Having apparently completed its mysterious purchase of LA Weekly, new owner Semanal LLC promptly fired 70 percent (9 of 13 staffers) of the alternative newspaper’s editorial staff in a brutal Nov. 29 layoff described by axed Weekly editor Mara Shalhoup as a massacre reminiscent of the Game of Thrones‘ infamous “red wedding” scene. Stunned staffers were fired one after another and told to pack up their things.
“Mara called it,” said ex-Weekly music editor Andy Hermann. “It was basically the ‘Red Wedding.’ They called us in and laid us off one by one. Nine editorial, the publisher, a bunch of admin people—just fucking gutted the place. No explanation, no transition; just ‘Thanks, bye.'”
The Weekly‘s new editorial honcho, Brian Calle, an ex-Orange County Register editorial director and one of OC Weekly‘s Scariest People of the Year, was perhaps not even in the building at the time. “Nope, never met or spoke to the guy,” Hermann confirmed.
“It was brutal, but I was the first to go, which means first to beer,” reminisced ex-Weekly managing editor Drew Tewksbury. “Which was great!”
Shalhoup announced the layoffs in a series of tweets late Wednesday. The following morning, a strange story with an unusual byline appeared on LA Weekly‘s home page. “Who Owns LA Weekly?” the article’s headline asked. “The new owners of LA Weekly don’t want you to know who they are. They are hiding from you. They’ve got big black bags with question marks covering their big, bald heads. These new owners just laid off nine hardworking journalists. Why? . . . It’s a fair question. Who is benefiting? You deserve to know.”
The story, by Keith Plocek, was particularly noteworthy because it may be the first time a newspaper has run a story pondering the identity of its ownership, not to mention one with a Simpsons cartoon image (see above). But perhaps more surprising is the fact that Plocek isn’t now, nor was he at the time the story was published, actually an employee of LA Weekly. So how did he have access to the website? Plocek is a former Voice Media Group web editor who, despite no longer working for the company, still had access to the newspaper’s publishing software.
In a Nov. 30 interview, Plocek, who now teaches at USC Annenberg School of Journalism, said he was surprised how easy it was to post the story on LA Weekly‘s website. “I’m just a random dude who used to be a muckety-muck who happened to have a password,” he said. “I just thought someone should write about it.”
So what’s up with Semanal LLC?
As the OC Weekly‘s Mary Carreon first reported on Oct. 20, legal paperwork for the group, which translates to “Weekly” from Spanish and was apparently formed with the sole purpose of purchasing the newspaper’s assets (thus busting the union that represented LA Weekly‘s editorial staff), was filed by an Orange County pot attorney named David Welch. After confirming he was the registered agent for Semanal, Welch hung up on Carreon and so far hasn’t responded to further calls from her or other journalists.
Semanal’s apparent Orange County connection was also the subject of a Nov. 30 tweet by ex-LA Weekly journalist Jason McGahan, who identified ex-Register editorial writer Steven Greenhut as a partner of Calle at Semanal. But in a Dec. 1 interview, Greenhut denied any involvement with Semanal, claiming that while he was friends with Calle and had written for him in the past, he wasn’t an investor in the group. Greenhut’s think tank, R Street, referenced in McGahan’s tweet, also denied any involvement.
And . . . literally as I was finishing this story, Calle posted a story on LA Weekly‘s website identifying Semanal’s investors, including Welch; Kevin Xu, “a philanthropist and investor”; Steve Mehr, “an attorney and investor”; Paul Makarechian, “a boutique hotel developer”; and Andy Bequer, a “Southern California-based investor.” Calle also said that esteemed UC Berkley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who praised Calle in an LA Times story yesterday, plans to invest.
Bequer, the registered agent for something called the “Experience Recovery Detox & Residential,” is the only one of the purported Semanal partners tweeted by McGahan on Nov. 30 named by Calle as investors in Semanal. At any rate, he’s another OC boy; the paperwork for his company shows an address in Fountain Valley.
You can read Calle’s LA Weekly story here. Or better yet, skip it. Thumbnail sketch: He talks about the LA Weekly‘s glory days as a beacon of independent journalism and its subsequent decline, thus strangely bemoaning the plight of the very paper he just gutted, as I predicted he would do here.
Additional reporting by Nate Jackson, Mary Carreon and Frank John Tristan.
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).
