The Imperative For Independent Journalism

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Passing Torch
Passing the Torch. Graphic by Terelle Jerricks.
Why Random Lengths News Matters

By Evelyn McDonnell

One week after Donald Trump’s election, the publisher and editor of Random Lengths News convened a rare in-person editorial meeting. Emergencies require all hands on deck, after all, and the ascendance of a man who spews racist, xenophobic rhetoric and is a mortal threat to women’s bodies — not to mention the entire planet — caused James Preston Allen and Terelle Jerricks to broadcast the proverbial bat signal. We — editor, arts writer, tenant advocate, intern, publisher, etc. — assembled in the Pacific Avenue offices for only the second time in the year since I have been writing regularly for San Pedro’s only newspaper. As in most newsrooms these days, the majority of us work virtually. But it felt important to be in physical space with each other. It felt good to be rescued from the loneliness of our Zoom rooms. As we made plans for a recurring list of local mutual-aid organizations and pondered how a sanctuary city under Karen Bass would handle the task of hosting the 2028 Olympics under Trump’s presidency, it felt necessary to strategize.
Now, more than ever.
Just a few weeks earlier, the Los Angeles Times’s publisher had greased the wheels for a Republican victory by killing the editorial board’s plan to endorse Kamala Harris. After all, numerous sources reported that Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong had tried to land a job in the last Trump administration. A Nov. 23 tweet by the medical tech billionaire praising the incumbent’s “inspired decision” to appoint a trio of highly questionable doctors to lead health cabinet positions affirmed just how far the newspaper owner has his nose up Donald’s butt. (Thanks to RLN’s intrepid senior editor Paul Rosenberg for sharing that post in an email chain.) The doctor wasn’t alone: The Washington Post, owned by another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, also failed to endorse a presidential candidate.
Quick journalism lesson: While endorsing candidates may seem to run counter to the idea of “objective” journalism, it is a time-honored practice at most newspapers. They issue opinions on contemporary issues every single day in editorials and columns on the “op-ed” — short for “opinion-editorial” — pages. After all, who is more informed about current events than the people who spend their working lives investigating and reporting them? We hear politicians telling us what to think every time we turn on a device. Isn’t it helpful to hear from someone who has done the research, considered the opposing sides, and can help us sort it all out? Presumably, the news organization doesn’t have a financial or personal stake in their opinion-making — if they do, they should make it transparent in their writing. This is why the press is called the fourth estate: It stands outside the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government, acting as a check on their abuses of power. Everyone who works in a newsroom — from the publisher to the intern — is supposed to maintain that independence of thought.
By refusing to endorse, Soon-Shiong and Bezos were not upholding the independence of the press: They were abandoning it in acts of deliberate self-interest not to mention abject cowardice. They were afraid that a vengeful Trump would not only not hire them, but that he might attack the newspapers that they had purchased in what once seemed like acts of civic virtue, but have now been revealed as mere vanity projects — virtue signaling, in place of the real thing. Most of all, they were afraid Trump might use his powers to assault their other businesses, i.e. Bezos’ Amazon. As lawyer Harry Litman said Dec. 5 in his announcement that he was leaving the Times after more than 15 years as an op-ed contributor, having previously been at the Post: “Both billionaires flinched when the chips were down, choosing to appease, not oppose, a criminal president with patent authoritarian ambitions.”
The complicity of the mainstream media in helping sustain systems of hegemonic power is not news: Noam Chomsky called it Manufacturing Consent in his 1988 book of that name. Just read the previous issue of Random Lengths for our annual publication of Project Censored’s roundup of stories the press missed. Social media analyst Taylor Lorenz, author of Extremely Online, recently left The Washington Post to start her own publication, User Mag, because she no longer believed legacy media was up to the task of reporting and disseminating the news. As she said recently on Threads, “The actual corporate media exists to prop up institutional power. Yes, they do the sad stories about poor ppl losing healthcare, and yes there are phenomenal reporters within corporate media, but corporate media as a whole will never fundamentally challenge our capitalist system bc they play a key role in upholding it.”
This is why we need papers like Random Lengths.

