#Village its very village voicey full

But I would be dishonest if I said that if structural changes weren’t made, it could have survived.

So would I have handled it and communicated it way differently? A hundred percent. Weekly is still around and viable, and other publications are not, whether that’s the Village Voice or OC Weekly, is because I ripped off the Band-Aid and made really tough choices. Weekly was,without being dramatic, in a death spiral. Maybe that would have changed some of the narrative about me or what we were trying to do.īut at the end of the day, L.A. On the staffing side, I could have gone and met with every individual person and talked to them once we made the acquisition. And I wanted to make sure that I had wound up that relationship because it was 10 years of my life. For example, the first story that came out about secret owners or whatever - the only reason that I wasn’t named initially was because I was still under employment at another large media company in a competitive market. Some of the things that happened were novice mistakes that were perceived as somehow veiled or malicious but in fact were simple oversights. Yes, I 100% would have done things differently. People hit up the sales reps and often they want press, and we can’t and wouldn’t sell press, but we can sell sponsored content, where they can tell their own story in their own words. We have standards - there’s certain stuff that obviously we won’t take, anything that’s illegal or illicit or libel or slanderous. Times - run sponsored content, but there’s a piece that went up last month on the Weekly, for instance, that amounts to a press release about a commander of the Peshmerga Forces in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, promoting his social media accounts. Weekly under your tenure has been criticized for leaning heavily on sponsored content. If demand from both readership and advertisers is greater than that, then we’ll just expand it. Getting a physical print product out is an incredibly expensive process, but I can make a quarterly publication work from a quality-of-journalism perspective, a conservation-of-resources perspective, but also a revenue perspective.

The idea behind the quarterly, frankly, is that it’s safe from an economic perspective. I realized after 10 months that I wasn’t able to do that.ĭo you think your personal politics are in conflict with running historically left-leaning alt-weeklies? An opportunity came up with the think tank, and I thought, maybe I can move the needle in that direction. At that time in my intellectual progression I was like, “I think I can fix the Republican Party.” If the Republican Party was conservative on taxation and economics but was progressive on social issues, then it would be in my mind a better situation. So I am now “decline to state,” and I have been for many years.Īnd it’s so funny because, people are always like, “Oh, the Claremont Institute!” I was 26 years old and it was a 10-month stint. I was an independent and then for a brief period of a few years turned to Republican and then I was like, I can’t do this either. No, my grandfather was a union Democrat and worked in a bakery. You’re not a Trump supporter but you were a conservative commentator at the Register, and worked at the Claremont Institute. I read a story saying I was a white heterosexual Trump supporter from Orange County - I’m half-white, I’m not heterosexual, I didn’t support Trump and I wasn’t born in Orange County. If you read stuff about me online, it would be very hard to piece that together. I was born in Whittier, and then we moved to Chino, out in the Inland Empire.

#Village its very village voicey full

When we weren’t living with my grandmother, my mom was on welfare and food stamps for a time, and she ended up working three jobs, and I went to community college, as the first person in my family to go to college, and then transferred to USC, and then because I performed pretty well on the speech and debate team at both Mount SAC and USC I got offered essentially a full ride to grad school at Cal State L.A.ĭid you spend your whole childhood in Southern California? Everyone thinks I’m this super-rich billionaire that had a silver spoon in my mouth and magically went to USC, but no, I grew up super poor. You lived with your grandmother growing up?įor a time, yeah. So I grew up in a household with a very, very New Yorker grandmother. My grandmother’s from New York, God rest her soul.