Latest Fast Company Article

On January 6, 2010, in Articles, Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

Cenk Uygur Sets Out to Take Down Traditional Television

By: Tina DupuyTue Dec 1, 2009 at 1:00 PM

Cenk Uygur and his rebel band are out to take down traditional television, with a hand from YouTube, satellite radio, and 500,000 fans.
Young Turks, Cenk Ugyr

Photographs by Dave Lauridsen

Television studios are airport-hangar-size buildings with green rooms, overflow trailers, and people with massive salaries bustling around. I’m sitting instead in a cramped office on Wilshire Boulevard, a mile from Beverly Hills, which has been converted into a makeshift studio for the Internet-based TV talk show The Young Turks. In the control room, three staffers in T-shirts and a perky producer, Ana Kasparian, 23, man eight computer screens and clutch boxes of various Willy Wonka candies. A wall-size window separates them from a modest newscast-esque set.

Just before 4 p.m., host Cenk Uygur, 39, arrives — “early,” he says, so we could talk — not at all fazed that his three-hour show is streaming live in 10 minutes. I’ve seen the show; his musings are thoughtful, insightful gems in a sea of digitized diatribes. I look around for a teleprompter. There isn’t one. No writers either. Uygur watches the day’s video clips for the first time during commercial breaks, seconds before he discusses them on-air.

Uygur doesn’t look like a rebel, but there is something revolutionary going on here. Roughly 450,000 people watch The Young Turks on YouTube alone; thousands more in the precious 18-to-35 demo listen on Sirius Satellite Radio and through the TYT Web site, making it competitive with, say, MSNBC’s Morning Joe (382,000 viewers a day in September), or CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight (616,000). And that, says Uygur, is only the beginning of a campaign “to take down television.”

“When I watch TV, I see robots,” he says. “We’re not robots; we’re people.” On a show touching on health-care reform and Senator Max Baucus, Uygur proclaimed, “The mainstream media and the politicians who do these tricks and the media who cover for them — guess what? You’re fucked. We’re coming for you. We’re coming to your house.”

Uygur is no Jim Cramer or Keith Olbermann. There are no props. He doesn’t pace or throw papers. On air, he sits at a desk in a news-anchor manner, without the necktie. His style is conversational. Even from the voyeuristic distance of YouTube, he seems to be having an intimate chat with his viewers. For two hours, he comments on what interests him about each sound bite and piece of video, and talks with guests who span the spectrum from Mel Brooks to Mary Matalin. A self-described moderate progressive, he sometimes disagrees with the likes of Michael Moore. For the third hour, cohost and producer Kasparian does softer news.

The Turks’ goal has always been to make a television show for the Web and build on that success. “In ‘97, I knew television and the Internet would merge,” Uygur says. “Didn’t realize radio would too.” TYT was Sirius’s first original programming, an arrangement that, by 2006, provided this ragtag crew with an operating budget of $250,000 a year. According to Uygur, the network wouldn’t allow them to produce a YouTube video program, so they raised their own funds (mostly friends and family) and worked out a syndication deal with Sirius. The gamble paid off; within a year, revenue reached the $250,000 mark. Today, TYT takes in more than $20,000 a month from YouTube’s ad sharing, plus a similar sum from 2,100 subscriptions and ads from its own Web site. Revenue has doubled in the past 18 months.

With operating costs of $35,000 a month, covering five full-time employees and rent, TYT is a lean — and modestly profitable — talking machine. There’s no makeup person. No wardrobe budget. No craft services. No catered lunches. No grips. No unions. And no 401(k)s. “Yeah, I’m on my wife’s health care,” admits Uygur.

To create a single hour of cable news, “you’re probably looking at a ballpark of $200,000 to $300,000,” says Pixel Pictures executive producer Karen Daniel. Compare that to TYT’s tidy budget and television looks like a dinosaur blissfully dismissing mammals, or newspapers scoffing at blogs circa 2002.

