Love the idea, but mighty unimpressed with the amount of content. $20 admission? Pretty steep. Especially compared to the Festival of Books happening on the same weekend which is free and full of stuff to see or do.

The LA Weekly brand is strong enough that they could do something much more ambitious to celebrate their 30th. Perhaps originally they had bigger ideas, but the economy struck… but $20 a ticket?

The event does sound cool, but I agree that $20 seems like a lot.

We still pick up the Weekly every week, mostly to peruse the concert listings. I miss “Life In Hell” and some of the other comics they used to include. If nothing else, it provides good, free lining for my guinea pigs’ cages.

I gotta say, I still enjoy reading it from cover to cover. Except the cooter-plastic-surgery ads.

…and the call girl ads.

You think for $20, they could have thrown in an interview or two with one of the call girls.

“It should be said it’s not seeing the Amazon-rainforest-esque destruction that the LA Times has been seeing; its editorial dep’t has not been quite laid to waste the way it has at the Times.”

Uh, it hasn’t? They basically have a writing staff of five or six. They still list Marc Cooper as a writer on their website, despite the fact that he was laid off as a contributing editor, and as his widely read post on the Weekly makes clear, he wants nothing to do with them anymore.

http://marccooper.com/la-weekly-the-autopsy-report/

“The paper has fired, pushed out or let go its top deputy editor who managed most of its cover stories over the last five years. It fired its managing editor — and with no intention to replace her ( this is a first in newspaper history I think). It fired its dazzling News Editor — and my friend Alan Mittelstaedt– and has shrunk and twisted its news gathering operation which took more than a decade to build into a competitive and credible local watchdog. The paper’s two prize-winning investigative reporters quickly bailed to other papers. Other long-time staff writers have been fired. Others have chosen exile. The Weekly’s fact-checking department has been abolished. Its copy editing department has been decapitated. It design staff decimated. Its free-lance rates — once competitive with any other publication in town — have been chopped and the overall free-lance budget has been almost obliterated. Writers’ rates that once topped a dollar a word have been cut by half or more (for the few writers who can still squeeze out an assignment).”

Thanks for the post, Lucinda! I am an avid LA Weeklyer too.