Parallel paths
Journalism proves there’s more than money to being rich
By Kevin Uhrich 07/30/2009
To paraphrase Super Chicken, one of my favorite cartoon characters as a kid, I knew the job was potentially dangerous — and low paying — when I took it. But in my mind, journalism was about telling stories, sometimes important stories, not being safe or making money.
As an old friend, editor and publisher Wayne Lee, used to say, reporting is actually bearing witness to history, then recording it for posterity. It can be a pretty big deal for a guy in his 20s to play such an important role in a community, and I was extremely proud to serve — proud enough to forget about low wages, the crummy apartment I lived in and my broken-down car while covering city council meetings, local politics, elections and assorted crimes and court proceedings.
Back in the mid-’80s, when the Weekly and I were beginning our sometimes parallel but distinctly different paths, I was writing anywhere from two to seven news stories a day for The Enterprise, back then the paper of record for Simi Valley and Moorpark. But not all of them were generated from an agenda or a police log. One involved a councilman’s cocaine addiction; another focused on the recall of a mayor who used racial epithets all the time, but no one else wrote about; another was about a police sting occurring on a Saturday which we broke the previous Thursday, causing an uproar with the DA’s office and years worth of navel-gazing among colleagues around the country; and another one asked why the head of the county child support division — the guy who ran the sting operation, believe it or not — wasn’t paying his own child support but still arresting others no more guilty than himself.
Leaving The Enterprise after nearly five years of hard-charging muckraking (think Super Chicken meets Crusader Rabbit) was as much for my safety as to make a little extra scratch at the Pasadena Star-News, where reporters were fairly well paid, but as one editor put it, never got underneath the story, as I seemed to do. As it happened, this “talent” would perhaps never come in handier than in Pasadena, where there was another councilman on coke, a police chief allegedly roughing up his wife, a host of complaints about racial and sexual bias, police abuse, race riots and all sorts of political shenanigans and financial mischief to chase. But none of those stories ever got me in as much hot water as our attempt to unionize the paper in 1993 and ’94.
While these efforts were directly responsible in the short term for raises and other benefits for everyone, the union drive would fail and I would leave in a huff. Well, more like a huff cubed. But I have no regrets. I knew that I was making myself unhirable to most other papers by doing this. But that didn’t matter. The issues involved were bigger than me, bigger than all of us, or so I thought. I supported myself by writing for my old friend Steve Appleford at the LA Reader and a few other publications, while my main source of income came from driving a cab at night around the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and LA.
Soon, though, I found myself back in the news writing game, contributing to the LA Times’ old San Gabriel Valley edition as well, and in no time life was good again, only not for long. The following year, 1996, the Reader folded, leaving me with one less income source. A few months prior to that, the Times had cut me and the rest of its pseudo-freelance contributors, and that summer I would quit the taxi business and write the first of hundreds of yarns for PW.
Jim Laris owned the paper in those days, and it seemed I could do no wrong in his eyes. He gave me a venue and paid me, which is all I wanted. Jim, however, had other plans, ultimately selling the paper in 1998 to the Times’ Times Community News Division.
Many bemoaned the takeover, believing correctly that the Times would prohibit profanities and tightly watch anything controversial. Personally, though, I believe the Times’ editors brought a level of professionalism to the operation that hadn’t existed before. Now there were editors and fact checkers and staff photographers and deadlines that really meant “done or dead.” Probably because of my experiences with dailies, I thrived in this environment. I was long addicted to what former editor and friend Rick Arthur used to call the “hum and throb” of the newsroom.
By this time, I was not only writing for the Pasadena Weekly but also the LA Weekly. I had also resumed driving a cab and was swimming in cash. Then the Times’ PW Senior Editor Tim Hughes asked me to step into the editor’s slot, a request I initially viewed with reluctance — mainly because I could make more money as a freelancing cabbie. But I took the job.
Since then, I’ve learned a few things. One is a lot of people feel the same way I do, that it’s not about money, not entirely. Journalism, I’ve found, is really about people — the rich and powerful, the poor and pitiful, the saints and sinners, winners and losers, heroes and villains and family, friends and colleagues who enrich our lives and make it worth our while to help build a better tomorrow.
Here’s to another 25 years of the good ol’ P-Dubya, the People’s Paper.
Contact Kevin Uhrich at kevinu@pasadenaweekly.com.
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