L.A. Magazine Editor Looks to the Big Picture: Covering All of a Changing City

From the airy new 10th-floor offices of Los Angeles magazine, the cracked and subdivided city below looks almost coherent and comprehensible. On a clear winter’s day it’s easy to imagine you could gather the entire metropolis in your hands and turn it like a Rubik’s cube, until all the wary, far-flung parts connected.

Not a bad vantage point for Kit Rachlis, who once toiled amid the subterranean precincts of the Boston Phoenix, Village Voice and LA Weekly, but whose latest challenge is to transform a slick journal of bourgeois culture into what he calls “the diary of a great city.” Yet the main reason Rachlis likes the view from his mid-Wilshire digs is much simpler. “The sunsets are amazing,” he says, syncopating his words with an expletive he knows will never make The Times, another of his former employers.

Rose-tinted skies notwithstanding, Rachlis’ task won’t be easy. Having recently hit the big 4-0, Los Angeles magazine seemed to be suffering a midlife crisis. Editors of wildly varying tastes and temperaments whirled in and out like twisters through a trailer park. Corporate owners took turns lobbing the media property back and forth, shuttlecock fashion.

But Rachlis, 49, who retains a certain boyish alacrity despite a neatly trimmed beard now shot through with gray, seems rarin’ to give it the old scrappy-underground-alternative-press try. He vents his enthusiasm in an editor’s note in the magazine’s January issue, the first he has stamped with his own sensibility since taking over the 184,000-circulation monthly last July.

Starting with its cover story, the issue promises a bolder, harder-hitting journal than its readers may be accustomed to. Self-consciously labeled an “exclusive investigation,” the cover piece is a meaty analysis of the tragic dual-reality existence of the late Lori Gonzalez. The granddaughter of LAPD Chief Bernard Parks, the 20-year-old was shot dead last year while out driving with a gang member. Written by Jesse Katz, whom Rachlis recently wooed from The Times along with Hollywood correspondent Amy Wallace, it sets a lively yet ruminative tone the editor vows is a portent of things to come.

“The story is about being a child of two different ethnic cultures, crossing different demographic and class lines, which is more and more becoming a common experience for children in this city,” he says. “The odyssey of Lori Gonzalez is the story of L.A.”

Other features include a profile of Hollywood party animal Nico Golfar; a piece about the feral cat colony at the old Ambassador Hotel; a guide to L.A. yoga; a prescient interview with director Steven Soderbergh, who’s suddenly emerged as a leading Oscar contender for best director, and an epitaph for actress Julie London, all wrapped around ads for Beverly Hills jewelers and Big Bear resorts. (The magazine’s ad revenues dipped slightly last year after rising 27% in the three years prior, according to figures supplied by the Media Industry Newsletter.)

In ways obvious and subtle, the January issue attempts to push its up-market readership east of La Cienega Boulevard. New restaurant critic Patric Kuh combs East Los Angeles in search of the perfect tamale, in a story that manages to be atmospheric and informed without suggesting an anthropology lesson.

Another area to receive reinforcement is arts coverage. The January issue includes columns on film, music and books, a refreshingly skeptical essay on “The Vagina Monologues” and art critic Bernard Cooper’s review of the Bruce Conner retrospective at MOCA.

Rachlis says he thought an expanded arts section “would immediately distinguish us. And furthermore, I thought it was a real vulnerability of the LA Weekly and the L.A. Times, that [producing] a sophisticated, worldly but accessible arts section was something the L.A. Times and the Weekly are struggling with.”

Art director Joe Kimberling, formerly of Entertainment Weekly, also has given the magazine a cleaner, more navigable layout. But the issue’s most salient aspect may be its stated intent to be a guide “to the whole city” rather than just its Westside enclaves.

Emmis Communications, the Indianapolis-based media company that acquired Los Angeles magazine from Walt Disney Co. a year ago for a reported $25 million, says it, too, wants the journal to explore the entire city. “I don’t want to see the L.A. you just see in the movies,” says Deborah Paul, editorial director of Emmis’ publishing arm, which also publishes Texas Monthly and Atlanta Magazine. “One of the reasons I hired Kit is that I don’t pretend to know the city. I believe him when he says there is a market in Los Angeles that has an appetite for a very, very smart, very, very literate magazine.”

In some ways, Rachlis, whose personal style is decidedly more Los Feliz casual than Armani, seems an odd choice to head a publication destined for many a Brentwood coffee table. A native New Yorker, he arrived at the LA Weekly in 1988. He stayed there until 1993 when he either quit or was fired by Publisher Michael Sigman--allegedly, he says, for making the paper too intellectual and “serious.”

Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith predicts a smooth fit between Rachlis and his new assignment. “Can a child of the alternative press stay true to his principles while running a publication like Los Angeles magazine?” he asks rhetorically. “I’d say the answer is yes, of course. This is a case of the mountain coming to Muhammad. Los Angeles magazine is to going to change to fit Kit’s values.”

But Orville Schell, journalist, author and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, sounds a cautionary note. “It seems axiomatic that publications that are sort of lower down in the hierarchy of business and money have more freedom, and the bigger and the glossier, the more they want to cater to an audience that doesn’t want to have their golf game disturbed,” Schell says. “It’ll be interesting to see if Kit can bring some of his engagee style to L.A. magazine, whether he can become part of the haute bourgeoisie or whether it’ll chew him up and spit him out.”

Over lunch at Campanile, Rachlis expands on his vision. “I think the January issue would hold its own against the best magazines in America,” he says. “Now the challenge is to do it month in and month out.”

The other challenge, increasingly faced by daily newspapers and other publications, is how to stay hungry once you’ve vanquished the competition. For the first two or three decades of its existence, the magazine lived a sheltered and lucrative life. But when trendier rivals Buzz and L.A. Style bit the dust in the ‘90s, Los Angeles seemed unsure how to capitalize on their misfortunes (apart from acquiring Buzz’s subscriber lists). Despite many examples of ambitious reportage and witty design, its editorial tone sometimes wobbled between mannered hipness and unabashed boosterism.

As the city around it grew multi-toned and many-tongued, the journal still courted affluent Westside readers with restaurant guides and “Best of” lists, spiced with titillating glimpses of South-Central gang bangers or Silver Lake bohemians. The economic recession and the epoch’s natural and man-made calamities further rattled local magazines at a time when the entire city’s identity was at its shakiest point in decades.

“Back in 1992, when the riots came, I got a copy of Los Angeles magazine the same day the city was blowing up, and on the cover it said, ‘Great Escapes,’ ” recalls Steven Cohn, editor in chief of the Media Industry Newsletter.

“I think in the end what happened is that Los Angeles the city outgrew Los Angeles the magazine,” says Rachlis. Now, the precocious publication must catch up with the even more precocious city--in the same way, Rachlis says, he believes that Sherman Oaks and Bel-Air genuinely want to keep up with Boyle Heights and Baldwin Hills, and vice versa.

“It’s pure gut,” he concedes with a shrug. “It’s just instinct, it’s just intuition. But it’s a horrible thought if they don’t.”