Kit Rachlis

Kit Rachlis
Photo by Forest Casey, Los Angeles, CA
Born	Christopher Rachlis (1951-12-27) December 27, 1951 (age 65) Paris
Education	Yale
Occupation	Editor
Notable credit(s)	Senior editor, California Sunday (2014-); editor-in-chief, The American Prospect (2011-2014); editor, Los Angeles magazine (2000-2009); editor-in-chief, LA Weekly (1988-1993)

Kit Rachlis (born December 27, 1951) is an American journalist and editor who has held top posts at The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine, The American Prospect, and most recently the California Sunday magazine. Rachlis is best known as a practitioner of the long-form nonfiction narrative, a literary tradition that has been dubbed "an endangered species" as print has struggled to adapt to the digital age but that has recently enjoyed a renaissance.

Rachlis is the son of Eugene Rachlis, an author, book publisher, and magazine editor, and Mary Katherine (Mickey) Rachlis, an economics correspondent for the Journal of Commerce who wrote under the byline M.K. Sharp. He was born in Paris, France, where his father was serving as press attaché for the Marshall Plan, and raised in New York City. He attended Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned a B.A. in American studies from Yale in 1975.

Rachlis entered journalism as a pop music critic, reviewing albums for Rolling Stone that included 1970s works by Bob Dylan, Blondie, The Cars, Tom Waits, and Elvis Costello. His critique of Neil Young was included in Greil Marcus's Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. From 1977 to 1984, Rachlis was music editor and arts editor of the alternative weekly Boston Phoenix, then went on to serve as executive editor of The Village Voice until 1988.

In 1988, Rachlis moved cross-country to become editor-in-chief of the fledgling and flamboyant LA Weekly. Under his direction it earned a reputation as a bastion of smart and stylish writing, and his hires, including Harold Meyerson, Steve Erickson, and Tom Carson, would become some of the city’s most sophisticated cultural and political voices.

Although he was widely credited with professionalizing the paper and cementing its journalistic credibility, some colleagues felt that Rachlis's sensibilities were too mainstream for the rambunctious alt-weekly universe. Former columnist Marc Cooper would later write that under Rachlis the Weekly became "more slick, professional, better-edited but flatter, less willing to gamble and risk."