In mid-November 2010, Tom Christie spent his last day at LA Weekly, ending a 15-year tenure as senior features editor. The original FishbowlLA framing — “the last true stalwart of the old LA Weekly editorial guard is moving on” — is the part that turned out, in retrospect, to be exactly correct.
Then
Christie had run the LA Weekly’s arts coverage for years. He learned the editing craft under Harold Hayes, the legendary Esquire editor of the 1960s and 1970s, and brought that ethic into a Los Angeles alt-weekly that for two decades had defined what a serious culture section in the city looked like.
He told FishbowlLA he’d had “a great run” but was “very much looking forward to moving on.” His immediate plans were a documentary about the sculptor Richard Serra (the Moving Serra project he had been working on for some time) and a screenplay adaptation of A.W. Hill’s novel Nowhere-Land. He didn’t speculate about how his departure would affect the Weekly’s arts coverage going forward — he said he had no idea.
Now
The arts coverage at LA Weekly never recovered the depth or the editorial gravity Christie had given it. The paper was sold by Voice Media Group to Semanal Media in late 2017 — a transaction that triggered the departure of nearly the entire remaining editorial staff and produced one of the largest reader-and-advertiser backlashes against a sale in the alt-weekly genre. The LA Weekly that still publishes under that name in 2026 is, structurally, a different publication from the one Christie ran the features desk of.
Christie completed the Richard Serra documentary, which screened at festivals and continued to circulate in the documentary-art-film space. He has continued in writing and editing work, with subsequent projects across literary criticism and arts editorial through the 2010s and into the 2020s. The category of “longtime LA alt-weekly features editor” the original FishbowlLA post was identifying — the role Christie occupied — does not really exist anymore in the city, partly because the alt-weeklies that supported it have either folded or been hollowed out.
The piece itself reads now as one of the small farewell moments that, taken together across the decade after, marked the end of LA’s mid-century-style arts journalism establishment.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: November 2010 snapshot