LOTS OF ACTION IN LOS ANGELES

BY NEAL KOCH

Changes in ownership and leadership at the Los Angeles Times have been well reported, but things have been happening at some of the smaller journalistic organizations in the area too.

Los Angeles magazine has long been heavy on service features, sex, and light-hearted columns, but short on substance. Now, with a new owner (Emmis Communications, which also owns Texas Monthly) it's being reborn as a more literary, nonfiction magazine with a more expansive view of the city. And its new editor, Kit Rachlis (a former editor at the L.A. Weekly, The Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Times) says he's aiming for sophisticated, perceptive, lively writing about Los Angeles culture and life-styles that will make the magazine a must-read.

At the L.A. bureau of NPR, plans are afoot for a fifty- to one-hundred-person production facility to open early next year, aimed at expanding news and arts coverage of the West Coast. And public station KCRW has a new program being distributed by Public Radio International called To the Point, a fast-paced, daily public affairs show about national and international affairs -- not the sort of broadcasting Los Angeles is usually known for.

New Times, which entered the market several years ago, has recently done some important journalism -- despite the often shrill tone of its columnists. The other alternative paper, the tired L.A. Weekly, is bringing in a new editor.

To supply quality journalists for this new age, Los Angeles may have to overcome its curious difficulty in developing its own newspeople. The University of Southern California journalism school (whose accreditation was put into question in 1999) has been moving quickly to launch a slew of new programs -- most notably, one that will send about 70 percent of the graduate students abroad this summer to produce stories under USC faculty tutelage. They'll return, the school expects, with new insights about how to cover one of the nation's most multicultural regions.

That richness and variety of its culture, along with power shortages and the state's high-technology industries, have made Los Angeles "a focus for all the major issues of the twenty-first century," says Warren Olney, a program host on KCRW.