San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Our broken media are legacy of Simpson trial
“Do you read People magazine?”
The question came during an employment interview in 1995, and I didn’t know how to answer. No journalism professor I ever encountered deemed to acknowledge that publication.
I was 25 years old, in the high-rise office of City News Service, a local newswire out of Hollywood, and thoroughly unqualified for this job opening: covering courtrooms in downtown Los Angeles. My resume noted that I was a law school dropout, with 16 months experience writing about high school football in the small agricultural community of Santa Maria.
But it seemed they mostly needed warm bodies they could teach. (And I gave the correct answer to the People question: Yes!) The O.J. Simpson criminal trial had started, opening scores of jobs for celebrity-focused journalists — and changing our media landscape forever.
Simpson died on Thursday, noted mostly as an accused killer, acquitted in a courtroom but convicted almost everywhere else. Including, seemingly, in his own book.
A small handful of
Americans still think of him primarily as a football player — or in San Francisco as a classmate or neighbor. But I’ll also remember him for changing my chosen profession more than any human being in recent history; more than any one reporter, more than Princess Diana, even more than Donald Trump.
And I had a very good view to see it happen in real time.
Colleagues in the 1990s told me the changes started in Los Angeles when Zsa Zsa Gabor slapped Beverly Hills police officer Paul Kramer in 1989, and the seemingly minor story turned into a constant news cycle, fueling ratings for local and national outlets.
But Simpson fleeing
from police in a white Ford Bronco on June 17, 1994, solidified that cycle as an industry.
The slow-building tension of the chase created a national endorphin rush that was clearly monetizable. While more experienced reporters leveled up to cover O.J., I was tasked to roam the courtroom hallways looking at court dockets posted to the walls, and visit the records office every afternoon to read hundreds of new court filings in the county.
That’s where People magazine came in. My bosses could and would show me how to write. Instantly recognizing a broad base of celebrity names that might appear in freshly filed legal papers was a skill they couldn’t teach.
During that same 1995 job interview, I impressed my future editor by rattling off the real names of rappers. It was the Death Row Records era — when everyone was litigating with everyone — and the rap artists (Snoop Dogg, Ice-T, Ice Cube) were often sued under their given names at birth (Calvin Broadus, Tracy Marrow, O’Shea Jackson).
The Superior Court civil courts press room, much less busy before Simpson’s trial, was bustling with a collection of quirky, fun and oddball characters that had me humming the cantina theme from “Star Wars” whenever I walked inside. I shared a windowed office with the National Enquirer, and the veterans took me under their wing, offering tips like “When one celebrity hits it big, keep an eye out for divorce papers served to their less famous partner.”
(A month later, “Cheers” star Kirstie Alley’s divorce from Parker Stevenson arrived.)
At the center of this universe — arguably its Big Bang — was the O.J. Simpson trial. My job was the equivalent of a Double-A ball baseball player; I pulled files and
made phone calls about lawsuits mostly tangential to the case, in hopes of one day making it to the actual show. I never got a seat in the criminal trial and only attended the civil court proceedings for one full day.
Walking past the criminal court steps I would see the O.J. Simpson trial media scrums, with several dozen camera operators walking in a slow crablike dance around Simpson defense attorneys and prosecutors who months earlier were no more famous than me.
It was the Gold Rush, but with journalism. And when the verdict came in — acquitted — the pressure for the next big news payoff only increased. Early in my tenure, an acquaintance who worked in TV told me his station would offer $500 to journalists who heard about a car chase on a radio scanner and their station helicopter got to the scene first.
Meanwhile, I collected my own scoops big and small.
I was the first journalist to report the contents of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson’s sex tape, getting a tip from a friendly court clerk. (That qualified as a big story.) I broke news about nude photos of Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow appearing in Playgirl magazine. I later tracked down a coroner in Las Vegas who had seen Tupac Shakur’s body to confirm that the rapper was indeed dead.
Court TV rose from a niche channel viewed by out-of-work legal nerds to a cable powerhouse. And nimble journalists who didn’t mind making compromises made fortunes. I watched Harvey Levin, a pretty forgettable courtroom regular who gave legal analysis for a local TV station, as he started embracing a bigger personality and building what became his TMZ empire.
And the thirst for the next Simpson continued.
City News Service pivoted quickly and thrived in this new world of media. Los Angeles
Times Magazine wrote a cover story on the rise of CNS, following me around for days. But the CNS crew were the good guys in my experience. That job was like a boot camp, as it maintained high standards, still covered important community news, paid me every minute of overtime, and worked tirelessly to make me a bigcity breaking news reporter. I should have been paying them.
My next job, at the Los Angeles Daily News, had many more need-a-shower-when-it’s-over assignments. I drove to the family home of Monica Lewinsky in January 1998 after President Bill Clinton’s epic power imbalance with Lewinsky became public. As my business card fell through the mail slot, I imagined it resting on a nest of 60 to 70 others.
One too-enthusiastic editor demanded I go knock on the door of Phil Hartman’s home in 1998, immediately after the “Saturday Night Live” star was shot dead by his wife. It was a crime scene. I repeatedly drove around the block before heading back to the newsroom.
The most memorable moment came in late 1998, after a girl in South Central Los Angeles died after she was struck by stray gunfire on a bus. (No doubt it was a slow celebrity news week.) I remember the devastated family’s home vividly, with its dated but wellkept furniture.
As an O.J. Simpson trial-size scrum crowded into their living room, one camera operator climbed on a chair with clean white and pink upholstery to get his perfect shot, leaving two muddy footprints behind. A family’s life was left a little more devastated, but the endorphins were well fed that day.
Not long after that I left Los Angeles, getting a more conventional courtroom coverage job in San Francisco. But I couldn’t escape the changes wrought by that Ford Bronco, and the trial of the millennium.
The legacy style of news has mostly gone behind paywalls or is produced by nonprofits, as social media now endeavors to replace us, becoming one nonstop car chase. For our main news feeds, much of what we learned in journalism school has disappeared.
In its place: everything we learned from the O.J. Simpson trial.