Cathy: "It makes me grateful for this Okie area I grew up in, even though I hated it then and wanted to get away. It teaches you that not everyone thinks the way you think. It's a good thing to learn as a journalist that most people are not like the cultural elite in the newsroom. It's so easy to shock journalists. If you have a different opinion, they're shocked."I was sorry to read about Cathy Seipp's struggle with lung cancer, a disease that suffers from a lack of medical research dollars compared to illnesses like HIV or breast cancer, apparently because smokers are an unfashionable demographic. Even more unfortunate is that many non-smokers get the disease, and suffer and die without much public concern because of the stigma. For more information on this terrible disease, here's a link to the website of the American Lung Association.
"I worked for the AP after college for less than a year. I left because I was frustrated that I wasn't hired as a reporter from a copy clerk. My first job after that was at this hideous thing called The California Apparel News (CAN), the poor man's Women's Wear Daily, a trade paper for fashion. CAN brought in a new boss, Michael Belluomo. We called him Balumbo because he was such a dope. I was so young and stupid at the time that I didn't realize that you couldn't constantly make fun of the new boss. They will fire you. That was a shock. I cried. That was the last time I cried at an office. I was 20.
"I then went to the Los Angeles Daily News for four years, leaving in 1985. They doubled my salary to $400 a week. I was a fashion writer and for a year I wrote a daily column. It was a proto-blog. They had a stupid new features editor come in who I hated - Jane Amari. She's now at the Arizona Daily Star. I see her on Romenesko occasionally. She gets in trouble for doing some moronic thing."
From Jim Romenesko's page 10/28/02: "Several dozen Arizona Star readers let the paper know they weren't happy to see child killer Frank Jarvis Atwood's guest column opposing the death penalty. "I would cancel my subscription if my husband would allow me," says one reader. Star editor and publisher Jane Amari says she regrets publishing the murderer's essay. "Choosing to run the piece was a serious lapse in judgment," she says. "If we felt making that point was so important, I feel sure we could have located an author who is not on death row for a heinous crime." PLUS: The Star also regrets running an editorial cartoon equating the D.C. sniper with the gun lobby."
Cathy: "At that point, I didn't want to work in an office any more and have people tell me what to do. Since then, I've been a freelancer."
Luke: "When did your relationship with the LA Times begin?"
Cathy: "My first published article at age 19 was in the LA Times. I was friendly with a journalism professor named Digby Diehl and he was the Books editor at the LA Times and he gave me an assignment (biography of the real person behind the Three Faces of Eve book) and it was on the front page of the LA Times Book Review. At that time, you had to drive the story downtown because there weren't faxes and email. I didn't know how to drive from Westwood to downtown but I did it. Digby had a mean secretary named Eve who was horrible to me and screamed at me for having the margins wrong.
"When I was four and we moved to this country, I read the Times. Smart people got the Times. Stupid people got the Long Beach Press Telegram or the Orange County Register. When I wrote that thing about Bella Stumbo [LA Times feature writer] when she died, I've been reading her since high school.
"I freelanced for the Times until I started writing about them for Buzz. They would still call me up occasionally and try to assign me freelance articles. After I got into that niche of writing about media, and doing what I wanted to do - opinionated essays - I didn't want to do just some stupid assignment. As Ben Stein once told me, you want to have monopoly money instead of general money. You want to have a niche where you write about stuff that only you can do - so they will pay you more for it. You dilute the franchise if you start doing celebrity interviews."
Luke: "How did the Times react to your Buzz column?"
Cathy: "At first, they didn't know who did it. It took them two years to figure it out. It took the Daily News ten minutes when they wanted to. I'd mentioned the Daily News in some context and they got on the phone and figured it out. I first wrote under the pseudonym Margo Magee because they had a comic strip Apartment 3G and there's a girl in it called Margo Magee. It was my little inside-the-Times joke. They didn't read their own comics so they couldn't figure it out. I kept the pseudonym as a persona like Spy's Celia Brady [Hollywood gossip column written by various people and edited together by Kurt Anderson]. The Times thought for a long time that it was a bunch of people reporting my column and one person would write it. I was insulted. It was all mine. They couldn't get it out of their head that it was a man writing it."
Luke: "Did they ever threaten lawsuits?"
Cathy: "No, because nothing was inaccurate. And for what? Hurting their feelings? The argument was never that I was inaccurate. It was that I was mean-spirited and angry. As you can see, I'm not angry and I don't think that I'm mean-spirited. With American journalism, if you write something blunt, people get shocked. The English have much stricter libel laws but you're allowed to be ruder. In America, everything's got to be psycho-therapized and you have to considerate of people's feelings and you can't ever write about what people are really talking about.