TYT does absolutely no advertising. Rabid fans, known as the Young Turks’ Nation, are the show’s most devoted publicists. “Our marketing is purely word of mouth and people linking to our videos and blogs on the Web,” says Uygur. Meaning TYT has found a way to crowdsource everything, from fact checking to $10-a-month Web subscriptions to keep the lights on. “If I screw up and say something wrong, I instantly get 100 messages,” says Uygur.

What’s next for TYT? “Launch a network,” says Uygur. “We’re crazy cheap.” He notes they already have the studio and the equipment to produce another show. It would just take a couple more crew members and a new producer. The model is proven. YouTube is equipped. The TYT brand is ready to expand. Uygur hopes to launch at least one new show in the next three months.

But what if MSNBC, where Uygur had talks last spring about its 10 p.m. slot, comes calling? What if a real television network wants to scoop up TYT? “It would have to coexist with what we have,” Uygur says. Cable news is welcome to syndicate its content, but TYT won’t shut down the YouTube channel for the old Goliath of cable news. Instead, Uygur says, “we’re going to pick their pockets.”

Via Fast Company

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EM Forster Foresaw Facebook…No Seriously

On October 29, 2009, in Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

“Big Brother” is watching you in a very “Orwellian” way. Has been for years. People who have never heard of George Orwell know of the term “Big Brother.” In many ways his dark vision of what the year 1984 would look like is prophetic. For example, his novel 1984 takes place in a never-ending war while technology is aiding an over-reaching government. I read that in the New York Times yesterday.

Orwell was right. He was dead on. Spooky.

EM Forster is best known for his novels Howards End and A Passage to India. Less well-known is a 12,000-word science fiction piece, an allegory about technology titled, ”The Machine Stops” written in 1909.

Forster’s gloomy tale takes place in a future where all the world’s people have become hermits, content with no longer physically touching others, opting instead to live in solitary with the aid of The Machine. “There are no musical instruments and yet…this room is throbbing with melodious sounds,” he writes. The protagonist Vashti lives in a small climate controlled room, illuminated by neither lamp nor window. She has thousands of friends. She even lectures on “Music during the Australian Period.” It all takes place through The Machine. The catalyst is when her son wants to see her in person instead of through the “blue plate.” People don’t travel above ground anymore. The atmosphere is barren and brown. And Vashti doesn’t care for “air-ships.”

Basically he predicted central air, the Internet, video conferencing, television, radio, global warming and commercial air travel.

Forster was right. He was dead on. Spooky.

“The Machine Stops” was penned a hundred years ago. From a historical perspective, the first radio was not installed in the White House until 1922, yet a Victorian like Forster imagined modernity amazingly close.

I first read this short story ten years ago: before I became a telecommuter, before MySpace, before Google was a verb. Now I have days where I feel like Vashti, isolated in my pajamas revering The Machine. “The Machine, feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being,” wrote Forster.

But the story is also a poignant criticism of technological advancement. The current struggle between “old media” and “new media” is one of reporting verses the digesting news. One hundred years ago a lecturer in Forster’s tale pronounces, ”Beware of first-hand ideas! First hand-ideas do not really exist…Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from the disturbing element – direct observation.” It’s a rundown of blogging verses journalism.

It’s not just that Forster foresaw the Internet, but he guessed rightly how it would be used. In this fable of the future what values most are ideas – they are the new commodity.  Talking to her son Kuno about his desire to see her in person through The Machine is private, until Vashti turns off her isolation switch. “The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas?” He’s describing online communities. He’s describing Facebook. He’s describing Twitter.

“We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now,” Forster wrote. “It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. “ Of course, as I write this my “machine” chimes with the siren call of new emails, IMs and tweets tempting me to distraction. To quote Vashti as she tried to comfort herself while on the air-ship, ”O Machine! O Machine!”

This piece originally appeared on True/Slant.

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Blogger Asks For Payment From Newspaper Part Two

On September 8, 2009, in Hey Look, I'm a Writer, Podcasts/Video, Video, by Tina Dupuy

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Blogger Asks For Payment From Newspaper

On August 30, 2009, in Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

(tech note: I’m having issues with the embed, so it’s a screen grab linked to YouTube)
I’m calling this episode “YouTube to the Rescue!”

