PART ONE: CONCEPTION

    I’m sitting at my desk in the offices of The San Fernando Valley Weekly across Cahuenga from Universal Studios. I’m the editor, responsible for the entire editorial content of the paper, giving assignments, editing copy, working with other editors, hiring artists, journalists, cartoonists, columnists, and critics. Even though I’ve never held this position before, it’s a job I was born to do, and I have been doing it for several months from the Coachella Valley, 90 miles east of L.A., where I was originally hired. 
    The San Fernando Valley Weekly will contain within it a print version of Disinfotainment Today, a newspaper I’ve been putting out from my home for the past year, though paper has nothing to do with it. Yeah, it’s on the net, where anybody can post anything and declare themselves published, yet the very process of cranking out a newspaper week after week has taught me invaluable lessons concerning news and publishing. This self-publishing experience, plus my decades as a professional journalist, tell me I know what I’m doing, though each new job is always a voyage of discovery. 
    I’ve just moved to the San Fernando Valley to prepare Issue #1, which will be distributed for free all across Los Angeles, as a genuine alternative challenge to the other alternative papers in the city. We’re going to show the world what the word “alternative” is all about.
    Yeah, right. The only thing missing is the desk and the newspaper. The L.A. Weekly need not worry. The San Fernando Valley Weekly ain't gonna happen, and not just because I’m an editor who uses the word “ain’t.” It wasn't so big a fiasco as fiascoes go, just your average fiasco if you think about it. Some fiascoes seem to go on forever. This one only took up three months of my time. But it was close, folks. Very very close.

    My involvement with the paper started with Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, which instituted the GAIN program, a Federal employment agency with mandatory enrollment for everyone on the dole, like me. (Long story, another time, at a bar with a bottle of Chinaco) This program has worked for millions of welfare recipients, finding them jobs and getting them off assistance. It hasn’t worked for me for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the fact I’m stuck in the middle of the desert, miles from civilization, without any transportation, public or private. Working from anywhere but home is impossible, and because of this, I’ve been exempt from GAIN for years.
    Everything changed this January when I was assigned a new GAIN social worker who insisted I participate by coming into the offices. I said “you’ll have to come get me,” and darned if the next Monday, a government vehicle didn’t find me in the middle of the desert and bring me 30 miles away to the nearest GAIN office to help me find employment. They told me if I found a job they would NOT come get me and bring me to and from work every day so the whole thing seemed pretty futile, but not un-governmental. What the hell. I had nothing better to do.
    GAIN’s idea of finding you work is aggressively single-minded. They are only interested in jobs with an hourly wage. Tell them you’re a writer who gets paid by the word and their eyes glaze over. They’re not interested in artists who sell things; they’re interested in regular employment and paychecks with tax taken out.
    You show up in the morning and participate in some sort of self-help seminar, teaching you how to create résumés, what to wear, how to develop self-esteem, how to conduct yourself at an interview, etc. There are guest lecturers, government produced “motivation” films, all in a room where the walls are covered in mottoes like “ATTITUDE is a little thing that makes a BIG difference” and “Change your thoughts and you change your world.” After an hour or so of this, all participants are given Xerox’s of that day’s classifieds from the local daily, along with a sheet for you to fill out listing all your actual interviews, with a daily minimum that varies per case.
    If you’re not dressed properly, they take you to a room full of straight looking clothes and say “pick what you want.” If you can’t find anything that fits, they give you a voucher for K-Mart. If your car is broken, they help you fix it. If you don’t have a car, they push you out the door with a bus pass and say, “Go get ‘em, tiger.” The next day, you have to show up with the form filled out showing all the places you applied for work. If you don’t, you risk losing the pennies a day you need to feed your children.
    I started searching the classifieds with little hope of stumbling across anything in my profession, but there it was, three small sentences that said “WRITER with 4 Year Degree, fun, creative, hip. Also Cartoon Artist. Call xxx-xxxx.” Gloriosky, someone looking for a writer. I was fun. I was creative. I was hip. It’s true I not only don’t have a 4 year degree, I never graduated high school, but this was never an issue in any of the thousands of professional writing assignments I’ve fulfilled for local, national, and international magazines and newspapers over the years. It made GAIN tear their hair out, but rather than follow their recommendation and get a GED before applying for work, I went to the phone room, got an outside line, and made the call. 
    I got Jan de Grat on the phone. He told me he was starting a new newspaper. I explained that I didn’t have a degree but had years of journalistic experience. He said it didn’t make any difference, he just put that in the ad to keep kids away. He agreed to see me.
    And so a government vehicle took me from the GAIN office to a residential neighborhood in Palm Desert, to a street of perfectly groomed houses except for one under construction where I had my first GAIN appointment for employment.
    The house was a mess, in the midst of a total remodeling, with drop cloths and scattered furniture, ceilings torn apart, a big screen TV in the living room, and a side room full of computers. Jan was online to e-Bay when I met him, trying to buy a classic car. He was apparently publishing a newspaper from his living room. I found out he was an ex-cop, a self-made millionaire who had made his money in real estate by buying houses or hotels for cash, fixing them up, and selling them for double, like the one we were in. He casually mentioned that he paid $6,000 a month in alimony so I presume he was loaded.
     He would need to be. Conventional wisdom states that new publications can reasonably expect to be operating in the red for at least a year before going into profit, so starting a newspaper is a sizable investment. I’ve been involved in numerous publishing ventures that looked great at the start but folded after just a few issues, so I know how wrong things can go. Jan was starting a newspaper all by himself, no other investors, spending nothing but his own capital to get it going. This was a good thing if he could really afford it because having only one owner offered a type of freedom missing from the rest of the corporate owned media.
    It turned out we had worked together but never met. He had been at The L.A. Weekly when it first started in the 80s, delivering papers at the same time I was getting printed for the first time. He remembered how the paper struggled at first and he was determined not to make the same mistakes.
    He hated what The L.A. Weekly was now and missed the days when it was a true alternative. I didn’t have a warm feeling for the place either since, after 10 years of being in every issue, I was one of the first writers fired when new management took over in the 90s. Did I want to go up against them? You bet.
    His paper would be called The San Fernando Valley Weekly, and it would be free, just like The L.A. Weekly. Though the title contained the words “San Fernando Valley,” it would be distributed citywide. He had bought the title “San Fernando Valley Weekly” along with a bunch of other names for newspapers, and he spoke of all of them as “his papers,” like someone who had registered a bunch of domain names might refer to them as “their websites.” 
    I asked why he was doing this in Palm Desert instead of the San Fernando Valley, and he clued me into the bigger plan. He had purchased the names of every available “Weekly” paper in the country, including The Santa Barbara Weekly, The Hawaii Weekly, and dozens of others. The idea was to get one going and then syndicate it to the other cities, each new paper being cheaper to publish since the content would remain the same from city to city. He wanted to start an empire.
    I said it could work as long as content was divided between global and local, maybe 50/50. The global content could travel from city to city, but the local calendar would have to be done from local offices. He agreed. 
    He said he was looking for writers. I asked about the rest of the staff and he said so far he was it. I immediately thought about upgrading my application to editor. I explained that I already put out a free newspaper on the net and that it could easily transfer into print. I said I could fill the entire global content of his paper without working up a sweat, and that it would work for ALL his papers, but he still had to open offices in the San Fernando Valley for local coverage. The paper needed an entire entertainment section, film, music, and stage writers, not from Palm Desert but actually in the San Fernando Valley.
    I told him there was nothing at a newspaper that I couldn’t do, and I had the clips to prove it. If the photographer didn’t show up and the subject was in the waiting room, I could not only take the picture, I could develop it and print it. I’ve been proofreading for years and I know how to give assignments, get them back, edit them, and print them. I went on and on. He got it. 
    He was putting a newspaper staff together from the bottom up, which I knew was all wrong. “You don’t have an editor?” I said. He said no. I said “why don’t you publish and I’ll edit?” He said sure, though final credit would be determined later as the staff came together. I had a job. I was the editor of The San Fernando Valley Weekly. 
    And so a government vehicle took me back to the GAIN office where I explained I had the job, and a pretty good one at that, my dream job, but like most jobs in journalism, it didn’t pay until publication, which would be months away. They said fine as long as my boss signed a letter saying I had the job. That he did, freeing me from the GAIN program to put a brand new newspaper together. Thank you, Bill Clinton.

