Drex Heikes knows that the LA Weekly has seen better days.  In fact, the new editor of the city's last standing alt-weekly acknowledges it has been fighting just to survive.
 
"Sometime in the winter, spring, it bottomed out," Heikes said gravely from his new desk at the Weekly's Culver City headquarters. "I wasn't here, but from what I understand, there were sparks on the pavement. The shocks were gone. There was just nothing left."

The specter of loss still hangs quietly over the Weekly's offices like stale L.A. smog.  The organization has lost or pushed out some of its biggest names in 2009, including former Editor-In-Chief Laurie Ochoa, theater critic Steven Leigh Morris, film critic Ella Taylor, editor and reporter Steven Mikulan, and last week, film editor Scott Foundas.

Once the fattest alternative paper in the county, the rag has indeed looked weaker in recent years.  A steep decline in advertising demand has forced the paper to cut out some of its strongest copy as it squeezes into a smaller page count.  

The Weekly's editorial staff is down to six full-time employees: three editors and three reporters [see editor's note]. They will report directly to Heikes, a newspaper lifer who brought a Pulitzer Prize to the Las Vegas Sun earlier this year.  He edited different parts of the LA Times for 18 years before joining the Sun in 2005.

"The way this'll get structured is the way I ran the Sunday magazine at the Times," he said.  "Everything will come through that basket right there [knocks on desk]. I'll read everything."

News Editor Jill Stewart and Features Editor Tom Christie are the only editors who remain.  Stewart, hired by Village Voice Media's executive editor Mike Lacey in 2006, is known as a firebrand with a talent for piercing the armor of the city's governing bodies.   Several observers have said Stewart acted autonomously of Ochoa during her tenure, a claim Stewart denies. A nationally syndicated political columnist, Stewart is much further to the right than the Weekly's founders were.  

Heikes characterized most of the organization's woes as consequences of a tanking economy.  Yet, the Weekly has been steadily losing veteran talent since 2006, changes prompted more by an underlying shift in editorial philosophy than by recessionary forces. Longtime observers say that as the Weekly's talent has departed over the past several years, so too has its heart and soul.

Lacey, the self-proclaimed "asshole in charge," said he has authorized Heikes to double the size of its editorial staff in the next six months.

In an interview at the Weekly's offices in Culver City, Heikes said he did not sign on to preside over an organization in decline.  At the top of his agenda:  reclaiming the Weekly's legacy of pioneering investigative journalism and its street-level awareness of L.A.'s music and art scenes.  He's already overseeing heavy investment in the Web as a primary delivery vehicle for the Weekly's goods.

The new editor echoed past voices from the Weekly in describing his editorial approach:  "I see it from the ground up, not top down.  I don't want us covering [Los Angeles Mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa like a rock star like the Times did for a few years until they got tired of him.  What's going on in the streets? Let's work up from that."


The second floor of the Weekly's office, a flat-faced corporate space on a drive-through stretch of Sepulveda, is mostly dark.  The center of the large common space furnished with an array of vacant cubicles.  The cubicles sport neon green trim, a seeming tribute to a past funkiness at the Weekly.  A ring of offices casts some light across the carpet, and the odd conversation brings some noise into the room.  Heikes, steadily drinking coffee and occasionally gazing out the window, is not afraid to reflect on the organization's recent past.
  
He lauded veteran editor and reporter Mikulan, the first person fired under his tenure, as "a real class act" and reflected on the condition of his staff:  "Some really talented people are gone.  There are some very talented people that were with this paper a long time that are gone."

Heikes takes the editor's seat just as the county's worst recession since the Great Depression begins to ease.  A man with many admirers in the news world, Heikes remade the Las Vegas Sun into a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsmagazine over four years.  He is no stranger to captaining the kind of change he brings to the Weekly, overseeing complete transformation at the Sun, all the while commuting from his home in Playa Del Rey.

"We completely restructured that paper," Heikes said. "We took it from a sleepy little afternoon daily into what it became.  And that meant a lot of people left and a lot of people came in."

The new editor has assurances from his boss, Village Voice Media executive editor Mike Lacey, that the carnage is over at the Weekly.  In fact, the organization is hiring again, with positions available for a full-time reporter and news blogger.  Dennis Romero was promoted last week to serve as the Weekly's blog editor, a position Mikulan had occupied before he was let go.

Weekly follower Ezrha Jean Black of Artillery Magazine said she attributes much of the turnover to the need to cut high-salaried staff members and bring in "fresh blood."  At the same time, she doubted that the Weekly could grow its audience without veteran journalists like Mikulan.

"There is no replacing someone like Steven Mikulan," Blake said.  "He was one of its ultimate voices - the epitome of what the Weekly was and should be about."

Heikes said he has no illusions about the way his organization has been perceived in recent years.

"I could see why people on the outside would say it's a 'downward spiral' because it's been this great contraction of the kinds of things in here," he said.
 
Heikes, however, is unfazed.  He began his newspaper career in 1974 as an editor at the University of Oregon's Oregon Daily Emerald while pursuing an undergraduate degree in journalism.  After graduation in 1975, he served at newspapers in Middletown, New York; Anchorage, Alaska; and Fresno, California before landing at the Los Angeles Times in 1987.

