A One-Part Tribute

As first reported yesterday in the L.A. Weekly, the famed LAT media critic David Shaw has been laid low by inoperable brain cancer. Shaw has doing media criticism since before it was cool, starting at the LAT in 1974 and winning a Pulitzer in 1991. His trademark all along has been the exhaustive multi-part series, and so today Gawker pays an eloquent one-part tribute to him:

Yes, Shaw hates blogs. And, yes, he can be long-winded (both in print, where his trademark investigations typically ran over several days and several full broadsheet pages, and also on the phone, where a simple, tell-me-about-your-life Q&A with half of us a few years ago ran to nearly two hours of monologue). But he is also a giant among media writers–the only one to win a Pulitzer for criticism on the beat–and there was important and significant work in some of his (admittedly often-tedious) series, notably in his special-section-worthy reconstruction of the LAT/Staples Center fiasco.

Most simply, though, he’s a good guy, willing and even eager to get a cup of coffee with a young media writer on a visit to Los Angeles. (He also writes about food and wine in California, and he once made a phone call to secure half of us a prime reservation at the French Laundry.) And he’s only 62 years old.

According to the Weekly’s Nikki Finke, Shaw has been in a coma since July 5th, when he suffered a brain seizure.

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