PART TWO: GESTATION

    Jan needed me to show up at his house three days a week and GAIN wouldn’t help me get there. This problem was solved when an old friend mysteriously showed up out of the blue.
    Andre Hakim Zanuck was a millionaire on paper but a hobo every other way. Occasionally his famous family estate would be obligated to release some cash to him. Whatever the amount, most of it would be eaten up by immediate debts and the rest would be squandered within months. 
    Andre felt guilty that I didn't have a car, as well he might since he contributed to my lack of one. (Long story, another time, by a campfire with marshmallows) When he found himself in possession of an extra car, he decided to loan it to me. He showed up at my door unannounced, before I had time to hide any alcohol in the house, and told me if I went with him to Fontana, I could pick up a Toyota and bring it back for an indefinite period of time. The car was legal and registered to him. (A first!) Little knowing if I would ever see my children again, I hopped in with him, took a ride to Fontana, and magically took delivery of the very thing I needed, a car to take me to my new job. 
    It was a 45-minute drive to Jan’s house. First thing, I tried to clearly define our positions, that I’d be in charge of editorial, and he would be in charge of advertising since that was his primary concern. This turned out to be a problem since Jan couldn’t tell the difference.
    He had gathered Weekly papers from around the country. Together, we went through them keeping tabs on the advertising to editorial ratio, discovering that for a paper to be free, the ratio was one page of editorial to every two pages of advertising. We disagreed over the formula because Jan genuinely couldn’t distinguish between editorial and advertising. He was constantly blurring the lines. He wanted to give away free space to advertisers and I said, “only if it’s clearly labeled as advertising.” 
    “Why?”
    “Because the reader has to be able to tell the difference between an editorial statement and a plug. EVERY ad says they’re the best, but when editorial says something is the best, it’s because a reporter who was not getting paid by the advertiser went out and tried a bunch of burgers and came to a personal conclusion based upon their own taste.”
    “I don’t decide where to eat based on the food critic,” Jan said. “Who knows what they like? I make my decisions based upon the ads.”
    “That’s why you’ve got me in charge of editorial. You don’t care about editorial. I do. When I look at a newspaper, I SKIP the ads.”
    I explained it a million difference ways and it always looked as though he got it. He insisted the success or failure of the paper was dependent upon ad rates. Nobody really read or cared about editorial, and he quoted some cockamamie poll that showed less than 50% of people who picked up a newspaper actually read the articles.
    I saw this as a good thing. You can always get away with more with an absentee landlord. I wanted a publisher who didn’t give a shit about what I was doing. Someone who didn’t understand it. Someone who would leave it all to me. Someone who would take my advice.
    One day Jan told me he had finished the table of contents, which was strange since there were no contents. I explained that the table of contents was the VERY LAST thing you put together, not the first.
    He didn’t like long pieces. He liked editorial decisions that backed his worldview, which was “short attention span for reading.” I couldn’t argue with that. I like a lot of short news items, and intended on using hundreds in each issue, surrounding the longer pieces. Jan questioned the need for longer pieces altogether. I explained that, at the very least, the cover story had to be full length, and other than that you had to decide on a case by case basis how long a particular piece deserved to be.

    In a remarkable coincidence, that first week Jay Levin, the editor and founder of The L.A. Weekly, my boss for 10 years whom I hadn’t heard from in ages, gave me a call. He was in town and wanted to get together. I told him about Jan and my new gig and he agreed to meet with both of us. Jan and I had quarreled over a lot of issues concerning how a paper is put together, and I used Jay to back me up. “A paper lives or dies based upon the credibility of the editorial department,” he said. “Your readers have got to believe in the integrity of your writers.”

    Jan and I gave each other credibility. He had no credibility whatsoever in the field of journalism; I had no credibility in the world of finance. There was no way to find out ANYTHING about him. His only credibility was his bank account, which, of course, I never actually saw.

    I, on the other hand, barely have a bank account, but have journalistic credibility up the wazoo. My life is an open book. Bob Woodward wrote about me. CBS made a movie-of-the-week about me. Everything I’ve ever done, from dealing drugs to dodging the draft to getting charged with being a child pornographer, is on display for everyone to see.

    I had what he needed, journalistic expertise and an editorial plan. He had what I needed, money and a business plan. We were then, and remain, perfect partners as long as one of us isn’t a megalomaniac trying to control the other.

    After a while, it became clear that Jan’s lack of journalistic experience was getting in the way. He kept making creative suggestions. Some were good, but most I knew were impractical. He had no idea how things really worked. I expected him to be putting together the ad staff while I put together the editorial staff, but he didn’t understand why our film critic couldn’t also be our film ad salesman. “This is going to be a team effort,” he said. “Everyone’s going to wear a lot of hats.”
    I explained that for every department in editorial, there needed to be an equal opposite in advertising. When an ad rep accepts money from an advertiser, that’s called a “sale.” When someone in editorial takes money from an advertiser, that’s called a “bribe.” My writers won’t accept bribes. That’s why they can’t be the same person. It can’t even LOOK LIKE our writers are being paid by the people they’re writing about. That’s what Jay Levin was talking about when he mentioned “the credibility of the editorial department.” The further the editorial department is from the ad department, the more credibility we have. That’s why Consumer Reports has more credibility than any other magazine; they don’t accept advertising, proving conclusively that their articles aren’t influenced by anything other than the truth.
    Same with my paper. Anybody who reads Disinfotainment Today for the advertising is an idiot because there is no advertising, which is just about the strongest way possible to adhere to the journalistic code of ethics. It's not that advertisers haven't tried. Advertising doesn't appear in Disinfotainment Today because advertising is BANNED from Disinfotainment Today. People have attempted to place their ads in it and I have turned them down because Disinfotainment Today not only can't be bought, it can't even have the APPEARANCE of being bought.
    When I was a film critic at The L.A. Weekly, making $50 a week, a film company offered me $5,000 to give their film a good review. I turned them down, even though I was giving the film a good review anyway. (Ethics or stupidity? You decide.) Another time a film company canceled an ad because of one of my reviews. “What are you going to do when somebody cancels an ad because of something in editorial?” I asked Jan. “It’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. And when it does, it’s going to be my job to protect the writer from YOU.”
    “I understand that,” he said.
    He had strong ideas of how the ad side of the paper was going to work. First of all, he said he wasn’t going to accept all the X-rated porno ads that filled the back of most free papers. He wanted to attract the sort of advertisers, like real estate, who didn’t want to see their ads next to such stuff. He didn’t want to offend our female audience. It made no difference to me, though I somehow doubted he’d follow through with it once he discovered he needed more advertising revenue, and that porn ads brought around $80,000 a week into The L.A. Weekly coffers.

    Jan had called the studios to try to get some film ads and made a startling discovery. They didn’t pay for ads in free papers, they gave ‘em away and considered you lucky to have such fabulous graphics in your paper, which people wouldn’t bother to pick up in the first place unless the calendar was full of film ads. They knew you needed them more than they needed you and they acted accordingly. Interesting ploy. A publication like ours needed film advertising to look legitimate. We wanted their ads whether we got paid for them or not. Good for them. Bad for any publication looking for film ad revenue.
    He also discovered that the heads of studio publicity departments are REALLY impressed by guys they’ve never heard of starting newspapers they don’t need. They treated him like crap and he was actually surprised.
    I explained to Jan that he shouldn’t expect people in Hollywood to return his phone calls. At a certain level of publicity, people only deal with those they’ve dealt with before. “You have no idea how hard it is to get studios to work with you,” I said. “They won’t even let you into screenings of their films, much less give you access to their stars unless you play ball by their rules. Getting enough credentials for a studio to take you seriously and invite you to their screenings can take years. I’m going to cut through the crap by getting us a film critic who’s already on all their lists so there will be no hassle. They’ll know who he is.” 
    I fulfilled this promise by hiring F.X. Feeney as our film critic. He’s a great writer, a member of the Los Angeles Film Critic’s Association, already on all the studio lists, and would give us instant credibility.
    “Still,” I told Jan, “You can’t just call cold. You’ve got to hire people they already know. We need to hire an advertising executive with experience dealing with the studios, someone they can talk to, and we’re not going to find them here. Forget ads in The Desert Sun, you need to put an ad in Daily Variety saying, ‘Experienced entertainment ad exec wanted.’ Don’t even try to do it yourself.”
    Luckily, I didn’t have to convince Jan that F.X. wouldn’t sell ads, not because it would be wrong, but because we would be printing the ads without charge, so there was no need. Once we proved we weren’t going to disappear like most new publications, I presumed the studios would start taking us seriously and the perks would show up. They might not pay for advertising, but maybe they’d have a special screening of a new film just for our readers. Good publicity for everybody. In any case, the problem of getting past the ogres at the entrances to studios was solved through hiring F.X.