"Robert Scheer was angry [with me]."
Luke: "David Horowitz wrote he was always opening up people's refrigerators looking for stuff to eat."
Cathy: "Well, that sounded like Scheer. He's a masher - an old fashioned term for an older guy who picks up on young women. I'd always refer to him as Robert "Romeo" Scheer and he'd get really mad.
"As a kid, I loved Rolf Harris records [Australian folk singer, "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" et al]. It shows you how eccentric we were growing up in Los Alamitos. There was this one song: "I've got hair oil in my ears and me glasses slipping down/ But baby I can see through you." That always reminded me of Robert Scheer and he got mad when I wrote that about him. And the good thing about Buzz is that they never made me explain the reference like a lot of bad editors. If you don't know who Rolf Harris is, you can figure it out."
Luke: "Why did Buzz close in 1998?"
Cathy: "Because Disney decided not to sell Los Angeles Magazine. There wasn't room for two monthly LA magazines. LA Magazine had made money every year except when Buzz started. Buzz was never profitable. If Disney had closed LA Magazine, Buzz would've stayed open. When Buzz became bad the last year or two, when the editor Allan Mayer left and they turned Buzz into this Tiger Beat meets In Style sensibility... I was fired from Buzz because they couldn't afford to pay me any more.
"The only time I got mad when I was fired from some place was Salon because they never bothered to tell me. I only found out when a reader emailed me and said, 'They reorganized the whole look of the site. Are they keeping your column?' I called the sub-editor that I worked with and he said, 'Oh yeah, I was going to call you. We're dropping the column but you can still pitch us with stories.' The editor-in-chief who hired me, David Talbot, never bothered to call me, which is terrible. When I called him and left a message, and emailed him, he never called me back. He'd also promised 10,000 shares of stock, which he never gave. That's a moot point now because it's worth nothing.
"The most lucrative column I ever had was the one for Media Week's online site [trade magazine]. I did it for two years. It started off as a twice-a-week column. I've liked getting into more writing about media instead of what I used to have to do - some schleppy celebrity interview."
Luke: "Which members of the media have taken greatest exception to your writing on them?"
Cathy: "Robert Scheer is still resentful and he refers to me as evil. There was a funny time when I called up Noel Greenwood, an old City editor at the LA Times. I had to ask him if he did have an affair with Carol Stogsdill, the really mean sub-editor that everybody hated and was the then-ranking woman at the Times."
Luke: "That's a horrible question to have to ask."
Cathy agrees. "I was very dutiful. I call him up. 'I'm sorry I have to ask you this but...' He replies, 'Hahaha, that's none of your business.' I say, 'That's fair enough. I just had to ask you.' And I'm about to say goodbye, when he says, 'And I don't respect your work.' Click.
"That's one advantage that calling people has over email. You'd much rather email people that question but if you don't call them, you don't hear their voice. I confirmed that he's pompous and insufferable, which couldn't have been done through email. Noel was angry.
"[LAT's media reporter] David Shaw was nice to me when I called him up to get quote on something but that was before I insulted him.
"Poor Robin Abcarian was real angry with me. She used to have a column [in the LA Times and a radio show]. We worked together at the Daily News and we were friends. I felt bad about having to insult her but the column was insultable, what are you going to do?
"I'd avoided writing about her because we were friendly. But if you're writing about the Times and somebody does something spectacularly stupid, you have to report it. I remember she had seriously libeled somebody's parents. Some woman had been abused by her parents but Robin identified the parents. Until you've been convicted in a trial, you cannot refer to them as rapists and child abusers. An editor should've caught that. So they had to trash something like a 20,000 copy run of the paper. I had to write about that. She got mad. I don't blame her. Then the cat was out of the bag and I made fun of her columns and she was resentful.
"An old friend of mine, Richard Rouillard, stopped talking to me. He was editor of the Advocate [gay magazine]. He stopped talking to me for no fair reason. I didn't insult him it was just some stupid..."
Luke: "Was there ever time when people's anger at you overwhelmed you and inhibited your writing?"
Cathy: "Never. If you are going to care about people getting mad, you should be a social worker, not a journalist. I used to like to go to the Times' cafeteria and I started to feel like I shouldn't go there anymore. If people write something stupid, I'm going to write about it. People forget that I did make friends [through my Buzz column]. Stupid people got upset but smart people liked the column and made friends with me. That's how I know Matt [Welch] and Ken [Layne] because they remembered reading the column."
LA Times obituary here.