As a freelance writer, when I don’t have an assignment, I’m in the practice of writing witty and pointed opinion pieces to keep my name out there. I send these articles out to op/ed editors around the country. Some papers pick up my work. Many don’t. I’ve been doing this for years.

Well, a month ago I found via Google Alert a piece of mine was published in the Tampa Tribune. They never contacted me prior to publishing it. I sent them an email telling them I was never asked for my permission. The editor Jeff Stidham, responded explaining my unsolicited submission didn’t ask for payment or permission. Which is not how copyright works.

Anyway, I wrote them back, sending them an invoice for $75, which is the amount newspapers of their size and circulation normally pay guest columnists. I have not heard back from them.

So now my only recourse is putting a video up on the Internet to plead my case.

Enjoy!

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LA Marathon for the LA Weekly

On June 18, 2009, in Articles, Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

Ruining the L.A. Marathon

Preachers pressured City Hall to change it. Now the race faces uncertainties

By Tina Dupuy

Published on June 16, 2009 at 9:15pm

The L.A. Marathon has never been world-class. The course is hilly and winds through the ugliest parts of the city, a festival of blights. It’s gone through three owners in six years, and the number of entrants is half of what Chicago and New York boast. It’s not a “runner’s marathon” but a very long parade of moisture-wicking wear.

And now it’s morphed into a flash point for religious leaders to browbeat City Hall, with probably more strife to come. Next year’s event is slipping toward turmoil, with officials at the L.A. Marathon failing to release or even hint at a date for next year.The unsettled situation regarding this decades-old, major-metropolis marathon is extremely unusual; it’s keeping sponsors and runners in limbo, and is an indicator of how the key political players in the drama, City Councilman Tom LaBonge and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, have failed to clean up the marathon mess.

As runner Shanna Moore wrote in an online petition calling for the marathon to return to its longtime date of a Sunday in March, “I proudly attend church on Sundays and often during the week, and I know firsthand that if someone wants to get to services, no once-a-year marathon is going to stop them. This is all ridiculous! Move the race back to a March Sunday or don’t have it at all. These ‘houses of worship’ should be ashamed of themselves!”

For years, the L.A. Marathon, like every other U.S. marathon (save the oldest, in Boston) has taken place on a Sunday. But the closed-off streets were, according to Father John S. Bakas of Pico-Union–based Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral, “an infringement on our access and ability to worship on the sabbath,” which tied up “the whole city until 2 p.m.”

In 2004, according to religious leaders, then–mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa had promised them he would move the race to a different day. “He promised me that,” says the Rev. Jeong Song of Mijoo Peace Church in Koreatown.

With religious leaders increasingly insistent, a curious math began to emerge: The numbers of avid churchgoers and others purportedly stymied by street closures during the one-day marathon blossomed to one-quarter of L.A.’s 4 million people. “Using the most conservative estimates, 921,000 people are directly affected,” states Save Our Sabbaths, a group that includes Bakas, on its Web site.

Song, who has opposed the Sunday race for more than 14 years, says, “I told them it was 100,000 people impacted [who] cannot attend church” — a more modest figure but also inflated. By some estimates, the turnout for runners, volunteers and supporters of the marathon is upward of 200,000.

Last fall, the L.A. Marathon, a corporation, was bought by Dodgers owner Frank McCourt. Seizing the moment, the religious community spearheaded by Bakas — the self-proclaimed “biggest mouth and the most passionate” — shook its collective fist and finally prevailed. The 2009 marathon was set to take place on a federal holiday, a Monday, not a Sunday.

In the contract being negotiated by the city of Los Angeles and the McCourt Group, President’s Day in February was the suggested date — as most cities with hot weather hold their marathons in winter to spare the runners from the heat. The contract with McCourt was easily ratified by the Los Angeles City Council, with Villaraigosa’s blessing.