    Jan was pissed off about ad rates, which seemed to be what bothered him the most about The L.A. Weekly. He couldn't believe what people had to pay to advertise. How could small businessmen afford it? They couldn't. Jan wanted to help guys like that by offering them FANTASTIC ad rates, which he could afford by paying little for editorial, little being much more than nothing, which is what most alternative newspapers pay their writers. He kept trying to impress me with our ad rates. He showed me charts that showed how FANTASTIC his ad rates were, but the numbers were meaningless to me since I’ve never sold or placed an ad in my life. I wouldn't know an ad rate from the anti-Christ. I was more concerned with how we were to deal with writers.
    I explained that writers got paid by the word, that a nickel a word was small, a dollar a word average, and three dollars a word for the masters. We agreed we’d start out paying 10 cents a word.

    During one of the exercises we did at GAIN, one of us would leave the room and re-enter as though applying for a job, and the rest of us would conduct an interview and critique them afterwards. This was supposed to be practice for the interviewee, but for me, it turned out to be practice for conducting interviews, which is what I did for Jan the first two weeks. These interviews were with other people who were responding to the same ad I did, and they seemed ridiculous to me since we needed to hire people in the San Fernando Valley. Nevertheless, I’d show up for work, Jan would introduce me to some hopeful, and expect me to interview them.
    Jan was always more impressed by people than I was. He was glad to get employees who were looking for experience, whereas I wanted people WITH experience. I saw the way he worked with his construction crew around the house. He deliberately hired non-professionals he could boss around, then he’d jump in and do their work himself when they didn’t live up to his standards because he was a “hands-on kind of guy.”
    Same with the paper. He thought I was being a dilettante when I was impressed by someone’s credentials or skill. He didn’t care if people were famous or experienced. He was more interested in if they’d “wear a lot of hats.”
    One interview was with a local music writer who was willing to relocate to L.A. to be our music writer. I knew this was a bad idea. Even though they covered the local music scene well for a local paper, I wanted a music writer who was already an expert on the L.A. scene. Jan asked her if she'd mind selling ads and she said no problem, she'd worked for ad departments. He offered her a percentage of the ads she'd sell at his FANTASTIC ad rates. She accepted and he hired her.
    This was completely wrong. The music writer CAN’T be the same person who sells the ads to the music companies. Perfectly obvious, but I still had to explain.
    I greatly admire Sheila Benson, ex-film critic of The Los Angeles Times, who categorically refused to meet anybody involved in the production of motion pictures she was reviewing. She presumed, quite rightly, that when you meet somebody in a movie, get to know them, like them, consider them your friend, it becomes just a tad more difficult to call them a no-talent hack the next morning. I once saw a terrible John Travolta movie, but accepted a chance to interview him before my review came out. I really liked him, found him to be an awfully charming guy, and so I was inevitably a bit softer in my trashing of the film. I didn’t want to hurt John Travolta’s feelings. I was an idiot. Studios are smart. They know it works like this and act accordingly. 
    Benson’s philosophy of criticism was and remains very much against the tide. Film critics find it hard to resist when the very studio that sent them a fancy press kit along with an invitation to a FABULOUS screening of a MAJOR motion picture invites them to stick around for canapés and meet the GENIUSES responsible for making it. Christ, where would your objectivity go if you had to write about the latest Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, right after having spent time with him, where you discovered to your horror that he made a fabulous Salade Nicoise and easily quoted Proust?
    These rules aren’t iron clad, but there’s a reason why the interviewer at a paper usually isn’t the critic too. Objectivity is incredibly difficult to maintain, especially in Hollywood, where the people you’re criticizing are often people you’d like to be working for.
    I asked Jan to stop running advertisements for writers, or anyone else in the editorial department, and I believe he complied, though who knows how many young lovelies he may have tried to interview after hours. "You don't need to troll the streets for writers," I said. "I know plenty of writers."

     Actors quickly learn not to tell their friends about every part they’re up for. It gets too disheartening for them to hear “How did the audition go?” and to have to say they didn’t get the part for whatever reason. Same thing with most jobs. It’s much easier just to tell people about the ones you actually get, and even then it’s a crapshoot, especially in show biz. Tell your friends you got a part in a film and more often than not you get to suffer the embarrassment of telling them the financing fell through or it didn’t find distribution or your part ended up on the cutting room floor.
    It was my natural proclivity NOT to tell anyone about this job until I knew it was real. I wasn’t absolutely sure that The San Fernando Valley Weekly would actually happen, and I feared raising the hopes of others as my hopes had been raised, but what was I to do with this job but do it? I was the editor. I had to put together an editorial department. Armed with a Toyota, a PC, and free rein, I headed out to change the face of modern journalism.
    The first person I approached was Paul Krassner, one of the founders of alternative journalism, and he agreed to reprise his column "Zen Bastard," for which I gave him the freedom to write about whatever the hell he felt like writing about. He deserved no less. His wife, Nancy Cain, also came aboard with a superb feature article called "What Would Jesus Do For Cramps?" 
    Next, I asked Billy Hayes, the author of Midnight Express, to do a regular column called "Inside/Outside," which would feature two profiles each week, one of someone in prison who belonged out, one of someone out of prison who belonged in. Billy agreed, and proceeded to contact the ACLU and Amnesty International in preparation for one side of the column, and local law enforcement in preparation for the other. 
    I knew we couldn’t afford Lawrence Grobel, who was Playboy's interviewer and wrote the books on Brando, Michener, the Hustons, Capote, and others, but he’s an old friend so I called him anyway. I found he was teaching journalism at UCLA. We agreed to give his students the opportunity to participate in "Larry's Class," a page reserved for interviews conducted by Grobel's students. He would be the only professor capable of rewarding his best students with actual publication, and I would be proud to give the cream of the crop of the next generation of journalists their first professional break. Once word got out, I got dozens of e-mails from Larry’s students offering to help any way they could. All newspapers need gofers. Ours would be graduate students from UCLA, every one of whom knew more about the workings of a newspaper than our publisher. Pretty cool. 
    One of Larry’s Class had gone to Beverly Hills High School and wanted to go back to investigate the recent rash of deaths attributed to fumes from the oil well on the site near the athletic field. Apparently Erin Brockovich had taken on the case and was planning a class action suit against the high school. 
    “That’s fantastic,” I said to Larry. “Tell them to interview Erin Brockovich, get a picture of her with the oil well and Century City behind her and it’s a potential cover.”
    I told Jan about it and he said, “Why don’t you interview her? Get her into the office. I want to meet her.”
    I explained that I’d be busy editing the paper, that doing an interview was hard work, demanding a lot of research. I wanted the paper to get a reputation as a great place to be interviewed because of “Larry’s Class.” I had a student willing to do a full week’s work: the research on the well, infiltrating the school to talk to old friends on staff, finding Erin Brockovich, arranging an interview, reading everything Erin Brockovich had ever written and everything ever written about her as personal research, preparing hundreds of questions before meeting her, taping the conversation, spending hours transcribing and editing the piece, and delivering it with a picture worthy of the cover. They would deserve a thousand bucks and we were only paying them a hundred. 
    “You don’t want to meet Erin Brockovich?” he asked.
    “I’m not going to insist that she come by the office if that’s what you mean. You’re thinking you’ll save money if I do it, I understand that, and yes, I will wear lots of hats, but interviewing is a lot of work. Larry’s famous for his research. He read everything James Michener ever wrote before interviewing him.”
    “No he didn’t.”
    “Yes, he did, and it became a book called Michener, I think.”
    “I bet there’s something by Michener that he didn’t read.”
    “Well, you can ask him at a staff meeting, but I think you’ll find he’s the most thorough interviewer on earth, and I’m sure his personal technique is the one he’s teaching his class. C’mon, man, think of it, if we want to interview an actor or actress, we’ve got someone willing to watch everything they’ve ever appeared in, and read every review they ever got, preparing hundreds of questions before meeting them. Neither of us could possibly do the expert job that Larry’s Class will do. Larry’s class will become famous and it will make us famous for having the foresight to print it.” He seemed to go for it.

