Indy Digest: July 10, 2023
When I was a kid, the first thing I did every morning was go to the kitchen table and grab the sports section of the Reno Gazette-Journal.
As a baseball fan, I loved—LOVED—poring over all of the box scores. I even cut them out and made scrapbooks. (I am pretty sure I still have one, with Dodgers box scores from their 1988 championship season.) Box scores are perfect, small encapsulations of every game, and how all of the players did. I also loved reading all of the game summaries, the various features, and—as I got older—the high school sports coverage, where I could see some of my classmates’ names in print.
When I went off to college, my goal was to become a sportswriter. My dream job at the time? To become the Los Angeles Dodgers beat writer for the Los Angeles Times. That, of course, didn’t happen—I got “stuck” (in a good way) covering news instead, and my career ended up taking a different path. That said, my love for newspapers and journalism was undeniably heightened by the sports section and those box scores. It’s not a stretch to say the Coachella Valley Independent may not exist had I not become so enamored with the sports section four decades ago.
Well … it’s been a tough few days for daily newspaper sports sections.
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times announced: “Today, we are introducing a new era for the Los Angeles Times sports section. The printed sports section will take on the look and feel of a daily sports magazine, with a different design showcasing our award-winning reporting and photography. Our new layout highlights our best, most ambitious sports journalism—distinctive work you cannot find anywhere else. We are making this change to adapt to how readers follow news and sporting events each day while managing rising production costs. You no longer will see box scores, standings and traditional game stories, but those will be replaced by more innovative reporting, in-depth profiles, unique examinations of the way teams operate, investigations, our distinct columnists’ voices, elite photography and more.”
The “managing rising production costs” mentioned by Iliana Limón Romero, the Times’ sports editor, could mean a lot of things. It almost certainly has to do with the impending closure of the Times’ print facility, which will probably mean earlier print deadlines when the paper starts being printed by the Southern California News Group, making it impossible to print timely box scores anyway. The recent layoffs at the newspaper may have also been a factor.
But at least the Los Angeles Times will still have a sports department. That won’t be the case with The New York Times, which today made this announcement, as explained by NBC Sports:
The Times announced that they are disbanding their sports department and that The Athletic will handle all sports coverage online and in print.
“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” executive editor Joe Kahn and deputy managing editor Monica Drake wrote in an email to the Times newsroom on Monday. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”
The Times had downsized their sports department in recent years and this move will impact more than 35 journalists and editors who remained on the desk ahead of Monday’s announcement.
If you’re unfamiliar: The Athletic is an excellent sports-news app/website that was bought a while back by The New York Times. It’s also worth noting The Athletic just endured a round of layoffs.
Times are changing, for sure. While I used to love the sports section when I was younger, I must admit that it’s been years since I’ve looked at a box score in a printed newspaper. I still look at box scores—but I do so online.
While I am surprised by The New York Times’ moves, the Los Angeles Times’ sports-section changes make sense to me. But the whole thing still makes me feel a little sad.
—Jimmy Boegle
From the Independent
Therapeutic Music: The Heartless Bastards’ Erika Wennerstrom, Coming to Pappy and Harriet’s, Reflects on Two Decades of Methodical Songwriting
By Matt King
July 7th, 2023
The band Heartless Bastards is heading out on a summer tour, including a stop at Pappy and Harriet’s on Sunday, July 16. During a recent phone interview, band leader Erika Wennerstrom explained what tour preparation looks like for the rock-pop-blues band.
CV History: The Adventurous White Sisters Made Their Mark on Early Palm Springs
By Greg Niemann
July 9th, 2023
Florilla and Cornelia White arrived in Palm Springs in 1913—and quickly became two of the village’s most prominent citizens.
Apocalyptic Satire: Mark Duplass, Sterling K. Brown Are Fantastic in the Weird, Funny Film ‘Biosphere’
By Bob Grimm
July 10th, 2023
Mark Duplass and Sterling K. Brown, two of the more underrated and under-utilized actors working today, are very good as the only two characters in Biosphere. The wilder the film gets, the better they get.
America the Streamable: Seven Movies ‘About’ ’Merica
By Bill Frost
July 8th, 2023
As an experiment, our scribe typed “’Merica” into streaming database Reelgood.com—laziness is this country’s birthright—and it spit back these movies.
Visionary Weirdness: Amazon Series ‘I’m a Virgo’ Is Both Bizarre and Hilarious
By Bob Grimm
July 10th, 2023
Not only is Amazon Prime series I’m a Virgo totally weird; it’s also one of the year’s best comedies.
More News
• Forgive the media-heavy nature of this Digest, but there’s a LOT happening in the newspaper world. First up, and most important, is this awful, awful news for San Diego and Southern California as a whole. As explained by the Los Angeles Times: “Patrick Soon-Shiong and his family have sold the San Diego Union-Tribune to competing publisher MediaNews Group, slimming down the family’s holdings to just one news organization—the Los Angeles Times. California Times President and Chief Operating Officer Chris Argentieri announced the sale of The Times’ sister publication to an affiliate of the Denver-based MediaNews Group, which is owned by controversial New York hedge fund Alden Global Capital. The company did not disclose a purchase price. Argentieri said in a statement the sale was finalized Monday.”
