.
so in the wake of all of that is the idea that a silly newspaper in a no-newspaper town going down such a ridiculous speculation?
it isnt.
and la times, i know you read me. i see you in my referal logs. im serious when i tell you that you should hire me and my friends. but the problem is there is no such thing as the LA Times. there is no one "thing". the Times is merely a collection of perfectly fine human beings who all happen to get a paycheck signed by similar people.
the building downtown is not the Times, robert hilburn isnt the Times, the newsprint isnt the Times, the ghost of Jim Murray isnt the Times-- that paper is a collective of professional writers and artists and editors and ad people. if some new paper rolled into town offering similar money and called itself something different and everyone moved over to the new paper, the new paper would be the LA Times with a different name.
what the Times needs, and what LA needs are different people, different writers, and a different objective. the objective shouldnt be to simply put out a paper, it should be to put out the finest newspaper in the world.
as someone who has lived in LA for more than half of my life, it doesnt sit well with me that new york has what is regarded as better Anything than LA.
the LA Times can put out a better paper than the NY Times without competition. in NY if someone wants to leak something, they have a half dozen newspapers to go to. Here in LA, if they want their story to really hit the masses, they only have one.
But it rarely happens here.
And I think it's because the Times, now owned by the Chicago-based Tribune Corp. doesnt really give a fuck. unless they do something completely offensive they will continue to get subscribers and advertisers, and as long as they keep buying up the small community papers they will avoid competition. but unfortunately their product suffers and so do their readers.
thankfully, the Internet has arrived and if we want to know whats happening in LA we are no longer tied to the teet of the Times, who have been far more interested in news items outside of the 213, 310, 323 and 818 for more than a decade.
this weekend go to LABlogs.com and click around. i bet you that if you give yourself an hour, you will have a greater grasp of what is really happening here in tinsletown than if you spent an hour with our local page.
me, i will be in my computer room trying to change the world
for the better.
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Previously on busblog...
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