A sidenote about yesterday's post: I must reiterate that having a prospective competitor to the LA Weekly is a good thing, even if the initial set of contributors are the type of hack-pundits usually published by the L.A. Daily News. For those of you who live outside of LA County, one of the things you have to remember is that half the population in the city lives in the San Fernando Valley, myself included. I cannot remember the last time the Weekly published an informative or intelligent story about the Valley; during the recent secession vote, the only times it could be bothered to comment on the issue was to say that it was a movement of, by, and for, racists. As skeptical as I was about secession, quite frankly the notion that this was some sort of white separatist movement is bullshit.

Normally, I would be infuriated by that sort of take, as it derives from the outdated view that the Valley is a predominantly white enclave, which hasn't been true since Yorty was mayor, as well as unintentionally endorsing the view, widely shared west of the 405, that the rest of the city has a parasitic relationship to Valley homeowners. But the Weekly's coverage of this area is so bad (its restaurant guide lists more restaurants from the "trendy" Silverlake area than from the Valley) that I find the throwaway to be more a testament to provincialism than something I need to take seriously. In some ways, it resembles the cliched view that East Coast sportswriters have of California, as a place too "laid back", too "Hollywood", to be passionate about our teams. I am optimistic enough about the forward progress of human development to believe that such opinions will eventually die out, hand-in-hand with the morons who share them.

Considering that the alternative is the execrable Daily News, a newspaper whose only worthwhile attribute is that it reprints the NY Times crossword puzzle every day, a new weekly holds the possibility that the other half of Los Angeles is finally going to get covered in a serious manner. And for that reason alone, I am mildly excited by the debut of the Examiner.