In early December 2010, LA Weekly music editor Gustavo Turner — a Los Feliz resident who knew the territory — published a sharp critique of a recent LA Times piece on Echo Park’s gentrification. He called the Times piece “an epically LULZy article that seems to come from a different dimension where aliens from an unknown galaxy (Sherman Oaks?) have landed in Echo Park with a guidebook from 1978.” The phrasing landed.
Then
The LA Times piece in question — a Guide section nightlife write-up on Echo Park’s bars and clubs — was, in Turner’s reading, doing the classic Times move where the metro paper’s Westside-defaulting feature desk discovers a neighborhood about ten years after the rest of the city has noticed it. The piece’s tone treated Echo Park’s gentrification as new news in 2010, which was the offense Turner was prosecuting; the neighborhood had been visibly mid-shift since at least the mid-2000s.
Turner’s LA Weekly Informer-blog response was sustained. He picked apart specific framing choices, noted the venues the Times piece had missed, and located the broader problem: the city’s flagship paper was structurally a Westside operation covering an Eastside neighborhood from outside its actual residents’ experience.
The original FishbowlLA framing — Pandora Young’s pickup — treated the dispute as a slow news week winner. Internal-LA-media skirmishes between the LA Weekly and the LA Times were one of the publication’s reliable beats, and Turner’s piece was unusually sharp.
Now
Echo Park’s gentrification did continue through the rest of the 2010s and into the 2020s, eventually producing both the cultural-real-estate shift the 2010 LA Times piece was clumsily acknowledging and a substantial backlash — culminating most visibly in the 2021 Echo Park Lake encampment-and-eviction controversy that became one of the defining LA public-policy stories of that year. The neighborhood the Times feature was describing in 2010 looks substantially different in 2026, with multiple waves of subsequent development and displacement.
Gustavo Turner left LA Weekly in 2014 and has had a long subsequent career in music journalism, including work at Sonic State and several other audio-and-music industry publications. His specific style — the irreverent annotation-of-mainstream-press piece — was an LA Weekly genre that the publication had been doing well for decades and has, in the post-Voice-Media-Group LA Weekly, largely lost the staff to keep producing.
The LA Weekly itself was sold to Semanal Media in late 2017 and went through the well-documented mass-editorial-departure cycle. The current LA Weekly continues to publish but in a structurally different form than the 2010 Weekly that produced Turner’s piece. The LA Times has gone through its own transitions — the Soon-Shiong purchase in 2018, the El Segundo relocation, two recent rounds of newsroom cuts. The metro section’s coverage of Eastside neighborhoods has improved across the interval, though the broader Westside-default problem Turner was diagnosing has not entirely gone away.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: December 2010 snapshot