After leading editorial teams across the country for more than three decades, including the Times' foreign affairs team in Washington D.C. and its New York City bureau immediately following 9/11, Heikes is confident that he can reestablish the Weekly as a leader in investigative journalism.   He said the open reporting position attracted 429 applicants, including Pulitzer Prize winners.

 "That's why they brought me in. I call [investigative reporting] 'journalism with a capital J' and that's why I'm here," Heikes said. "We're pushing things that are very deeply reported. We want good, hard-nosed investigative work."  

The trick now for Heikes, assuming the economy is on the rebound, is rallying his staff around his editorial mission, playing on the Weekly's unique strengths as an alternative weekly in an increasingly underreported Los Angeles, and steering the organization back to a level that satisfies both readers and his own executive management at Village Voice Media.


The Weekly was once a very different animal.  When Michael Sigman, the Weekly's publisher for 18 years, joined the staff in 1983 the paper was a teeming mass of energy and ideology he described as "insanity."  He was hired by founder Jay Levin to build a business out of a rabble of creative anti-authoritarians with what he described as a "punk ethos."
 
Sigman said that during the mid-80s, advertising revenues at the Weekly were lucrative enough that the organization "had money to waste."  With the budget to do so, Levin funded a long streak of reporting from the ground in Central America, where the United States was waging a series of blood-soaked smack-downs of indigenous uprisings.
 
"We just pounded away at what was going on in El Salvador and Guatemala," Sigman said. "The LA Times was a great target.  We did what the daily paper didn't."

Culturally, the Weekly became a common venue for "a cohort of the city that didn't have a center," Sigman explained.  With a bunch of punks and activists jamming its headquarters on Sunset Boulevard, the paper's music, arts, and local news coverage grew directly out of the L.A. scene while Levin orchestrated extensive international coverage.

At the same time, Sigman's outfit hosted public events that drew hundreds and thousands of Angelenos to discuss and organize on local issues, national politics, and foreign policy.

During his tenure, he said, the Weekly's editorial philosophy was radically different: "We were a paper of the Left," Sigman said. "We didn't make any bones about it."

Although Sigman declined to comment about specific personnel moves at the Weekly, he lamented the paper's move away from liberal activism, and said that he would steer it back in that direction if he were in charge.

By the time Sigman left the Weekly in 2002, the publication was averaging 200 pages per issue, the highest page count of any alt-weekly in the country.

Mike Lacey, Heikes' boss, has been described as the "overlord of alt-weeklies across America." A co-founder of the Phoenix New Times in 1970, Lacey slowly built an empire, acquiring alternative weeklies across the country throughout the 1980s and 1990s.  In 2006, New Times merged with Village Voice Media, LA Weekly's parent company, and assumed the Village Voice name.
  
Speaking from Village Voice Media headquarters in Phoenix, Lacey said he chose Heikes to run the Weekly because of his "proven track record" and Southern California background.  His comments indicated that Lacey sees the Weekly under Heikes as a fresh start for the organization.
 
"I think the havoc that you perceive is more in the mindset of the [former Weekly employees] who are no longer there," Lacey said, going on to say that the Weekly's reporting in past years had often put "clever writing at extreme lengths" before well-reported journalism.
 
Heikes is bringing in his new staff with both eyes on the paper's Web site, LAWeekly.com, which is now a top priority for the organization.

"This paper had not gotten into the Web which is kind of mind-boggling to me," Heikes said. "So, a lot of resources have to go over there."

Lacey agreed with Heikes' assertion, citing statistics that suggest traffic across the Village Voice Media sites has nearly tripled in the past three years.  He admits, however, that the Weekly's site is a work in progress.

"We're a bit like Helen Keller at this point," he joked.  Lacey explained that the Weekly is working on a cultural change, first dispelling any "preconceived notion of our audience" and then moving toward greater competition with daily news operations like the LA Times.

"We look at the Web site as a daily operation," Lacey said. "We're not conceding anything to daily newspapers or broadcast outlets."

For Heikes, the Web is an ideal platform for investigative journalism.

He sees what he calls a "thirst for long-form, serious journalism" and will focus on breaking stories on the Web before presenting them in the paper.  "When we write a big, meaningful story, that thing goes off the charts," Heikes said.  "I think it goes viral and it certainly goes national."  

Heikes, whose name has elicited compliments from his current staff, former colleagues, and critics of the Weekly's trajectory in recent years, says he's now oriented after an adjustment period that Lacey likened to "being parachuted as an adolescent into a new family."  

The new editor, who looked relieved to be moving out of "survival mode" and back toward growth, called for time: "I would say, God willing, the place is going to grow and we can be judged on where we are a year from now or two years from now."

 

Updated editor's note: After publication, Drex Heikes e-mailed Neon Tommy that the editorial staff was, in fact, significantly larger than six.  We omitted mention of Music Editor Randall Roberts, Web Editor Erin Broadley and several members of the editorial support staff.