It’s 1977. The Bronx is burning, Son of Sam is on the loose, and a two-day blackout cripples New York City. Yet one of Manhattan’s most dramatic surprises comes when the archconservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch buys the nation’s most famous alternative weekly news publication, the Village Voice. The paper’s notoriously outspoken and politically progressive editorial staff had already accused the previous owner and editor, New York magazine’s publisher Clay Felker, of dulling the Voice’s editorial edge, reining in writers’ freedom, and displacing serious news stories with soft features and lifestyle reporting. But Murdoch, who acquired the Voice, New York, and the New York Post to establish beachheads in the U.S. media market, threatened these values even more, and his takeover nearly inspired an insurgency. According to a column by the staff writer Alexander Cockburn, Murdoch could be treated the way unwanted chieftains once were in New Guinea: “they would take [him] out to the mountainside, stretch him out, and smash his testicles flat with a rock.”1 Only an “alt weekly” (as the genre came to be called) would print such a threat to its new owner, and only an alt weekly editor would fight to protect the author who made it. Despite Murdoch’s efforts to have Cockburn fired, the writer’s byline returned in subsequent issues. The Australian magnate gradually learned that an antiestablishment attitude and a license to print what the respectable dailies suppressed were the sources of the Voice’s popularity. Keeping his hands off the paper, Murdoch let it line his pockets instead.
Had they known this would happen, the three men who founded the Voice in 1955 might never have printed the first issue. Dan Wolf, forty, his upstairs neighbor, Edwin Fancher, thirty-one, and the writer Norman Mailer, thirty-two, had great literary ambitions but modest expectations about the scope of the Voice’s coverage and the size of its audience. After all, another Village weekly, Caricature, folded just a few years before, and the area already had the Villager, a paper stuffed with ads, announcements, apartment listings, and light news.”2 Fancher and Mailer each put five thousand dollars into the project, Wolf agreed to become editor in chief so long as he could be an equal partner, and they rented a two-room office at 22 Greenwich Avenue. In the first issue, published October 26, 1955, and featuring a front-page photograph of folk musicians in Washington Square, they printed an introductory article proclaiming that the Voice “will serve not merely the Village proper but also the Cooper-Stuyvesant, Gramercy Park, Lower East Side, and Chelsea areas. Its editors expect it to have a wide circulation in uptown New York and elsewhere, since it is in part intended to provide thoroughgoing coverage of the special entertainment and other features of this unique neighborhood. They foresee a net paid circulation for the Voice of at least 10,000.”
For a nickel, readers received twelve pages of surprisingly boilerplate local news reporting, bold social and political commentary, edgy humor, extensive cultural coverage, and serious arts criticism from a roster of eclectic writers. Readers also became part of a happening, helping to support a countercultural movement that would speak to and stand for a growing number of young Americans who did not find their concerns reflected in the daily newspapers. It took a while. Only about 2,500 people bought the first issue, and the publishers lost one thousand dollars per week for the first few months of operation. Yet the letters from readers, so witty and well written that they soon became a featured part of the paper, signaled that the paper was hitting one of the city’s central nerves. Mailer’s columns, which began in January 1956, boosted the Voice’s public profile, and Wolf attracted a number of distinguished contributors by offering them a chance to bare their souls with intensely personal and brutally honest writing that would infuse the page with attitude. But he couldn’t keep Mailer, whose frustration with the project proved uncontainable. After four months as a columnist, the temperamental writer alienated many of his colleagues and editors, complained that as a minority owner he had “no real voice in the control of anything except [his] column,” and left the city for Europe. Mailer would ultimately return to the paper, yet as he made his first dramatic exit he huffed that the Voice had become “remarkably conservative for so young a paper.”