    In a similar manner, I put together my dream team of journalists and editors and artists I've worked with and admired over the years. I found there was a whole world of voices longing to be heard, voices who were willing to work for little in exchange for the artistic freedom I was willing to give them. 
    Truusje Kushner, an L.A. Weekly alumnus and N.Y. journalist turned writer/producer became our entertainment editor. R.B. Ham is a political writer from Canada who knocks the socks off anyone in America. Meria Heller is the anti-Rush Limbaugh with the best radio show on the net. Jon Rappaport is a political writer who specializes in medical issues. Hank Rosenfeld wrote for The Realist and Spy and the L.A. Times. Victoria Looseleaf has been doing her cable show The Looseleaf Report forever and knows every artist in the city. Jim Channon is the smartest man I've ever met - the new Buckminster Fuller. He's a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Pentagon who is now a warrior/monk living in Hawaii. All agreed to work for a measly 10 cents a word.
    I'm particularly proud of what I put together graphically. I not only found two animators, one from Disney and one from The Simpsons, who are creating new and vital editorial cartoons that have never been published, but several amazing websites gave me permission to make unlimited use of all their online graphics. These sites included whitehouse.org, politicalstrikes.com, and the-broadside.com. We were going to look like no one else and it was all for free.
    And there’s me. Who knows what I’ll say or where I’ll put it. I’m much more radical than I can ever let on. If you think I need a tighter leash, just imagine the leash I hold on MYSELF, the stuff that never gets past my brain, the stuff that gets typed but never read by another soul, my personal reject file, the letters I look at a week later and thank the imaginary invisible cloud being that I never sent. As an editor, I’d much prefer printing the work of someone else expressing exactly how I feel than MYSELF expressing exactly how I feel. I find myself in the egoless position of giving others more credibility than myself.

    I started picturing Issue #1 and what I would want people to see as soon as they opened the paper. Obviously, an opening editorial statement. I wrote one, and after a couple changes from Jan, it read like this...

    Welcome to the very first issue of The San Fernando Valley Weekly. (Insert picture of handsome devil here) I'm your publisher, Jan de Grat. (Insert picture of slovenly goatherd here) I'm your editor, Michael Dare. 
    We're going to rip you away from the commonplace and snap you into realities you have yet to discover. We're going to enlighten you, piss you off, and turn you on. We're not going to be another version of something else because we're not like anyone else you've ever met. We don't blindly accept ANYTHING. We're not corporate owned or beholden to anybody but our own sense of inner justice and humor. We're going to make you laugh at things you didn't think were funny and we're going to make you cry at things you didn't know were sad. 
    We are the alternative. We are the opposition. What are we opposed to? Whatayuh got? 
    We're opposed to lies. We're skeptics. You can't put anything over on us. We're opposed to cover-ups. We're opposed to rewriting the past to suit the future. We've got nothing against whores who sell sex but are vehemently opposed to media whores who shill for the elite. We're opposed to anybody who puts his or her own personal needs ahead of the needs of mankind. We're opposed to Republicans, Democrats, liberals, and conservatives. We're opposed to easy labels. We think for ourselves. We think anyone who blindly follows another's ideology is an idiot. We think terrorism is a tactic and that a war against a tactic is moronic. We think we have real enemies and they're not who you might think they are. 
    Our news coverage is going to be 50% local and 50% global. The global part will in fact be national news but from a global perspective. We're going to tell you what the world thinks about what we're doing. 
    We're Americans. One of us is Indian but doesn't own a casino; the other is Jewish but sympathetic to the Palestinians. We love America but think our country is broken and needs to be fixed. 
    We're in favor of the San Fernando Valley seceding not only from Los Angeles but from the United States. We're in favor of decriminalizing all drugs and victimless crimes, abolishing ALL political contributions, making all government officials divest themselves of ANY stocks or bonds they may hold before taking office and putting their money into a standard savings account, changing the national anthem to "This Land is Your Land," and a whole lot more fun stuff. 
    We're against the death penalty except for Fox TV executives, government interference in our personal lives, utility companies, having to change our clocks twice a year, every law in the books that hasn't proven its efficiency, and a whole lot more nasty stuff. 
    One of the things that's broken is the media. We're going to be a problem to those hiding their agenda. We're going to offer actual solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems. We are radical in every sense of the word, and if we ever slip into the commonplace, we expect you to kick our ass. We're not out to make you feel safe. We want to rattle your bones and wake you up to the New World. 
    We're going to take on big business. Allow us to remind you that the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines fascism as "A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism." Sound like anyone you know? Gee, I wonder why they didn't mention "court appointed with lack of a democratic mandate?" We're anti-fascist, so there's no way we can take on big business without also taking on big government and the BFEE (Bush Family Evil Empire). 
    Speaking of big government, we'd like to take this opportunity to say hi to John Ashcroft. How you doin', dude? Eavesdropped on any nice statues lately? Welcome aboard and thank you for monitoring us. The more, the merrier. 
    We're going to give back to the community and try to take back the streets from hoodlums, whether they work for gangs or the powers that be. We're going to respond to you and expect you to tell us what you want from us. We're open to discussion. We know we're going to regret this but we invite your submissions. We want to read your writing and see your art, even if you've never been published before. 
    We like writers who are saying things no one else is saying, whether we agree with them or not. [This list got filled in as the crew grew] You've probably heard of local heroes like Paul Krassner, Nancy Cain, Billy Hayes, F.X. Feeney, Victoria Looseleaf, Hank Rosenfeld, and Lawrence Grobel, but you're going to be hearing from a lot of voices who are currently only heard on the Internet. Allow us to introduce you to Barry Crimmins, R.B. Ham, Jon Rappaport, Meria Heller, Ian Patrick Wolff, bartcop, govrant, the NetWits, The Broadside, Political Strikes, Lyndon LaRouche, Hitler, and Buddha. 
    We will soon have our own unique Internet presence. We're going to make Matt Drudge look like Garrison Keillor. One thing at a time. (Actively seeking insane webmaster) 
    We're free and you can't afford to miss a single issue, because if you do, there will be others out there who know more than you do, and we can't have that. You're going to want to say to your friends "I can't believe they said that IN PRINT." 
    Pull up a seat, shake off your preconceptions, and make yourself comfortable. We're going to be around for a while. 

Sincerely, 

Jan de Grat - Publisher 

Michael Dare - Editor

     Every day I'd tell Jan everything I was doing, which never had anything to do with advertising, and he'd tell me everything he was doing, which was always advertising and promotion. I’d say “I got a website to let us use their graphics for free.” He’d say “I got ahold of the L.A. Weekly distribution list and hired an artist to put together a map.”
    I said I was looking for an art director. He said we didn’t need one, that we could do it ourselves. I said that maybe we could do it all in the beginning, but once we were cranking them out once a week, we needed to be more like an assembly line with lots of people doing individual jobs. We’d be too busy. Besides, as clever as we both were, a REAL art director could improve the quality of the paper in innumerable ways by focusing ENTIRELY on the look of the paper.
    As proof that we didn’t need an art director, one day he showed me a mock-up of the cover he said he put together himself. It was a mosaic of a bunch of different pictures inside a frame. It looked okay. I gave it a B for execution but a D for concept. There was no concept. I knew a real art director could do 10-times better and I told him so.
    But the biggest problem? At the top it read "The SFV Weekly." Down the side it read "Entertainment. Noise. Film. Pictures. Publisher's Word by Jan de Grat." 
    "I know we agreed we’d both be able to make editorial statements but that's ridiculous," I said. "I got you famous names. If we were making a film and I got you Jack Nicholson, would you sell the film with HIS name or yours? I'm not putting my name on the cover unless I wrote the feature article. Nobody's going to pick up a strange new paper because they see the name Jan de Grat on the cover. They WILL pick it up if they see the names of the people I've gathered. Billy Hayes' name goes on the cover. Paul Krassner's name goes on the cover. Not mine. Not yours. We’re the maitre d’. The cover is like the chalkboard menu outside a restaurant. It's what we're featuring this week. Nothing goes on the cover that's not a selling point. That’s your ego talking." He seemed to go for it. 