See to it there are all the tools that you ‘d such as to make use of. Other scripts in China that obtained or adjusted a few Chinese personalities but are otherwise unique consist of Geba manuscript, Sui script, Yi script, and also the Lisu syllabary. The oldest writing Chinese products located in Vietnam is an epigraphy dated 618, set up by neighborhood Sui dynasty authorities in Thanh Hoa. For instance, the received character 來 lái (“come”) was written as æ¥ in the clerical script (隶书/ 隸書, lìshÅ«) of the Han empire. Hanzi was additionally utilized to phonetically record the Manchu language in the Qing empire. Around the 13th century, a script called chữ Nôm was created to record people literature in the Vietnamese language. All these languages are now officially composed utilizing Latin-based manuscripts, while Chinese personalities are still made use of for the Mulam language. Received variations were mandatory in published jobs, while the (informal) streamlined characters would be used in daily writing or fast notes. In contrast to the second round, a majority of streamlined characters in the first round were drawn from conventional abbreviated kinds, or ancient kinds.
The variety of personalities in usual usage was restricted, and official lists of personalities to be found out during each quality of institution were developed, initially the 1850-character tÅyÅ kanji (当用漢å—) list in 1945, the 1945-character jÅyÅ kanji (常用漢å—) list in 1981, and also a 2136-character changed variation of the jÅyÅ kanji in 2010. Numerous variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for usual personalities were officially dissuaded. Some characters were provided simplified kinds called shinjitai (æ–°å—体, lit. Considering that the 1950s, as well as especially with the publication of the 1964 checklist, the Individuals’s Republic of China has formally taken on simplified Chinese characters for usage in landmass China, while Hong Kong, Macau, and also the Republic of China (Taiwan) were not affected by the reform. For instance, the name for the hanja æ°´ is 물 수 (mul-su) in which 물 (mul) is the indigenous Korean enunciation for “water”, while 수 (su) is the Sino-Korean enunciation of the chnlove.com character. While hanja is occasionally utilized for Sino-Korean vocabulary, native Oriental words are rarely, if ever before, composed in hanja.
When discovering how to compose hanja, pupils are instructed to remember the indigenous Oriental enunciation for the hanja’s meaning and the Sino-Korean pronunciations (the pronunciation based on the Chinese enunciation of the characters) for each and every hanja respectively to make sure that trainees recognize what the syllable as well as meaning is for a particular hanja. Hanja is likewise helpful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean vocabulary. In North Korea, the hanja system was as soon as entirely banned given that June 1949 because of worries of flattened control of the nation; throughout the 1950s, Kim Il Sung had actually condemned all kind of foreign languages (also the then-newly recommended New Oriental Orthography). However, as a result of the absence of tones in Modern Criterion Korean, as the words were imported from Chinese, many dissimilar characters and also syllables tackled identical pronunciations, and also ultimately the same spelling in hangul. In the duration of Republican China, discussions on character simplification occurred within the Kuomintang federal government and also the intelligentsia, in an initiative to greatly lower practical illiteracy among grownups, which was a major worry at the time.
Although the majority of often related to the People’s Republic of China, character simplification precedes the 1949 communist triumph. After the Okinawan kingdoms became tributaries of Ming China, especially the Ryukyu Kingdom, Classical Chinese was made use of in court records, yet hiragana was mostly used for preferred writing and also verse. Chinese personalities are thought to have been initially introduced to the Ryukyu Islands in 1265 by a Japanese Buddhist monk. After Ryukyu came to be a vassal of Japan’s Satsuma Domain, Chinese personalities became a lot more prominent, along with the use of Kanbun. Currently this alphabet is the primary manuscript in Vietnam, yet Chinese personalities and chữ Nôm are still used in some tasks connected with Vietnamese conventional culture (e.g. calligraphy). The first two lines of the timeless Vietnamese legendary rhyme The Tale of Kieu, written in the Nôm script as well as the modern-day Vietnamese alphabet. In contemporary Okinawan, which is identified as a Japanese language by the Japanese government, katakana and hiragana are primarily utilized to create Okinawan, however Chinese characters are still made use of. Hanja are still used to some level, especially in newspapers, wedding celebrations, area names as well as calligraphy (although it is no place near the extent of kanji use in daily Japanese society). These people urge the unique use the native hangul alphabet throughout Oriental culture and also completion to Hanja education in public institutions.