(Creative Commons licensed)

Betsy A. Ross speaks fondly of the first Robert Blake trial, in which Blake was acquitted of murdering his wife, Bonny Lee Bakely. It was during that trial, which concluded in March 2005, that Ross met former LA Weekly editor and reporter Steven Mikulan.

"He and I were both new to covering trials," Ross said. "He was quite nice to me, and when I ran into him at the Phil Spector trial, he saved a little spot for me."

Ross, who runs the legal blog Trials & Tribulations, reported on the Spector trial as part of a group of friendly journalists that included Mikulan, LA Daily Journal writer Ciaran McEvoy, and the late former Vanity Fair writer Dominic Dunne.

"Of all the accredited press, [Mikulan] was the one who was most accepting," Ross said. 

Until his firing last week, Mikulan was a longstanding employee of the Weekly who had covered some of the biggest criminal trials of the last 10 years in Los Angeles: Robert Blake. Phil Spector. Anthony Pellicano. Anand Jon. He had reached his 25-year milestone and gained high esteem from friends and colleagues as a "superior writer" in the tradition of Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote.  

However, as several of his colleagues have attested, Milkulan's talent was not being utilized under the Weekly's new management, which came into power after the merger of New Times Media, the Weekly's parent company, with Village Voice Media was finalized in 2006.

"This is all part of a long, downward spiral for the Weekly," said Robert Iafolla, now a staff writer at the LA Daily Journal, who covered some of the same trials that Mikulan did. Calls and e-mails to the Weekly were not returned.

Mikulan began as a freelance writer for the Weekly in 1983, after completing a graduate playwriting program at UCLA. He started writing theater reviews "for five dollars a pop," remembers Mikulan, before being promoted to the position of Calendar Editor. By 1986, he had been named the paper's Theater Editor, a position he held for 10 years.

"It's sort of an embarrassment to be at one place for so long," Mikulan said, adding that he had not intended to continue working at the Weekly for more than a few years.

Asked why he didn't find work at other Los Angeles publications, he said: "It's possible that I had pissed off some people at the LA Times."

Mikulan gained praise for his theater writing at the Weekly, winning the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for his reviews in 1990.

Yet, many Angelenos know Mikulan not for his theater writing, but for his trial and politics coverage. At the urging of then-news editor Alan Mittelstaedt, Mikulan began his foray into trial coverage at the Robert Blake trail. According to several colleagues, he was a natural.

"He brought the keen eye of a theater critic to the courtroom, developing characters in high-profile trials like no one else in L.A. He made murder entertaining," Mittelstaedt said.

Mikulan agrees that his theater background has given him a unique perspective on the courtroom.

"It allowed me to step outside of what was going on in court and view it from sort of an artistic perspective," he said. "You don't want to trivialize a murder trial, but you take it off of its Hegelian pedestal."

Ciaran McEvoy, writing for the City News Service during the Phil Spector and Anthony Pellicano trials, both of which Mikulan covered also, said that attorneys in the respective cases respected Mikulan's work and would ask him about it during recesses. He laments Mikulan's firing from the Weekly.

"It's a loss for the Weekly and L.A. journalism," McEvoy said.

Mikulan declined to talk in detail about the circumstances surrounding the termination of his employment, citing terms of his severance agreement. About the current management, he explained:

"They have a business paradigm that they strongly believe in. However, it's not a paradigm that's been used before at the Weekly."

In November of last year, Mikulan was told that he would not be writing print stories anymore, and would instead oversee the Weekly's blog content. It wasn't a perfect fit, said colleagues.

"Steve blogging was like using a Ferrari to deliver pizza. He deserves, and will surely find, a better venue for his talent," said Iafolla. 

Mikulan agreed. "I wish I had remained as a regular writer both in print and online," he said.  "My strengths lay in writing longer pieces."

As such a long-time employee of the Weekly, Mikulan had gained a reputation as someone who could be trusted by his fellow employees. Until September of this year, he served as president of the L.A. Weekly Machinists Union, a title he held for four years. He called the experience, which involved speaking on behalf of workers on both the editorial and printing sides of the organization, "very trying."  

"It's sort of like an existential dilemma," Mikulan said. "You're trying to save people, but you can't. You can really only save their jobs for a few months or a year. Because sooner or later everyone loses their jobs."