Everyone seemed happy — until the first “pre-planning” meeting, at which police, fire and transportation officials met at Councilman LaBonge’s office. There, somebody thought to ask senior transportation engineer Aram Sahakian about the street logistics of holding the marathon on President’s Day, February 16.

Incredibly, nobody on the vast staff of the 15-member Los Angeles City Council, which employs 320 personal assistants at an annual cost of about $20 million, had bothered to fully review that date with the transportation engineers before the council approved the deal. Instead, Sahakian tells L.A. Weekly, “It was done verbally at a meeting.”

Sahakian informed the pre-planning group that so many people work on President’s Day that he couldn’t recommend a race then. He envisioned a huge commuter-traffic mess. Sahakian, who has worked on the minutiae of road closures and preparations for the marathon for 10 years, says that the query “was just thrown out at us, asking for a recommendation.”

The only other “federal-holiday Monday” in the first part of the year was Memorial Day, May 25. And to the chagrin of runners, fans and residents, the city’s 23-year tradition of holding its race in early March was suddenly being shunned in favor of a marathon date during a much hotter season.

Despite an uproar, religious leaders — insisting on their mythical estimation that 1 million church-going residents would face road closures — refused to back down, citing barriers to religious freedom. Bakas’ loudest battle cry has been “Honor the contract” — a contract whose date was rejected because it had not been fully explored and was unfeasible. He exclaimed to L.A. Weekly, “Why would we have to work it out? It’s already worked out. The City Council voted. We have a contract.”

The weather stayed cool on May 25, and the runners did not face horrific heat. But the unprecedented uncertainty and controversy kept runners and viewers away in droves. The L.A. Marathon does not disclose the number of its registered runners. But in the past 10 years, according to its Web site, the average number of those who finish the race in a given year is 18,000. This year, fewer than 14,200 completed the marathon.

“Their argument doesn’t hold water. It doesn’t make any sense,” says Peter Abraham, director of the L.A. Marathon, of Bakas’ claim that blocking some streets one day out of 365 harms the churches’ ability to thrive.

Now, the issue over the 2010 race sits before the Los Angeles City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee, headed by Councilman Bernard Parks. Parks tells the Weekly, “If the two groups [runners and church leaders] can come together and take care of it, that would be great.” He says it’s not up to the City Council to fix this, and that the McCourt Group is letting City Hall “take the blame.”

In fact, it is up to the City Council, which must now amend the contract it so badly botched, and settle on a date for next year’s marathon. And to make sure the council members ban the marathon on Sunday, Bakas and his Save Our Sabbaths posse have enlisted former mayor Richard Riordan, whom Bakas calls “just a private citizen who has been very helpful to us.” When asked if Riordan is lobbying the council, Bakas tells the Weekly, “I hope so.”

Notably, during the tenure of Riordan, a devout Catholic, the pragmatic mayor never stopped the race from taking place on a Sunday; Riordan was, in fact, a marathon enthusiast. The group’s other headliner lobbyist, Cardinal Roger Mahony, has written to council members, pushing them to ban a Sunday race.

LaBonge now argues that the race belongs on its original Sunday in March, saying, “I believe the best day of the week in L.A. is a Sunday morning.” He’s suggesting a “face-to-face dialogue” between the religious groups and the runners. After all, the runners are the ones forking over about $100 per person to participate, and in many cases they are traveling great distances to run the race here.The runners are also the ones McCourt must woo in order for his acquisition to turn a profit. Many runners and race supporters, 5,000 of whom signed a petition in recent months, favoring the traditional Sunday in March, are furious. But LaBonge insists, “We have to have agreement from everybody.”

Bakas, whom few Angelenos had heard of before the contretemps, is clearly relishing his bizarrely granted, outsize power over the city, its traditions and dwellers. In an e-mail to council members Janice Hahn, Bill Rosendahl and LaBonge, Bakas compares holding the race on a Sunday to biblical bloodletting: “In this matter we WILL NOT IMITATE JESUS by putting our heads down and be led like ‘sheep to the slaughter.’ ”

Now, the Pasadena Marathon, whose fall 2008 debut was postponed until last February due to wildfires, is again scheduled for February next year, close to the traditional March date of the L.A. Marathon. Who knew a nimby turf war would move the money out to the suburbs?