    Of course editorial and advertising weren’t all the paper needed. There were the physical items necessary to actually put it out. 
    The Village Voice, owners of The L.A. Weekly, had bought The L.A. Weekly's only competition, The L.A. New Times, and closed it, giving themselves a monopoly in the market. The United States Department of Justice didn't see kindly to this and came down on them just like they came down on Microsoft. As part of a settlement, the DOJ was selling off the New Times assets, which included everything one would need to start a new newspaper in Los Angeles, including stands for the papers, computers, software, distribution and advertising lists, etc.. Jan promised me he'd call them right away to make a bid. 
    Next week he told me the Department of Justice were assholes who hadn't gotten back to him. [CLUE #47 I didn't pick up on at the time: He seemed surprised that the Department of Justice were assholes.] "We don't need them," he said.
    "Yes we do," I said. "Whoever gets those is going to have a major advantage over us." 
    And that they do. Valley Printing, who had been printing the L.A. Weekly, bought all of the New Times assets and is starting their own alternative paper.

    I started designing the actual paper. The calendar section would be two facing pages: "L.A. Underground" on the left, "L.A. Overground" on the right. Absolutely everything fits into those two categories. A fictitious battle between culture and sub-culture.
    "L.A Underground" is counter-cultural and totally Tabloidsville. Brazen, splashy, gossipy, and ridiculous. Lots of pictures and LOTS of NAMES in BOLD. Trumpets the experimental and outrageous. Clubs and galleries and rock 'n' roll. Thinks Beethoven is a dog. 
    "L.A. Overground" is cultural and totally conservative. Stuffy, stuck-up, old-fashioned, formatted like the New York Review of Books or a Time Magazine that's been sitting in a dentist's office for a few decades. Art museums and ballet and classical music. Doesn't understand what all the fuss is about Springsteen. 
    I wanted to send Ann Coulter to interview Satan, who is running for president. It would have gone nicely until Satan roasted her over an open spit and ate her. Actually, not all of her. He hickory smoked her left buttock and sent it to the office with homemade honey mustard. 
    "I didn't realize I was eating Ann Coulter," said San Fernando Valley Weekly columnist Paul Krassner. "Seemed more like chicken." 
    I would fill the paper with quotes in boxes, quotes worthy of cutting out and putting on a bulletin board, quotes from my ridiculously extensive quote file that I use every week under the heading “Don’t Take My Word For It.” I wanted to experiment. I wanted to have five stories with bumps to the same page where there would be only one paragraph that successfully concluded all five stories. I wanted to do a final page that was just as valid an entry into the paper as the first. I wanted a guarantee that four times a year, the centerfold would be given to editorial to print posters, even if we had to bump an advertiser.
    I even gave a few assignments for entirely personal reasons. I’d recently been diagnosed pre-diabetic, so naturally I coerced a NetWit, Irv, to write the ultimate piece on pre-diabetes, filling space in the paper with vital information I just happened to personally need. It’s good to be the editor. Whatever I want to know, I just hire someone to write about it. Hey, you, over there, c’mere, I want to know what the hell’s going on and I’ll pay you to find out for me. Can you write?
    At first I thought I'd break a great journalistic taboo and give writers final say on their headlines, but then I realized a greater purpose necessitating that the headlines remain in my hands. 
    Most newspaper headlines tell you what the story is about. See a headline saying "Garbage Workers on Strike" and you know pretty much what you're going to get if you read the article. A technique I've perfected churning out Disinfotainment Today is the art of writing headlines that can't possibly make any sense unless you read the article, therefore getting you to read things you wouldn't ordinarily read. See a headline saying "What's that Stink?" and you've got to read the actual article in order to find out what the hell I'm talking about. You may find yourself reading about a garbage strike that you thought you had no interest in, a story you would have skipped with a proper headline, and you may find that you continue reading because the writing is so good you don't care that you don't care. 
    It's all a ploy to produce a paper that coerces the reader into reading ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. I wanted the paper to be your best read of the week, an absolute necessity, something you saved. 
    Issue #1 would have a star in the lower right hand corner of the cover with little explosions around it, saying "Special Collector's Edition." So would issues #2 and #3. EVERY issue would be a special collector’s edition. In ten years, when you look back upon these times, you'll have to get out your box of San Fernando Valley Weeklies to remember what was REALLY going on in the world of the 2000s.

       One night in the midst of all this, I shared in the celebration of Jay Levin's 60th birthday with his kids, Art Kunkin, Paul Krassner, and a host of others. Krassner said "From now on, when people ask you if you remember the 60s, you can say Remember them? I am them!" 
    Sharing a dinner table with the founder of The L.A. Weekly, the founder of The L.A. Free Press, and the founder of The Realist was boggling to say the least. The history of alternative journalism made flesh before my eyes. I gathered as much information as I could. My main question? What the hell is my job? 
    Grammar, punctuation, and spelling seem to be the realm of the copy editor and proofreader. What's left after that is called editing, a word with a baffling variety of definitions. 
    Kunkin told me he never edited anybody, just printed what they wrote. If anyone said something he disagreed with, he simply wrote a reply and put it in a box next to the article, and THAT only happened once. Levin was a notorious monster with a blue pencil, as the bald spots from 10 years of pulling my hair out will attest to. I have no idea how Krassner edits because the bastard never printed me, but Lenny Bruce's Autobiography came out pretty good. 
    Most of my personal experience is from the other side. I've worked with every kind of editor, from lazy bastards who happily didn't touch my work, to aggressive bastards who challenged me every inch of the way. I did a weekly video column for Billboard Magazine. For more than a year, I handed in my copy, and they printed me without changing a single syllable. On the other hand, I once wrote a piece for Movieline Magazine where they totally rewrote half the piece.
    Get a bad response to a piece of journalism and hey, what did you potentially waste? A month? A week? A day? But a novel takes a year. Get a bad response to a novel and you just wasted a goddam year, so giving your novel to the very first reader is a nerve-wracking experience. 
    The first person to read my novel Hollywoodland called me back and said it was great except for one thing, chapter 16 should be chapter 17 and chapter 17 should be chapter 16. Outrageous! Impossible! Until I made the change, read it, and discovered they were absolutely right. I wouldn't have picked up on it in a million years. THAT was editing. 
    I learned practical things concerning how to put a paper together. You should start with the ads in the layouts and work the editorial around them, not because the ads are more important but because the ads are a fixed size whereas editorial is flexible. Graphics can be enlarged or shrunk, headlines can be different types and sizes, the same article can take up an infinite variety of shapes, including continuing the text to a later page, so you work editorial around the inflexible ads.
    Hal Ashby once told me that the job of film director is actually quite simple. His job, his ONLY job, is to make sure that everyone does their best work. Some people need guidance. Some need to be left alone. Find out what everyone needs to work at their peak and give it to them. Sounds to me like a pretty good definition of newspaper editor too. Call me Perry White.
    So how do I make my job easier? By hiring people who are so goddam good they don't need editing. People who will make everyone else look good. Kunkin, Krassner, and Levin passed the torch to me and I passed it to my staff. 
        The simplest contract between a writer and an editor is that nothing gets changed without the writer being in on the loop. I set up a structure whereby the entire editorial content of each issue would be available in the office, and on the net, to all writers, the day before publication. I encouraged feedback because the reason Monty Python was so good was that everything passed through everybody. In the misbegotten belief that art comes out of confusion, I encouraged everyone's comments on everything.