From today’s perspective, however, what’s striking is that the early issues of the Voice were remarkably local, with news and cultural reporting that consistently featured the West Village. Photographs of Washington Square appeared regularly on the front page, as did news stories about New York University, neighborhood development, the housing crunch, and conflicts over the public culture of bohemians. The paper localized city and national stories, using Village characters or institutions as pegs for reports about the arms race or the civil rights movement. On May 11, 1960, for example, the main page-one story on civil disobedience to protest air-raid drills featured a demonstration at the Women’s House of Detention on Greenwich Avenue, and on July 23, 1964, the lead story on the “weekend riots in Harlem” commented on its effects, or lack thereof, in the Village. Its regular features, such as the Village Square, Saloon Society, On Campus, the lengthy letters section (which identified the street where each writer lived), and the Press of Freedom (where readers could pen their own articles) also kept a tight focus on the neighborhood, as did its political coverage. Its ads promoted small retailers, movie houses, hotels, and nightspots, and its classifieds, both the Public Notices and Village Bulletin Board sections, were full of local offers and humorous communications. Although the editors continued reaching for a national audience, they were not shy about their parochial commitments, and by the end of their first successful year they had changed the front-page header from “A Weekly Newspaper Designed to be Read” to “A Weekly Newspaper of Greenwich Village.”
By 1958 the Voice had earned the header “A Weekly Newspaper that Helped to Save Greenwich Village,” though it never printed such a boastful claim. In its first years, the Voice emerged as a galvanizing force in the fight to prevent Robert Moses, New York’s legendary “power broker” and modern planner, from lowering the wrecking ball on the neighborhood in order to build a four-lane highway, twelve feet for each lane, straight through Washington Square Park. (One reason for the project, Moses insisted, was that developers south of the park had been “formally, officially, and reliably promised a Fifth Avenue address,” and to do this they had to bisect the park with a road.) As local publishers with a deep interest in preserving the Village’s unique charms, Wolf and Fancher joined with organizers such as Shirley Hayes and Jane Jacobs to lead the campaign for preservation and self-determination. The highway, Wolf wrote, would be “the beginning of the end of Greenwich Village as a community … Washington Square Park is a symbol of unity in diversity … It brings together Villagers of enormously varied interests and backgrounds.” Wolf devoted the prime real estate he controlled—the Voice front page and news sections—to the cause. Leading urban critics such as Jacobs and Lewis Mumford authored important articles, Charles Abrams proclaimed the “revolt of the urbs,” and the staff writer Mary Perot Nichols reported on the backdoor politics driving the city’s development. When the battle moved from the streets to city hall, wrote the Voice historian Kevin McAuliffe, “the Voice was the paper of the movement against Moses.”3 On this issue, at least, the countercultural weekly provided a platform from which neighborhood residents and preservationists could speak louder than the ultimate insider and power broker. In 1959 the Board of Estimate killed the highway proposal, ruling instead that Washington Square Park would be permanently closed to traffic. It remains that way today.
Yet the Voice would not stay a Village paper much longer. After winning the neighborhood battle, the editors staked out journalistic territory in the rest of the city, mounting a case against corruption at Tammany Hall and becoming a beacon of urban reform, supporting Republican candidates such as John Lindsay rather than the Democratic machine. The Voice’s cultural coverage broadened as well, and by the 1960s it had become a vital organ for the nation’s many emerging social movements and cultural experiments. The Village, as its editors liked to say, had already become a state of mind rather than a place. The paper expanded, giving news reporters and even art critics the space to write long-format articles, adding high-profile columnists, and opening its pages to sustained battles over the most divisive issues of the time, from feminism to black power, abortion to the Cold War. It continued to feature local issues, and its most prominent columnists engaged in fierce debates over the Village’s unions, public schools, political representatives, community organizations, and, of course, cultural activities, many of which had national significance. But the balance of coverage gradually shifted as the paper expanded, with metropolitan, national, and international coverage outweighing the neighborhood offerings. By 1968, the paper’s header was changed to “The Weekly Newspaper of New York,” and cover stories were less likely to feature the Village. The paper’s circulation grew, as did its influence. Prominent magazines such as the New Yorker began mimicking the Voice’s style and tone, occasionally even hiring away its best writers. Cultural entrepreneurs in cities from San Francisco and Seattle to Chicago and Boston created new weeklies based loosely on the Voice’s model, providing both news about alternative ways of life and alternative news about issues that the daily papers were ignoring or covering poorly. The weeklies expressed the free-spirited, antiestablishment sentiment that blossomed in places like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and Old Town in Chicago, helping a rising generation of young people who questioned the authority of political leaders and journalistic institutions to find its voice.