This piece originally ran in the LA Weekly.

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LA Weekly and the Octomom

On April 2, 2009, in Articles, Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

Octomom as Reproductive Lightning Rod

Do the prolife and prochoice sides in L.A. finally agree on something?

By Tina Dupuy

Published on April 01, 2009 at 7:03pm

Nadya Suleman is our local, single, unemployed, plastic surgery–enhanced welfare mother of 14, many of them “special-needs” children. Her story is straight out of Brothers Grimm, and by now the world knows that all of her children, including her octuplets, born in January, were conceived through in-vitro fertilization.“Does she live in a shoe?” asked my friend’s 4-year-old daughter.Suleman is a staple for Dr. Phil intervention, tabloid prattle and message-board hostility, but underlying it all is an emerging story that pits her against both prolifers and prochoicers.“It’s a Rubik’s Cube of reproductive issues,” admits Colleen Holmes, executive director of Eagle Forum, a prolife conservative grassroots organization. “It takes childbearing out of the family and is not in the best interest of the children.”In a RadarOnline “video showdown” with Suleman and her mother, Angela Suleman, before the children were born, Suleman described them as “human beings that are growing. That are related to you.”

Suleman’s mother snapped back, referring to the embryos her daughter had used: “They were frozen, and you didn’t have to do anything.”

“They were lives,” Suleman insisted.

In other circumstances, prolifers might have taken up her cause, proud of a media-magnet example of a woman who would not destroy any embryos for any reason. Indeed, prolife blogger Jill Stanek says that Suleman’s decision to not abort her babies or selectively reduce their numbers was prolife. But beyond that, Stanek states, “many prolifers believe the process of in-vitro fertilization is unhealthy and/or immoral.” She wrote on conservative World Net Daily, “I tend toward Catholic teaching that it is morally wrong to create the image of God in a Petri dish.”

Normally on the other side of such divides are prochoice advocates like Leslie Marshall, a Talk USA nationally syndicated host in Los Angeles. Instead, Marshall is stunned to see that Suleman, so vehemently opposed to abortion and the destruction of fetuses, is drawing the ire of the prolife movement.

“You would think she would be their [prolife] poster child,” Marshall says. “A woman who can’t afford these babies but had them, didn’t abort them — or murder them, as a prolifer would put it. … I was surprised they didn’t erect a monument or shrine to her.”

“Freedom, including women’s reproductive freedom, entails responsibility,” says Carole Lieberman, a prochoice Beverly Hills psychiatrist who filed the first complaint with Child Protective Services against Suleman. Lieberman tells L.A. Weekly, “Nadya is the poster child for women’s reproductive irresponsibility. Prochoice essentially means that she had the choice over her body in regard to reproduction. She had several options, including donating her frozen eggs or giving the babies up for adoption.”

“She illustrates the problem with ‘every sperm is sacred,’ ‘every egg is sacred,’” says Gloria Feldt, former president of Planned Parenthood. “She’s a poster child for irresponsible childbearing.”

For anyone keeping score, the antichoice people think Suleman made the wrong choice and the prochoice people think she made the wrong choice. Normally only in fiction would such a scenario unfold.

Some prolifers have blamed the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling for the situation, saying it has led to the erosion of social norms and cut men out of the picture. But Liz Owen, a prochoice activist in Valley Village since the early 1990s and mother of twins by in-vitro fertilization, says, “‘Prochoice’ should not be equated with bad medical decisions.”

Regardless of what the various sides think of Suleman’s resolve to have all those preemies, most of the feeble bundles are home after a reported $1 million in medical bills at Kaiser Hospital in Bellflower.

Suleman’s medical bills are giving the two sides in the abortion wars something to haggle over, while they seem to agree that the eight babies deserve society’s support now that they’re here — but with caveats.

Prochoicer Marshall says of the prolife crowd, “Now they complain because they have to pay for them? So … it’s okay to pay for the unborn, but once you’re born, forget it?”