     I also had a giant file of people I intended to contact once it was really off the ground, so don’t be offended if I know you and this is the first time you’ve heard of any of this. If you’re a writer online, you were probably in the file, people from NetWits and bartcop and newsrant and changingplanet and yellowtimes and dozens of other discussion groups I troll, "The Checkout-Chick" who reviews supermarket food online, the Monday Morning Noter, you know who you are. With 60 pages a week to fill, you would have all gotten your chance. Who wants to be our fictitious foreign correspondent Warren Iraq? Up for grabs.

    Things got infinitely more real the day Jan took me to visit the offices of the San Fernando Valley Weekly on Cahuenga, across the street from Universal Studios, with a great view of the Black Tower where we would be able to see Universal executives jumping if The Hulk tanked. It was 1,600 square feet, spotlessly clean, one big office with a door and big windows overlooking the street (Jan's), one smaller office with a door and a smaller window overlooking the rest of the office (mine), a reception area, a rec room, two bathrooms, and a large central area with room for at least a half dozen desks. A perfect workspace I could see us outgrowing in six months. I was armed with a set of keys, nine used chairs, and a staff. All we needed was phones, computers, and furniture and we would be a newspaper.

PART THREE: ABORTION

    In order for me to do the job, I had to move to L.A., so I started taking field trips from the desert to look for a place. I not only had to find somewhere to live, but a high school and elementary school for my two sons, who were thrilled to be moving back to the city. I discovered that rents in L.A. are triple what they are in the desert. My current landlady told me she had someone to move in if I moved, so there would be no turning back unless I continued paying rent for the house in the desert, which would quadruple my monthly rent, which was ridiculous. If I were a bachelor, no problem, I'd have put stuff in storage, taken a single, and I'd be living in L.A. right now. But finding myself stranded in Los Angeles with two kids, no money, at triple the rent was something I wanted to avoid. 
    People kept telling me I’d be nuts to make the move without a contract or other form of guarantee. Truusje Kushner, our entertainment editor, also had to make a move for the job, and she was insisting on a contract too, so it seemed right to start negotiating mine as a prototype for hers.
    In my research for what kind of contract I was looking for, I found that the job usually paid $50 thousand a year, not the $37 thousand I was initially offered, so I knew I was already a bargain. I also found a standard clause in the contract of every editor The L.A. Weekly has ever had. Since the editor’s reputation is at stake, any fiddling with editorial by the publisher would be just cause for the editor to quit at full salary.
    I told Jan simply and clearly that I would not risk getting abandoned in Los Angeles. Before I moved, I needed money up front for moving expenses, plus an iron-clad guarantee, in writing, that I was being hired for a year and would receive my full salary under any circumstances.
    He said I wouldn’t be working for just a year. After The San Fernando Weekly was together, we’d move to Hawaii and get The Hawaii Weekly together, then to Santa Barbara, then to Washington DC, etc. 
    I said that sounded good, but realistically, a lot of things could go wrong. I explained that I once worked with a producer who was making a movie in Tucson. We were about to start shooting when the executive with the actual check for the production was killed in a place crash on his way to the production office. The remaining pre-production money went to the producer's expenses attending the executive's funeral and the film was never made. 
    "What if I'd moved to Tucson to work on this movie, Jan?" I said. "I'd have been stuck in Tucson with two kids and no money. I would have been fucked, so I'm not moving anywhere unless I know I'm not going to get trapped. What if YOU get killed in a plane crash?" 
    "I'll tell my sister to release some funds to you after I die." This guy was getting to sound more like Andre Hakim every day.

     Finally, there was nothing left to do but publish. I told Jan I had enough material for a prototype.
    He told me that was okay, he had already done the prototype. He didn’t need any editorial.
    “What? A prototype is NOTHING BUT editorial,” I said, “with spaces that say ‘Put your ad here.’ You can’t do a prototype without editorial. What are you selling?”
    “Ad rates,” he said. “A map of distribution points. How we’re going to publicize the paper.”
    “What paper? If there’s no editorial, it’s not a newspaper, it’s a flyer. It’s nothing but ads. You’ve got to show people what the paper is.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Jan, you can’t sell a paper without editorial. It’s like trying to sell ads on a TV show, you’ve got to show them THE SHOW. The prototype of a newspaper is like the pilot of a television show. It’s everything BUT the ads.”
    He gave me a line I got to hear a million times whenever he wasn’t sure about my knowledge, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
    In any case, it was time to move. Jan and I drove to L.A. several times looking for a place. It was clear that the going rate for what I needed was $1,200 month and Jan didn’t like it. He only wanted to pay $1,000 a month, but the places I found at that rate weren’t adequate. I found a house I liked and said “Why don’t you just buy it, fix it up, and let me live in it a year?” No go. I found three apartments I liked and would have moved into immediately. He wouldn’t rent them.
    What was going on? The offices were rented and looked to cost at least $5,000 a month. Every day I wasn’t in them putting the paper together was a waste of money. Why did a measly $200 a month mean so much to him? Why did he care what I was paying in rent? It was just an advance coming out of my salary anyway. He didn’t need to be involved. All he needed to do was give me the advance and let me find a place on my own.
    No advance. No contract. No guarantee of a place to live for a year. This wasn’t looking good.

    The first and only editorial meeting of The San Fernando Valley Weekly took place in the L.A office with Truusje Kushner, Billy Hayes, Larry Grobel, and R.S. Bailey. Andre had taken his car back and loaned it to someone else who trashed it in a shoot-out with the Riverside Police, at least according to Andre. A good excuse that left me, once again, without transportation. I had to borrowed one of Jan’s cars to go to L.A. for the meeting. It was a great group of people who really looked forward to working together, though the meeting would have been a hell of a lot better if Jan had showed up. We waited and waited, finally calling him on his cell phone. Turned out he had been robbed the night before and had to spend the day at the police station in Palm Desert. 
    He had loaned me his car the night before. It was always parked in front of the house. Since there was no car there, a gang of thieves that just happened to be passing by assumed that no one was home. The house was clearly under construction and incomplete. They broke in the back door and actually went into Jan’s bedroom where they didn’t see him under a pile of pillows. Jan’s police training would have come in handy if his gun hadn’t been taken away as a condition of his wife’s restraining order. He didn’t know if the thieves were armed or not, so he decided not to risk making his presence known. He didn’t move till the thieves were out of the house, whereupon he called the police, there was a chase, one van was driven off the side of the road and was on fire, the driver in custody, the other van had gotten away clean and was already in Arizona according to recent charges on Jan’s credit card.
    So he couldn’t make it to the meeting. Another good excuse, but where did that leave us? The thieves got some office equipment destined for the Weekly offices, but nothing that couldn’t be replaced. Jan stated we were still on, though everyone was skeptical, especially when they found out about my living situation.
    When I got back to the desert, Jan showed me the damage. He had bought a jumble of computer equipment from e-Bay, new but without warrantees, some PCs, some Apple, different monitors, I thought it would be a nightmare to put together. Once they were stolen, I had a brainstorm. Replace them all with the exact same laptop with the exact same software. Check them out to staff. The rear room can just be one continuous shelf around the room where sales people sit with their laptops and phones making sales. If someone’s laptop breaks, replace it with another, the exact same laptop, get a deal on a dozen of them. Everyone will love it, and we’ll all be compatible. 
    No way. He already had a bunch of screens we were going to use. So much for compatibility.
    I told him I found an apartment I liked in Valley Village, a nice safe neighborhood near the office and blocks from schools. It was still available and I gave him the number. He didn't call. He told me he needed the car, so he had to drive me back home and leave me there without transportation. I had been planning on going back to L.A. the next day to continue looking for a place. I already had appointments, so I asked him to rent me a car. He refused. Some millionaire. Our conversation on the way back to my place, our final conversation, went something like this...