• Want to know more about Alden Global Capital? Well, here’s a 2021 NPR story for you, which references a story in The Atlantic. The Atlantic headline? “A secretive hedge fund is gutting newsrooms.” The NPR headline? “When this hedge fund buys local newspapers, democracy suffers.”
• However, there’s some good news in the newspaper world: The well-intentioned but horribly written California Journalism Protection Act is being held for a year in the California Assembly. We’ll again turn to the Los Angeles Times to explain: “The California Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, sponsored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), would direct digital advertising giants to pay news outlets a ‘journalism usage fee’ when they sell advertising alongside news content. … The bill passed in the Assembly with bipartisan support June 1 and moved on to the state Senate. A hearing was initially scheduled for July 11, but Wicks’ office announced Friday that it would be rescheduled for 2024, picking back up at the same point in the legislative process. ‘I’ve agreed to make AB 886 a two-year bill in order to ensure the strongest legislation possible — because getting this policy right is more important than getting it quick,’ Wicks said in a news release.“
• Meanwhile, ProPublica reports on Google’s … shall we say, willingness to do business with all sorts of shady faux-journalism organizations: “In the nearly half-trillion-dollar digital ad industry, Google sets the rules of the road. More than any other company, Google determines the online ads we see, what they cost and who gets paid for them. … (For unscrupulous sites), Google’s Display Network has another benefit besides its market share: its secrecy. Google is the only major ad platform that hides the vast majority of its ad-selling partners. This means Google does not disclose all the websites and apps where it places ads or the people and companies behind them. The company conceals this information even after helping establish and publicly supporting an industry transparency standard for disclosing such sellers, which its competitors have largely adopted.”
• This lawsuit seemed inevitable—but one of the people behind it is somewhat surprising. SFGate says: “Sarah Silverman, acerbic comic, ‘The Sarah Silverman Program’ showrunner and author of essay collection ‘The Bedwetter,’ is suing OpenAI and Meta, alleging that the tech giants unlawfully used her copyright book to train their artificial intelligence systems. The suits, filed July 7, accuse the two firms of using Silverman’s and two other plaintiffs’ work to enrich their AI systems, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA, in violation of book copyright law. It’s the latest in a stream of legal challenges to the training and output of AI systems, suits that have often accused the tech companies of lifting work without permission or pay. ‘AI needs to be fair and ethical for everyone,’ Matthew Butterick, one of the suit’s lawyers, said in a statement. ‘But Meta is leveraging the work of thousands of authors with no consent, no credit, and no compensation.’”
• Wired magazine looks at a company’s efforts to create a one-time shot to help people with Type 2 diabetes: “There’s a major downside to semaglutide, the drug originally developed for diabetes and now prescribed for weight loss under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy: People often stop taking their medication. But what if the drug only needed to be given once to have lasting benefits? That’s the idea behind Fractyl Health’s treatment for type 2 diabetes—which could also be used for weight control. The Lexington, Mass.-based biotech company is in the early stages of developing a one-time gene therapy intended to lower blood sugar and body weight using the same mechanism as semaglutide. ‘You have this problem where you need to stay on therapy for efficacy,’ says Harith Rajagopalan, a cardiologist by training and CEO and cofounder of Fractyl Health. ‘That’s the Achilles heel.’”
• Pioneertown is a popular getaway for valley denizens—and the San Bernardino Sun (via The Press-Enterprise) reports on the possibility of some character-shattering new development there: “San Bernardino County adopted a new Countywide Plan in October 2020. Officials are now standardizing existing zoning and laying out a road map for future development. At the moment, Pioneertown is designated as a commercial development, but it’s zoned for residential use. To clean things up, Pioneertown’s Mane Street is expected to be designated ‘Rural Desert Commercial,’ a new zoning definition that’s expected to allow both residential and commercial uses, but has not yet been finalized. That has Ben Loescher, an architect and owner of Pioneertown’s Red Dog Saloon—built by (Roy) Rogers and Gene Autry—fearing the worst. … He and others in Pioneertown fear a future where Mane Street would get paved, big box stores and Starbucks would surround the marshal’s office and horse riding would be prohibited. In that nightmare scenario, Mane Street becomes just another Main Street. And Pioneertown becomes just another stretch of sun-blasted commercial property in the San Bernardino County desert.”
• And finally … if you use a metal brush to clean your barbecue, you’re going to want to throw it away after reading this piece, from The Washington Post. A snippet: “Seated next to a radiologist, Thomas P. Trezona scoured the images of his CT scan, dreading the thing he was sure he would find: evidence of pancreatic cancer, the same disease that had killed his mother. Given his age, sex and family history, that was the most likely explanation for the violent abdominal pain, nausea and rapid weight loss that in July 2021 hijacked the life of the retired surgical oncologist. … The cause of Trezona’s debilitating symptoms, confirmed nearly two months later following surgery, turned out to be none of those things. The surgeon’s persistent, methodical approach to his own illness—honed during his long medical career—coupled with the assistance of his longtime gastroenterologist led to the discovery of the unusual and preventable reason for his alarming decline. Trezona, now 72, recovered, although the experience left him shaken. He hopes to alert others to a frequently overlooked danger hiding in plain sight and spare them a similar ordeal.”
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