Prolifer Stanek is equally ready to slam the other side, telling the Weekly, “They don’t think children should be conceived in adverse financial circumstances. But they aren’t giving Suleman a break. They’re mad she gets financial help from the government, and mad at the thought of her making money from book and movie deals.”

Holmes tries to explain that being prolife means more than caring about persuading women not to have abortions, saying her greater issue is that “life needs to be protected.” She draws a line at government assistance aimed at the parents, saying, “We don’t agree with welfare, though. The focus should be on the children.”

But so far, much of this tangled tale has been about the adults.Among other standout moments, feminist icon and lawyer Gloria Allred secured 24-hour nursing care and housing for all of Suleman’s children through an organization called Angels in Waiting, founded by nurse Linda West-Conforti, a specialist in care for premature foster babies.Now, West-Conforti has publicly accused Suleman of not caring about her children, and of volunteering to feed them only when cameras are present; Suleman has fired Angels in Waiting, claiming its nurses spied on her; and Allred has publicly questioned the children’s safety, calling security at the Suleman home questionable.Before those events, Allred had hinted that donations to the family were lacking. Perhaps that is because Suleman, who underwent disfiguring plastic surgery to glamorize her face, is seen as an avid self-promoter. Allred had promised, “All donations would be used to secure experienced and trained professionals who would provide much-needed care, and not 1 cent would go to Nadya or anyone else in her family.”When Dr. Phil jumped into the fray, he argued to his TV audience that he needed to play a role because “of all the angst — I felt that somebody had to step up and show some leadership here. So I offered to mediate the situation.” In a contrived-for-TV turn of events, Suleman, a food-stamp recipient, had reluctantly accepted help from Angels in Waiting on the March 10 Dr. Phil show.

“None of this could have happened without you, Dr. Phil,” Allred said during the bizarre announcement segment of the show.

Now, the prochoice and prolife activists are launching into an argument about who is going to help Suleman more, both at this stage and in the difficult years to come. After all, as Suleman lectured her own mother in an Online video, “You can’t go back and alter the past.”

That fact has former Planned Parenthood president Feldt predicting that, “Of all the people that are going to help her, nine out of 10 of them will be prochoice.”

But Stanek takes a different tack, arguing via e-mail, “I don’t think you’ll find it is prolifers who so vehemently oppose Suleman’s decision. That said, we do believe in most circumstances children are best raised in a two-parent, married (mother and father) home. Yes, I think the children would be best off adopted out to married male/female couples. Furthermore, the female body and human psyche were not made to have and raise litters of children the same age (different from large families), another problem with in-vitro fertilization.”

Even on controversial wedge issues like this one, prolifer Holmes relays, “Yeah, the two sides can unite in some areas.”

The original story is here.

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What Was I Thinking? reading this weekend

On February 12, 2009, in General Announcements, Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

I have an essay published in the book, What Was I Thinking?. You can check it out on Amazon here.

I will be reading my essay this Sunday, the 15th of February at Border’s Books in Westwood at 3:30 PM.
Stop by and say hi!
Borders Books
1360 Westwood Boulevard
on the second floor
Sun. Feb 15, 2009

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LA Marathon Hits the Wall

On December 16, 2008, in Articles, Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

The inspiration for long-distance runners is the Greek messenger Pheidippides, who legend has it ran the 25 miles from the plains of Marathon to Athens in 490 BC to announce the Greeks’ victory over Persia, and then immediately dropped dead.

This is the model of my sport of choice. You think sky divers are twisted? Please.

For cities, marathons are a thing of pride. Just ask someone in Boston what they think of their super-exclusive marathon (the world’s oldest). The people of Chicago — even those who don’t own running shoes — will talk about how their marathon, with its quick flat course, sells out at 45,000 runners every year. In New York, the whole city gets together, and its marathon is like a six-hour-long parade.

Los Angeles holds a special place in modern marathon history, especially among women. It was in Los Angeles in 1984 that women were first allowed to officially compete in an Olympic marathon. Joan Benoit of the United States ran through the glass ceiling to the gold with a time of 2:24:52.