For me, that November newsroom huddle felt not only imperative, but familiar. I cut my journalistic teeth at the “alternative” press, specifically alt-weeklies. In college I began writing for The New Paper in Providence, Rhode Island. In the early ’90s, I was an editor at the Bay Area’s SF Weekly. Most formatively, I spent a dozen years in New York writing and editing for The Village Voice, the original alt-weekly. All of those publications folded years ago, though the Voice has made a comeback as a digital shadow of its former self. In the world of alternative newspapers, Random Lengths – at 45 – is almost the last press standing: still in print, still providing the rare outlet for underrepresented voices, still holding the feet of the powerful to the flames, still pissing people off.
Alternative is an inadequate term for what publications like RLN do. It sounds too late capitalist, making difficult and fundamental oppositional stances sound like additional items on a menu rather than an entirely different approach to nutrition. The Voice was founded in 1955 by three veterans of World War II (including Norman Mailer) who sought to critique the military-industrial complex and complacent consumerist society and center writers’ voices. As documented in Tricia Romano’s recent book The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, The Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, the Voice became a platform for queer, feminist and Black writers including Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis and Greg Tate. Its film, music, art, fashion and literary critics were among the most important arts writers of their time. The Voice was the place where politicians were exposed for crimes and misdemeanors and the AIDS crisis was documented and protested. Voice reporter Wayne Barrett took on Donald Trump back when he was a New York developer with blatantly racist and corrupt practices. Voice writer Nat Hentoff was a passionate advocate of the First Amendment, while numerous press critics over the years publicly flagellated their associates at other publications for their ethical, moral and stylistic failures.
I learned more about reporting, writing, music, politics, feminism and editing at the Voice, working alongside the folks listed above, than I learned anywhere else in my educational and professional career. As Romano documents, there was a lot of egotism, chauvinism and just plain shitty behavior there as well. It was still a boys club, with a hard glass ceiling. But there was a passionate commitment to issues of justice, equity, inspiration and innovation that I did not experience to the same degree at the daily newspapers, magazines and websites where I was also employed. All the alt-weeklies I worked at had this communal ethos of poking the corporate ogre while arguing over music and also having some laughs. I’ve been so happy to find that spirit alive and well in the port town that I have called home for the last 15 years.
Granted, Random Lengths is technically not a weekly, coming out in semi-monthly installments whose durations are explicated in the publication’s title, as far as I can tell. (Maybe this is why I can never meet my deadlines.) Really, Random Lengths straddles two forms of publishing: an alternative — or as I would prefer to call it, independent, oppositional, or free – and a community newspaper. Most alt-weeklies, such as the LA Weekly (also a survivor, albeit barely), serve large metropolitan areas, not subsets thereof. Random Lengths, on the other hand, serves a very specific niche: the harbor communities of Los Angeles. And yet very few community newspapers have the nerve to take on substantive issues in the way RLN does; most offer tepid human interest stories that often feature advertisers. This makes RLN’s survival as both a community-serving and independent publication all the more remarkable.
Obviously, founder and publisher James Allen deserves much of the credit for Random Lengths’ longevity, as he would be the first to tell you. But I think the paper’s survival also speaks to the uniqueness of this community. This is a part of America with a proud history of labor organizing, as well as environmental activism and grassroots arts-making — unusual bedfellows. Those are core issues on which RLN has built its foundation. Today, writers Jerricks and Emma Rault are adding Black history and developer muckraking to this enduring, if sometimes wobbly — and always Wobbly, viva the IWW! — structure. Down here at the bottom of LA, END FWY, people aren’t interested in going mersh, as our hometown punk heroes the Minutemen put it.
Having turned in my green eyeshade for a professor’s cap, I didn’t know if I would ever have the good fortune to attend a newsroom meeting again. On that scary post-election day at RLN HQ, we kept talking about the need to articulate resistance, a term that, as someone who published a zine in the ’90s called Resister, pulled at my heartstrings. Keep coming to these pages to find out about the local organizations that are providing food, housing and other essential needs to the displaced and unfortunate; to hold our politicians accountable to promises of providing sanctuary for immigrants and abortion seekers; to find out who is making good art, music, film and food to keep us sustained in these hard years to come. The independent press is alive and well and living in San Pedro.

Evelyn McDonnell writes the series Bodies of Water — portraits of lives aquatic — for Random Lengths. She is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University. Her most recent book is The World According to Joan Didion.

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