THE ALT WEEKLIES ALSO HELPED ADVERTISERS FIND A MARKET, ONE that would ultimately be more lucrative than anyone at the Voice imagined. Wolf and Fancher began to recognize this during the 1960s, when they unleashed their sales team from the confines of the Village, selling enough ads to quadruple the length of the paper, raise the newsstand price to fifteen cents, and pay writers better wages. Then, in 1970, Carter Burden, a Democratic city councilman and former adviser to Robert Kennedy, offered to buy the paper for $3.2 million, so much more than the ten thousand dollars the publishers originally invested that they couldn’t turn him down. Wolf and Fancher remained involved in the paper, but four years later Burden entered into a merger with Clay Felker, who paid $2.5 million and purchased six hundred thousand shares of stock for controlling interest in the paper, fired the two founders, and took over as editor. Mailer joined Wolf and Fancher to sue over alleged violations of their contract with Burden. They won $485,000 in the settlement, but control of the paper remained decidedly out of their hands. When Murdoch took over in 1977, they could do little more than scream.
At least they had good company. By the late 1970s alt weeklies were gaining popularity in cities throughout the nation, and about thirty publishers—a motley group of rabble-rousers, bohemians, small business owners, and aspiring baby barons—began planning their own trade group. They formed the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) during their first meeting, in Seattle, in 1978. Calvin Trillin, who covered the event for the New Yorker, wrote that “just about everyone wanted to talk about taking market surveys and collecting accounts receivable and figuring out the hideous problems of distribution.”4 They must have had some good ideas. In the 1980s and 1990s ads for alcohol, tobacco, fashion, music, and movies became standard features of the alt weekly genre, as did a conventional format featuring local news in front, heavy coverage of big-label bands and Hollywood films in the middle, classifieds and sex ads in back, and national columnists sprinkled wherever space allowed. Weeklies in major markets fattened up until they were too thick to fold and too heavy to carry in a purse.
Not that the publishers minded. By 1992, the AAN papers reported $174 million in revenues. The booming economy of the late 1990s sent revenues soaring to more than $500 million, where—despite major losses in income from classified ads, which are moving to Web sites such as Craigslist, competition from “faux alternatives” put out by daily newspapers, and a spate of online publications dedicated to cultural coverage—they currently remain.5 According to a 2004 survey commissioned by the AAN, readers of alt weeklies are not bohemians but Influentials, “the 10% of the population that tells the other 90% where to shop and dine, how to vote, and, most importantly, how to spend their discretionary time and income.”6 American Demographics adds that the average age of an alt weekly reader is forty-six, the average annual income is more than $60,000 ($64,000 by 2004), and about half of all readers are over thirty-five.7 The audience, in other words, is not so alternative anymore. And neither are the papers’ owners.
Murdoch held on to the Voice until 1985, when he sold it to the pet products scion Leonard Stern for $55 million. Stern Publishing held the paper for fifteen years, during which it acquired six other major alt weeklies, including the nation’s second largest, the LA Weekly. In 1980 the investment firm Weiss, Peck &c Greer bought Stern’s holdings for $170 million and changed the publishing group name to Village Voice Media (VVM). A brand name was necessary because the firm had a major competitor, New Times, encroaching from the other side of the country.
In 1970 a small group of Arizona State University students and antiwar activists led by Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin started their own alternative weekly, the Phoenix New Times, when campus administrators refused to fly the flag at half-mast after the Kent State massacre, in which the Ohio National Guard shot four student protestors dead and injured nine others. “It reflected a frustration not just with the war but with American society in general,” Lacey, who is also an accomplished investigative reporter, told the Nation. “It was an indictment of the entire culture, a repudiation of capitalism.”8
But Lacey and Larkin, who became chairman and CEO of New Times, gradually learned to commodify their dissent and invest it in chains, acquiring the Denver Westword in 1983, moving into Florida in 1987, Texas in the early 1990s, California in the mid-1990s, and the Midwest (Missouri and Ohio) in the late 1990s. In early 2005 New Times owned eleven alt weeklies, more than any other company, and also owned the Ruxton Media Group, a marketing consolidator that sells ads for twenty-eight weeklies, including the Chicago Reader, the Washington City Paper, and the Austin Chronicle, and more than 1,500 college papers. Yet the company wanted to control more papers, and everyone in the industry knew it. In October 2005 the New Times and VVM announced plans to merge, with the New Times managers taking controlling interest of the company’s shares and the majority of seats on the corporate board. The new group would control seventeen of the largest alt weeklies, reaching about a quarter of the AAN audience, and enjoy a level of market domination that, as the Boston Phoenix noted, would “establish what both chains are supposed to despise.”9Adding insult to irony, the new group would claim the industry’s leading antiestablishment brand name, Village Voice Media.
