Mar 25, 2007 04:07 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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Just three days after the paper's publisher axed the whole section, the L.A. Times' Sunday "Current" supplement is on newsstands, good as new.
Well, more like actually new—the staff had to more or less start over when all the pieces selected by guest-editor Brian Grazer were pulled in the midst of a COI scandal. The LAT's opinion page editor, Andres Martinez, resigned Thursday when the section was killed, and the remaining staff had to pull together a replacement under the direction of op-ed editor Nicholas Goldberg and deputy Current editor Gary Spiecker. With a Friday night press deadline, the Current staff had two days to do something that usually takes over a week.
We caught up with Goldberg over e-mail yesterday and asked him how they did it.
The bottom line is that the situation was not as bad as it sounded. "Some of [what is in today's issue] is stuff that was going in the section anyway (Grazer was only going to fill about two-thirds of the section), some of it was already in hand for next week, and some of it had been planned for the daily op ed page."
How did he feel about it, now that it was done?
"I think the final product is just fine. It was lucky for us that this happened in a week when we had a lot of extra pieces on hand. Sometimes the cupboard is bare, but this week we happened to have what we needed to put a section together much more quickly than usual."
Goldberg told Gawker that no final decision has been made about what will happen to the articles that Brian Grazer commissioned as guest-editor. According to a letter from the LAT's publisher, that pile is heavy with manuscripts by "Paul Ekman on lie detection; Andr Leon Talley on fashion and status; Eric Kandel on the brain and psychotherapy; Dalton Conley on political polling and bias; Shepard Fairy with a special illustration; Marty Singer on the increasingly brazen tabloids and paparazzi; and Sam Hall Kaplan on L.A."
Will we ever get to see this article on L.A.!? Grazer hopes so. "We came up with a collection of essays and art that I think readers would have found genuinely stimulating," Grazer said in a statement Thursday. "My hope now is that we can find another way to present the results of our efforts to the audience it deserves."
In his e-mail yesterday, Goldberg said the editors are going to "sit down and talk about that next week." This is sort of like If I Did It! —LEON
Current [LAT]
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