hi, my name is tony pierce.
i would like to be your first full time blogger.
since the dawn of mankind humans have wanted to tell the story of their lives.
i’m no different.
like you, i grew up in chicago, moved to la, and took over.
i moved here a little earlier than you did, i came out here the day after my high school graduation and got my first job at a mcdonalds in santa monica.
i went to santa monica college, met a punk rock girl from malibu and lost my virginity in ventura.
i transferred to uc santa barbara and got a degree in literature from the college of creative studies.
there i worked for the college paper, the daily nexus, which, like you, had no real competition. i learned a lot.
our paper won every award that a college paper could win while i was there. i even won best arts and entertainment editor, beating schools like usc, ucla, and uc berkeley– schools that had journalism programs and advisors.
the nexus didnt have any of those things. it was magical.
after college many of my friends moved out to prague and started a newspaper. my only regret in life is that i didnt go out there with them. instead i stayed in santa barbara with my girlfriend and landed a job with a $50 billion international tech company who i represented.
after that i worked for the start up, webtv.
they got bought by microsoft, who i stayed on with but then quit to sell hot dogs, garlic fries and chablis for the san francisco giants.
after that i moved back to LA and hired 400+ people for an internet start up in westwood and when the dot com boom boomed i started editing for the tv network that i am currently employed at.
the whole time ive been writing and writing and figuring out this world wide web craze, and now i am starting to get noticed in the world of blogging.
all blogging is is a way for normal people to easily express themselves on the web without a lot of fancy software.
typically, serious bloggers update their page several times a day. like a columnist who just writes and writes and writes.
i don’t know what the philosophy of the Times is, but i know that i would have loved to read Royko several times a day, and at night, and on the weekends even if he just wrote a little blurb on a sunday night saying “i just watched the sopranos. wtf was that?”
wouldn’t you?
let rosenberg get into the details of tv. sometimes it’s nice just to have your average guy on the street give his two cents.
i think i would make a great guy on the street.
my idea for the Times Blog is to have a page on latimes.com where i would update several times a day and once or twice at night and let the people of the world know what life is really like in LA.
on the bus today a man with a walker recognized a man and they said
hey buddy.
oh, hey man
see that laker game last night?
yeah, they lost huh.
well they don’t have much of a team. shaq is hurt and foxy is suspended from that fight.
what about that new guy.
yeah, with the funny name, where’s he from, europe?
no, africa.
all this was going on while i was sitting next to a transvestite who was flipping through a trade school work book titled “Introduction of Computers and Microsoft Windows”
i looked over her shoulder to see how much i knew about computers and windows.
the first paragraph said “a computer can be broken up into four parts, external hardware, internal hardware, input devices, and output devices.”
she had this part of a sentence underlined “software, otherwise known as programs…”
we were driving south down fairfax right past santa monica blvd.
i love normal life. i also love the myth of hollywood. i would like to write about everyday life, but also cover the movie premieres, the sporting events, the rock clubs, the beaches, television. everything.
i’d probably write about everything except politics. is that okay?
okay, my fifteen minute break is almost over. so let me wrap this up.
times, i love you. i know my friends are critical of you. i am critical of you sometimes, but i want to make a truce. i say if you hire someone like me you will bridge the gap that just might be out there between the “mainstream media” and the world of blogging.
a few months ago i challenged the web to link me on 100 different sites. i gave the world a month to do it. i got 100 links in three weeks. then this summer i asked for money. the readers gave me enough money to fly to aruba and back.
imagine the traffic i could generate if i had a real blog on a real newspaper’s website. and imagine what would happen if readers from around the world finally had a chance to see los angeles, the city of their dreams, through a tiny little window of happiness and love.
and sarcasm.
and celebrity interviews.
and photo essays.
via a young single man who takes a bus to work who finally was given a break by his hometown paper.
i bet you in a month i could get 1,000 links and the entire web will be abuzz from the groundbreaking move the LA Times made by signing up one of the web’s most loved and innovative and creative bloggers.
if you want to see news blogs, you can see them on the wall street journal dot com, slate, salon, msnbc.com has six blogs, and fox news used bloggers for a daily online column (even though the writing was good, it wasn’t a good idea cuz you never knew who you’d get.)
i don’t want to do a news blog. i want to do an LA blog that focuses on life in LA.
i don’t think that any one could write one better than me. maybe welch could or layne could or rabbit could or amy could or ben or kate, but none of them could do the photo essays like me, none of them could write about dating in hollywood like me, and none of them ride the subway.
so i win.
🙂
email me, please. im serious.
p.s. yes i do plan on changing the world.
but in a sweet way that everyone, like my mom, would be proud of.
p.p.s. no one pps’s enough these days. anyhow, even if you see a diamond in the rough here it’s still a diamond. bukowski basically starved for decades while he lived in LA. i dont want to be like that. anyway. think diamond in the rough. or maybe just think diamond.
p.p.p.s. i dont think ive seen a ppps since highschool. told ya, innovative.