IT STARTED WITH A KISS: FINDING SHELTER AMONG THE STRAY CATS

This is Joe Donnelly kissing my ass singing my praises in the LA Weekly…   He is was the editor at the Weekly who invented me as a journalist by giving me the opportunity to write cover stories for the Weekly despite my lack of experience, sense of entitlement and issues surrounding the basic principals of grammar, punctuation and spelling. He routinely received endlessly meandering drafts from me and surgically crafted them into stories, educating me in the process. It was like going to grad school directly  from high school (which I’d accidentally forgotten to attend).

IT STARTED WITH A KISS: FINDING SHELTER AMONG THE STRAY CATS

What news of a murdered girlfriend triggers

BY JOE DONNELLY

[excerpt]…..So many examples come to mind, but if I had to hold one up as symbolic, it would have to be Sam Slovick and his three-part cover series on the challenges posed by Skid Row in the context of the new downtown Los Angeles. Published between December 2005 and August 2006, the pieces were sprawling, epic investigations of the pressures of life in the middle of what police chief William Bratton called “the worst social problem in America.” Slovick told his stories from the perspectives of the police, politicians and mostly the elderly and the young trying to carve out some dignity, hope and balance in an unforgiving environment. Slovick was an unpolished and unproven talent at the time, but he possessed a sharp eye and a unique voice and, as the street hustler he once was, had an uncanny knack for disarming folks — whether they walked the halls of power or the streets of Skid Row. He represented something I wanted to see more at the Weekly — a raw, street-level, unprofessional (as opposed to institutional) approach to covering the city. Bloody, brutal, heartbreaking and sometimes uplifting, Slovick’s pieces were impossible to ignore. They were copied, passed around and cited at City Hall policy debates; they helped to inform; were the inspiration for a five-part documentary series produced by Goodmagazine, which appeared on various Web sites; and were finalists for several social-issue awards. I know they wouldn’t have found a home anywhere else, which is a testament not to me, but to the spirit of L.A. Weekly.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

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