So what’s going on with L.A.’s marathon today? Since the first one in 1986, the route has changed a few times — and not always for the better. It has had three owners in just the last six years. One was Devine Racing Management, which paid some of its winners so late in 2006 that some elite runners boycotted the following year’s race.

Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and his company, LA Marathon, took it over last year. A local guy. A sports guy. Great. New owner, new ideas, better marathon, I figured. Right? Maybe not.

The race is usually run in late February, early March. With the sale to McCourt, the race was moved to Mondays, with next year’s on Feb. 16, Presidents’ Day. That was better for the race. The ideal temperature for a marathon is about 50 degrees; the hotter it is, the slower your time. Slower times mean fewer people coming to L.A. to participate.

But now LA Marathon has proposed moving the race to — wait for it — Memorial Day, the last Monday in May. A month that is on average about 10 degrees hotter than February.

Why? The decision to move the race to Mondays in February was in response to complaints from religious leaders that the road closures and congestion made it difficult for their congregations to attend services on Sunday. LA Marathon President Russ Pillar said the switch to May was because many employers don’t observe Presidents’ Day, so fewer runners and volunteers would have been able to participate.

But there’s a reason cities in hot climates have their races in the winter months. Honolulu and Las Vegas have theirs in December. Big-city races want to attract the broadest number of runners, and the best course with the best weather is the best bet.

Maybe McCourt is used to baseball fans being mad at him, yet runners aren’t as easily miffed. But suggesting moving the major race in the city by three months has sure done it.

“It’s not considered a ‘marathoner’s marathon,’ it’s an event,” said Long Beach podiatrist John Pagliano, who has run 111 marathons. (For the record: I’ve traded in cars that had less miles on them.) And a move to what in L.A. is essentially a summer day will not make it a layman’s marathon either.

This date change is like moving a minimally popular television to Friday night. It’s a death rattle. It’s about to be canceled for ratings.

A woman in my running group put it best when she heard that the race might be moving to May — with a line that can double as a first reaction and an epitaph: “Great. First we don’t have a football team, and now we don’t have a marathon.”

This annual experience, which has grown to more than 20,000 runners, is the only major sports event in Los Angeles where, for a small fee, anyone can compete. It’s the only non-natural disaster that brings us together as a city.

And right now it looks like it’s in trouble.

This article first appeared the the LA Times.

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LA Times, LA Marathon…Ooh LA la…ahem

On November 26, 2008, in Articles, Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

The entire article can be read here. I’ll post it here in full later. Cheers.

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Fast Company Article

On August 18, 2008, in Articles, Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

Here’s a link to the article I wrote in next month’s issue of Fast Company.

Fast Company is one of those great magazines where you actually feel smarter after reading it. Not my article exactly. But the other ones. Really great. Ahem.

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LA Weekly and the Pico/Olympic Saga

On July 10, 2008, in Articles, Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

I co-authored a piece that is in the LA Weekly today. My original assignment was a follow-up on the Pico/Olympic story that then was absorbed by a larger story about the MTA.

The story is here.

Thanks for stopping by!

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LA Weekly

On March 21, 2008, in Articles, General Announcements, Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

Not to degrade anyone’s opinion of the LA Weekly, but they hired me to do some local stories.

One on the Silver Lake Meadow and another on the Pico-Olympic One Way.

I’ll post more…later.

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My New Blogging Gig

On March 10, 2008, in General Announcements, Hey Look, I'm a Writer, by Tina Dupuy

Hey All!

I’m blogging over at Mediabistro’s Fishbowl LA. Come by and say hi!

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The Hillary Standard

On January 23, 2008, in Hey Look, I'm a Writer, Political Dribble, by Tina Dupuy

She’s running for president, people, not Prom Queen.

This piece ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Huffington Post and LA Daily News.