    He asked me, what I thought my job was. I said editor. He asked me what an editor does. Not a good sign when a publisher doesn’t know what an editor does. Once again, I explained Journalism 101, adding that “Professionally, when an editor gives an assignment to a writer, it’s a binding contract. If they hand it in, you pay them whether you print it or not. If you print it, you pay the agreed upon price, if you don’t, you pay a percentage, usually around half. It’s called a kill fee.”
    “A what?”
    “A kill fee. Standard industry practice. You said we were going to be professional. Sorry for getting professional on your ass, but we’ve got to pay kill fees. It’s just a question of what percentage.”
    “I never heard of such a thing. I’ve got to check that out.”
    “No you don’t. With who? You don’t know anyone with more experience than me. I’m telling you that’s how it works. That’s why you hired me, because I know all this.”
    “Why should I pay someone for something I don’t use?”
    “Writers put a lot of time and effort into their writing. I told you how much effort goes into an interview. It’s a lot of work. The subject usually won’t even see a reporter unless the reporter is on assignment, which is why assignments are so important. A writer might put a week’s worth of effort into a piece that’s worth a thousand dollars, and we’re only paying them $100. They’re already losing money. Professional writers don’t take assignments unless they know they’re going to get paid for it.”
    “And you’ve given assignments?”
    “Of course.”
    “How many?”
    “Hard to count. Many dozens. That’s what I’ve been doing, putting together the editorial section of the paper. You know that. Obviously I can’t do it without giving assignments.”
    “I need to see copies of all those assignments. Send me copies of every e-mail.”
    “What? Some of them were on the phone. Anyway, that’s impossible. They’re personal communications. Some of them are with friends doing me favors.”
    “If I owe them money it’s my concern. I need copies of every communication you've had concerning The San Fernando Valley Weekly. I need to know all the promises you've made, and I need all their e-mail addresses so that I can write them and tell them that they’re not working for you, they’re working for The San Fernando Valley Weekly.”
    “They’re not working for The San Fernando Valley Weekly until The San Fernando Valley Weekly actually pays them upon publication. THAT'S when you get their information from me, when I'm submitting the final budget for each issue, when you're actually paying them for having published them. Until then, they’re independent contractors with assignments from me. I’m the only one that’s working for The San Fernando Valley Weekly.
    “Besides, Jan, you’re the ad department. Nobody in editorial works for you. Remember what I said about bribes? I guarantee you Billy Hayes will be offered a bribe to get someone out of jail, because EVERYONE is ALWAYS trying to influence editorial. That's why I hired Billy. Billy can't be bought, and neither can I. That’s why you can’t insist that he works for YOU, because you’re THE AD DEPARTMENT. Billy’s in editorial and very specifically doesn’t do what the ad department says. That’s how you get the reader's trust in the integrity of the paper. Nobody’s going to read him if they don’t trust him. I already gave him FINAL SAY on who gets listed in Inside/Outside. We may offer suggestions, but the final decision isn’t yours OR mine. It’s already his. I gave him autonomy. Undermine MY autonomy and you undermine HIS autonomy, making me a liar to everyone I gave autonomy to.”
    “You’ve got to stop giving assignments. From now on, you’ve got to clear all assignments through me.”
    “That’s impossible. You’re the owner, I’m the coach. You can’t just walk into the locker room right before the game and say YOU’RE calling the plays, especially if you’ve never done it before. That’s not what the team signed up for. You just asked me what an editor does. You don’t even know what the job IS, you know you’re not qualified to do it. That’s why you hired me. Just let me do my job, Jan.”
    “It’s my paper and I’m in charge of what’s in it.”
    “Right, but if I’m talking on the phone to someone, they pitch a dozen stories, and I pick one of them, I can’t clear it through you first. Giving assignments is done on the spot. I’m going to be giving HUNDREDS of assignments. A writer who saw a play wants to write a piece about the playwright, you want me to clear it through you first when you haven’t seen the play and have never heard of the playwright? Why? What about a $5 paragraph on a restaurant? I’ve got to be able to say to a writer Go Ahead. I can’t say Hold on while I clear it through my publisher. I can’t work that way. NO editor can work that way. You’ve got to leave that part of the job to me. Sometimes the finished piece will differ enormously from the original assignment. You’ve got to just wait and see what I hand you after it’s done, THEN decide if you want it. Believe me, you won’t be disappointed.”
    I ran through allegories galore. It’s like he hired me to be the chef in his restaurant. He can’t tell what a dish is going to taste like by looking at my recipe, he’s got to wait till it’s done and I present it to him to taste before deciding whether it goes on the menu. It’s like he hired me to direct a movie and at the last minute decided he was the director and I was the assistant director. It's like he hired me to pilot a plane, I put together a crew, found passengers, and right before I got aboard I found out I wasn't the pilot, I was the co-pilot, HE was the pilot, he'd never flown a plane before, and the propellers were on backwards. I not only wouldn't co-pilot, I wouldn't get on board, and I'd stop my crew and passengers from getting on board too. 
    Nothing worked. “Well you’ve got to work my way,” he said. “I don’t want you promising my money for pieces I might not use. No more assignments.”
    “Jan, that means you’re firing me because that’s the job you hired me for. That’s what an editor does.”
    “Then I’m the editor.”
    “What?”
    “I’m the editor-in-chief, you’re the managing editor.”
    “You can’t do that.”
    “It’s my paper, I can do what I want.”
    “We wrote an opening statement that starts ‘Hi, I’m your publisher Jan de Grat, I’m your editor Michael Dare.’ That statement isn’t just a promise we’re going to be making to our readers, it’s a promise we’ve already made to the entire editorial department. Everyone I’ve hired has read that statement and they all think you’re the publisher and I’m the editor.”
    “Managing editor is a raise from editor.”
    “Not if I’m under you as an editor. You’re not an editor. You know you don’t have a clue how to edit. You just asked me what an editor does. You told me you don’t even read the editorial parts of newspapers. Let me ask you. Who are you going to be editing? Not me. Not Paul Krassner. Not Billy Hayes.”
    “Right, I’m not going to actually edit. You’re going to be editing.”
    “Right, and when I’m done doing what I do, no further editing is going to be necessary. It’s ready to be handed in to the publisher, not another editor. We don’t need another editor in-between us, even if it’s you. ESPECIALLY if it’s you. I told you right off the bat that my job was to protect the writers from YOU.”
    “But you said yourself that you’re not going to be editing people, you’re just going to let them say what they want to say. You’re going to leave the writing alone; I’m going to leave the writing alone. What’s the big deal?”
    “Because you’re giving yourself the right to edit, whether you do or not. I can’t give you that right. It’s been entrusted to me and I’ve already given it away. We’ve promised absolutely everybody in the editorial staff that you’re not the editor, you’re the publisher and I’M the editor. Those terms have meaning.”
    “That’s why I’m calling myself editor-in-chief. I’ve got to check stuff first. I’m not going to let you just put whatever you want into my newspaper.”
    “Of course not. You’ve already got final say. You’re the PUBLISHER. All you’ve got to say is I’m not publishing that. What you CAN’T do is FIX IT. That’s the job of the editor. That’s my job, not yours.”
    “I’m the one who people will sue. What if you say something libelous?”
    “Look, if your lawyer tells you that one of the writers has said something libelous, does that lawyer open the actual Quark file of the paper and delete the statement?”
    “No.”
    “Of course not. They tell you about it. When you get this information, do YOU open the Quark file and delete the statement.”
    “Yes.”
    “No. You think Trudeau would let us print Doonesbury if he thought you’d rewrite his cartoons if you didn’t like them? All you can do is not print it. You can’t change ANYTHING. The content of the paper is based upon an agreement between the writer and their editor, me. Just like your lawyer tells YOU what the problem is, you just tell ME what the problem is, and I fix it with the writer or artist. I save you the bother. As publisher, the final decision as to whether something gets published is yours. You don’t need to be editor-in-chief. It’s like wanting to be president AND vice-president. If there’s a problem, I contact the writer and work out the fix with THEM. I know how to do that. After we work it out, I resubmit it to you and if it’s okay, you print it, if not, we try to fix it again or we pay the kill fee.”
    “That’s why you’ve got to clear all assignments through me. I’m not paying for stuff I don’t use.”
    “Jan, you’re not even paying for stuff you DO use. You’re getting a lot of this for free and the rest at bargain rates, only because everybody has been promised that I’m the editor and you’re the publisher. I’ve given my word that there will be no further editing, and they trust me. They know I’m a professional. They’ve seen my paper. They know I can do it. Nobody knows anything about you. Why should they trust you to edit them?”
    “I’m not going to edit them.”
    “Then you’re not an editor.”
    “And I'm leaving my name on the cover. Trump's name is on the Trump Tower. Nobody knows the name of the architect."
    “Trump hires the best architects money can buy then lets them do their job, he doesn’t hire non-professionals and boss them around.”
    He was stunned to find out that the letters page was part of editorial. “That’s another reason I’ve got to be the editor-in-chief. Letters to the editor have got to be to me, not to you.”
    “If somebody writes a letter about an article that you didn’t assign, write, or edit, why would they want a response from you? As the editor of the letters page, it’s my job to forward letters to the responsible party. The WRITER is the one who responds to letters about his piece, and then I edit their response. If I put a NOTE FROM THE EDITOR somewhere, it’s from me, the person editing the piece, not you, the publisher.”
    We went on and on with no solution. He just didn’t get it. He didn’t know what it was like to be a writer. He didn’t know what it was like to be an editor. An editor’s got to be able to keep his word. He dropped me off in the middle of the desert.

