It’s good to be the king
Celebrating 500 issues with Weekly Editor Kevin Uhrich
By Joe Piasecki 05/04/2006
It’s getting down to the wire here, with Weekly Publisher Dale Tiffany and the big boss, Group Publisher David Comden, demanding a story about my immediate boss, Editor Kevin Uhrich, in celebration of his 500th issue with this newspaper.
With the thousands of stories he’s written and edited over the past nearly 10 years, it’s funny but apropos, I think, that I can’t imagine where to start. The most important story? The most difficult? The most fun?
I can’t ask Kevin, as this is supposed to be a surprise — not just because he might rewrite the somewhat wordy, comma-laden lede, but because he’s always eschewed self-promotion and might strike all of this from the page.
But it needs to be said, so from all of us at the Weekly: Keep up the good work. It wouldn’t be the same here without you.
You see, a lot can happen in 500 weeks.
Since Kevin wrote his first story for this newspaper, “Scathing Ruling Raises Questions in Kings Villages Case,” on July 26, 1996, Weekly content has only continued to improve.
When you think about it for a minute, this paper is pretty unique. In Kevin’s ink-stained hands, it’s become a community paper that actually breaks news (“It’s the news that sells,” he says), but at the same time it’s an “alternative weekly” in the truest sense.
The Weekly, I’m proud to say, really takes a stand, like last year when we became the first mainstream news organization to call for the impeachment of President Bush.
Beyond offering a true progressive voice to Pasadena readers week-in and week-out, we’ve also published stories that have resulted in criminal charges being dropped and city laws that were once blown off now being heeded. Members of the community, often the poor or disenfranchised, have consistently found us willing to listen — and more importantly care — when many others would not on issues of justice and civil rights. Love us or hate us for it, we’ve also kept the Raymond Theatre debate in the news, which, when you really think about it, is more about people talking back to power than it is about an old building.
And while Kevin seems to get most of his vicariously through the editing process or during conversations at the bar, we’ve got local culture covered too, at least according to judges at the California Newspaper Publisher’s Association who were particularly fond of our arts coverage this year.
I have to say, the paper is pretty darn readable.
I know, I know: This is supposed to be about Kevin. But without him, would it really be the Weekly?
It wouldn’t be half as much fun, that’s for sure.
For all the notions of being new and edgy that come with this business, Kevin’s an old-school kind of editor who subscribes to professionalism on the page and barroom camaraderie off the clock, if he ever really is off the clock, per say.
“He encourages outstanding, professional work but also reminds us that our jobs should be fun,” said Arts Editor Julie Riggott.
“And he likes a good joke,” added Calendar Editor Carl Kozlowski, “especially when it’s on me.”
While I guess you’d have to be in the newsroom to really appreciate the human comedy that transpires here on a weekly basis, know this. Unlike many who have been in the business as long as he has (having worked for the Simi Valley Enterprise and LA Daily News in 1980s and for the Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Times, LA Reader and LA Weekly in the 1990s), Kevin still gets truly excited about the stories and even the letters that appear here and, though he no longer has to, continues to get his hands dirty with the real work of reporting the news.
Perhaps his unflagging interest in the news biz has something to do with what he often tells new writers joining the paper, a formula he developed when the Times Community News Division named him editor of the Weekly in 1998: “Make me see with your eyes what I can’t with my own.”
Maybe he’s still a little ticked off at the Star-News, which he was literally banished from a decade ago when that paper was under different ownership. A stand-up-for-others kind of rebel, Kevin was leading a union movement at the time because management just couldn’t keep themselves from flat-out abusing staff.
In fact, he’s been a reporter’s editor as long as I’ve known him, once turning down the promise of his own private office for a desk in the trenches of the newsroom.
But enough about Kevin already.
Thanks to him, there’s plenty of other good stuff in here to read.
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