My grandparents just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. They got hitched right after Grampa got back from the war. They’re both educated professionals. They’re proud Americans. We come from a long line of Southern Democrats. My grandparents, the mavericks, are first generation lifelong Republicans. Grampa has a portrait of Ronald Reagan in his bathroom. Not in the place that would make ‘trickle down’ literal – let alone actually manifest. The portrait is near the sink, where he brushes his teeth. Every morning he wakes up, and The Gipper is proudly smiling at him.

With that being said, for my own amusement, the other day I asked Grama what she thought about Hillary Clinton. Now it may have been a bad cell phone connection, but I think I heard my otherwise sweet little Grama actually growl before saying, ”That woman.” She said disapprovingly. “Ambitious.”

Which is EXACTLY what Clinton basher Christopher Hitchens says about Hillary. He notes her ‘overweening ambition’ in his otherwise thin ‘case’ (think grudge) against her in his latest Slate.com article.

With all due respect to Grama, there has to be something dark and twisted about the human psyche that only wants people that don’t want power to actually get it. Or maybe its that men are go-getters and women are ambitious. Or maybe it’s just Hillary. She has turned into a black light for Americans. Highlighting our dandruff and other things we would care not to have mentioned. Like the fact that we have no restraint when it comes to our viciousness toward her and can‘t come up with a good reason for it.

Her critics are starting to get really freaky with vehemence. People are starting to foam at the mouth. Chris Matthews, for example, was starting to look like Old Yeller right before they put him down.

For those of you not following the election that close because your more humane hobby of setting ants on fire with a magnifying glass is taking up most of your time, Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, on Morning Joe the day after the New Hampshire primary he said, “The reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around.” Then he went on to say,” She didn’t win on merit. She won because everybody felt, ‘my God this woman stood up under public humiliation’ – that’s what happened.”

So it’s not that voters really dig name recognition (cough – Schwarzenegger). It’s that she got a host of sympathy votes? When has Hillary Clinton ever – ever gotten sympathy? Her enemies are so quick to hit below the belt that neutrality is the best I’ve seen for her.

Matthews later defended his comments and said that he was not sharing an ‘opinion’ just historical interpretation. It’s like saying that it was not eggplant – it was aubergine. It’s really the same thing.

Then after what was a week’s long outrage for his remarks he finally gave up. On his show Hardball he said, “Saying that Senator Clinton got where she’s got simply because her husband did what he did to her is just as callous, and I can see now, it comes across just as nasty, worse yet, just as dismissive.” That was big of him, but that comment was hardly isolated. He never thought that calling Clinton supporters “castratos in the eunuch chorus” was nasty and dismissive?

Politics is a blood sport, but even blood sports have sportsmanship. But not when it comes to Hillary. Back when her husband was running for president, back in 1992, a television reporter from Columbus, Ohio asked her, “You know, some people think of you as an inspiring female attorney mother, and other people think of you as the overbearing yuppie wife from hell. How would you describe yourself?”

You may be wondering the answer to that question. I’ll quote from A Time to Kill, “Now imagine she’s white.” Think of that question to anyone other than Hillary. Could you imagine another first lady hopeful, on the campaign trail EVER being asked that? Could you see anyone asking Barbra, Nancy or Laura that?? Hillary’s rapport with the press started way back then. Way back then in what the press dubbed “The Year of the Woman”.

But just the word ‘ambition’ used in the pejorative is baffling. “I disagree with her wanting to do anything with more prestige than she has right now.” In other words, she needs to know her place. And because she doesn’t know her place – don’t hold anything back. It’s not regular criticism. It’s like a reprimand and to used Matthews’ words ‘public humiliation’ for not being more demure.

It’s as if she’s not liked because she’s a know-it-all. She’s running for president – we want a president to KNOW IT ALL.

It’s not even a double standard – it’s a special standard – just for Hillary Clinton. It’s the Hillary Standard. And who can hold up to the Hillary Standard? No one. Not even Hillary.

It’s a reality show where otherwise, rational, intelligent people are showing their prejudices and blinding contempt. It’s tired. It’s boring. And it’s not discourse. It reminds me of the ironic quote by Voltaire, “O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.” Done.

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