    The higher you get your hopes up, the further you have to fall, and I had high hopes for this one, especially since it could have worked out so well. Jan and I are still very much the perfect match. I’m ignorant about his department and he’s ignorant about mine. I admitted it and let him do his job. He admitted it and prevented me from doing mine.
    When I told him I couldn’t work for him without guarantees, he thought he still had a newspaper. He contacted the only members of the editorial staff I had introduced him to. He got together with Billy Hayes and found out that Billy was backing me. He called Truusje Kushner and found out she was backing me. He found he didn’t have a newspaper. He was back at square one, with an office empty save for nine chairs. Anyone got nine butts?

    The final nail in Jan's coffin was his interview with Larry Grobel, who took one last shot at saving the paper by inviting Jan to his house. 
    Larry has pictures on his walls of himself with everybody you've ever wanted to meet. He specializes in getting people to talk about things they don't normally talk about. My favorite Larry Grobel quote? 
    Larry Grobel: "When a movie is made of your life, who would you like to play you?” 
    Norman Mailer: "Larry Grobel." 
    If anyone could get Jan to face reality, Larry could.
    He couldn’t. He told me it was hopeless, that Jan was adamant about doing things his way and totally clueless about the publishing business. He couldn’t believe I had ever gotten involved with the guy. He wished he had known Jan was a flake before telling his students. And, of course, he got Jan to confess to two startling discoveries I somehow missed.
    #1) Jan had never read a book. Never. Not one. There's a word for people who have never read a book. Illiterate. Yeah, he knew how to read, but he didn't bother. How could I have worked for a man for 12 weeks without ever noticing that he was illiterate? Even though I said I don’t look at ads, I obviously can’t avoid looking at them occasionally, sometimes actually paying attention to them. I assumed the same was true about Jan, that even though he said he didn’t read editorial, surely there would be stories that would occasionally grab his interest. I guess not. The clues were all there, but when he confessed that he hadn't read any of the books I mentioned, like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Hustons, I assumed it was just because they were somewhat esoteric books, not that he had NEVER READ A BOOK. This guy was looking more like George W. Bush every day. 
    #2) He had once met a fashion model because he asked an employee to find her after he saw her picture in a magazine, which was why he wanted to be a publisher, to meet women and nail them in his office. 
    Hoo boy. The picture was clear. Never read a book? Hired people based upon their ability to find him women whose picture he saw in some magazine? No wonder he didn't want an interview with Eric Brockovich unless she came to the office. No wonder he didn't give a shit about the content of the editorial department. He wasn’t starting a paper to spread the news. He was an illiterate looking to get laid. (In the interest of total disclosure, I can’t say I blame him. Like most guys, I’m in favor of anything that leads to getting laid. In my fantasy of moving back to L.A. as the editor of a newspaper, I certainly dreamt of joining a gym, getting in shape, meeting a major woman and her dropping whomever for me, the man of her dreams, well-read, intelligent, talented, funny. What more could she ask for in a man? But I would NEVER tell a writer interviewing somebody desirable that the object of desire had to come by the office and meet me. I’m a professional first and a horndog second.)

    How could I have been such a fool? Did I let myself get suckered by this lunatic just because he was validating my goals for myself? Partially. It wasn’t a TOTAL waste of time. I got to prepare a newspaper that would do all the things I always wanted to see a newspaper do. I rose to the challenge and discovered I was absolutely capable of the job. In many ways, it was the best three months of my life. Then I fell on my sword.
    In my fantasies over what could go wrong, I imagined it might come down to a matter of politics, that I’d submit something too radical for Jan’s taste, but it never got to that. It never got beyond protocol. I didn’t sabotage the project, whether inadvertently or not, by insisting upon something outrageous. All I insisted upon was acting in a professional manner while protecting my children from a potential housing disaster. 
    Why didn’t I just work for Jan as managing editor? It’s not that I can’t work with another editor above me. There’s no way I’d turn down any sort of editing job at a real newspaper. If I'm not a General, I can be a Lieutenant, as long as the General knows what he's doing, which Jan decidedly didn’t. I won’t follow a nincompoop into battle. No newspaper or magazine on earth would hire Jan to edit ANYTHING. 
    I imagined him going into an interview and applying for the job of editor-in-chief. Have you ever edited anything? No. Have you ever written anything? No. Have you ever taken a course in journalism? No. Have you ever given an assignment, received it, edited it, seen it published, and made sure the writer got paid? No. Will you abide by standard journalistic ethics? No. We'll get back to you.
    Clearly the only reason the San Fernando Valley Weekly was considering hiring Jan as editor-in-chief was because he was sleeping with the publisher. In three months I put together the finest editorial team on earth at rock bottom prices. Totally professional, totally cheap, a publisher's dream come true, and he rewarded me by demoting me and trying to take credit for my work.

    I get almost a thousand e-mails a day from around the world. Nobody on earth has a wider variety of news sources. Every day I see items I can't believe the media has missed, and every day I see the major media report things I know to be out-and-out lies. Examples abound. Why has "Saddam killed his own people with poison gas" become common knowledge instead of "Saddam gassed his own people with poison gas given him by the United States?" The media wants the people to think "Saddam must be stopped," not "the United States should stop giving poison gas to people like Saddam," which is a much simpler, less bloody, and more cost effective way of solving the same problem. 
    This news has got to get out there. The Internet isn't enough. It needs to be printed on DEAD TREES and distributed for free across America. It's got to look like a real newspaper so people will take it seriously. It's got to have a sense of humor so that it's entertaining and allows people to decide for themselves whether to take it seriously or not. 
    Is it fair to call this piece The Life and Death of the San Fernando Valley Weekly when it could publish any second? How long do I have to wait to declare it officially dead? A week? A month? When is it "officially" not publishing? Before it doesn't succeed or after it doesn't succeed? Is it my ego saying it can't succeed without me, or is it my common sense telling me a newspaper can't work like that? 
    The San Fernando Valley Weekly would have been an experiment in the practice of journalism. We weren’t going to be different just to be different, we were going to be different because everything else is exactly the same.

     I want to apologize to all the people I offered a venue. I know you’re disappointed but I was just doing my job. Your voices are worth hearing and I will continue to try to get the world to listen. (Any other iconoclastic millionaires out there?)
    I want to apologize for my “publisher” Jan de Grat. He could have helped change the world. Instead he’s trying to get laid while furthering the cause of cheap ad rates. I wish him the best of luck.
    But most of all I want to apologize to America for the state of journalism in our country. You’re being lied to. In the words of Malcolm X, “You’ve been hoodwinked. You've been had. You've been took. You've been led astray, run amuck. You've been bamboozled." The media has made the truth something you’ve got to dig for instead of something they present to you in the course of their jobs. I wouldn’t care so much if the very life of our planet weren’t at stake, if furthering the cause of escalation weren’t furthering the cause of self-annihilation. (Long story, another time, by our bunks in the relocation camp)
    I continue to be flat broke, out of work, without transportation, in the middle of the desert, putting out a newspaper every week. Jan, the man who’d rather be editor-in-chief of absolutely nothing than publisher of an actual newspaper, is doing God knows what.

Revised opening editorial statement... 

Hi, I'm your editor Michael Dare 

Hi, I'm your Publisher Jan de Grat