Years before, at the 1997 Media and Democracy Conference in New York City, Lacey had responded defiantly to requests for New Times to respect the editorial autonomy of so many local outlets by declaring his managerial philosophy: “I’m going to run these papers the way I want, and if you don’t like it you can kiss my pink Irish ass.”10 At the Village Voice, where editors and writers worried that New Times managers would destroy their tradition of politically loaded criticism that reaches for a multicultural readership, Lacey promised that “we’re going to come in and we’re going to pay a lot of attention to content and to editorial. That’s what we’ve done in every city that we’ve gone into.” As for those editors and media scholars who warned that consolidation would homogenize the alt weekly market: “They are,” Lacey proclaimed, “the sort of armchair critics that life passes by.”11
But it was VVM’s and New Times’ market allocation agreement, not Lacey’s incendiary rhetoric, that compelled the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to review their proposed merger. Three years before, the federal government cracked down on the two companies when New Times closed New Times Los Angeles to give VVM a monopoly with LA Weekly, and VVM killed the Cleveland Free Times so that the Cleveland Scene could enjoy the same. Their CEOs put out a joint statement explaining, “Through this transaction we have been able to strengthen our respective competitive position in two important markets. As a result, both LA Weekly and Cleveland Scene will better serve the needs of the readers and the advertisers in their communities.” But the DOJ and the states of California and Ohio disagreed, immediately filing antitrust suits. In 2003, just three months after the deal, the DOJ announced in a consent decree that it was “requiring the companies to terminate their illegal market allocation agreement,” which was necessary “to restore competition in those markets.” R. Hewitt Pate, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Antitrust Division, declared that “rather than letting the marketplace decide the winner, these companies chose to corrupt the competitive process by swapping markets, thereby guaranteeing each other a monopoly and denying consumers in Los Angeles and Cleveland the continued benefits of competition.” It was a historic occasion: the Bush administration, and Attorney General John Ashcroft’s office in particular, were reprimanding leaders of the alternative media for acting as monopoly capitalists. Two years after the announcement, the DOJ had to decide if it could entrust the two companies to legally operate as one.
ALT WEEKLY PUBLISHERS HAD BEEN SPECULATING ABOUT THE NEW TIMES’ ambitions to take over VVM since the 2003 antitrust scandal exposed their collusive relationship, and by the summer of 2005 the editorial divisions of VVM papers were getting anxious about their future. They were, of course, already working inside a chain company. But, with some notable exceptions, VVM had proven to be a hands-off owner, even in valuable markets such as Los Angeles and Seattle, allowing editors enough independence and control over formatting and design to maintain the local flavor of each paper. When I visited the Seattle Weekly’s funky downtown office space, the former editor, Knute “Skip” Berger, told me that VVM managers “are strong believers in having local editors who love what they’re doing and know the markets and are really into it. They’ve given us tremendous freedom.” “Seattle isn’t afraid of New York City,” said David Brewster, a Yale graduate who founded the Weekly in 1976 with hopes that sophisticated cultural coverage would attract young professional readers, and remained actively involved until his partners persuaded him to sell to VVM in 1997. When we met in Seattle, Brewster explained, “David Schneiderman [the CEO] makes no public appearance here. The Weekly runs no Voice writers. It’s not a generic or formula paper. It’s not even widely known that the Voice is the owner here, and there’s no desire to make it otherwise.” In fact, VVM’s silent control of the paper disturbed Brewster, who stayed active in Seattle’s civic life by starting another new community project, Town Hall Seattle. “The readers ought to know who the owners are,” he insisted. “It’s kind of a public trust and a public utility, so it bothers me that it’s sort of concealed.”
Brewster’s overall satisfaction with VVM’s former management was not surprising, since he, Berger, and the key Weekly partners carefully evaluated offers from a number of leading media groups, and were courted by the New Times, the Chicago Reader, and a subsidiary of Hollinger International, the company controlled by Conrad Black. “There was tremendous interest when we were selling the Weekly,” Berger explained. “David and I wanted to keep the ownership local, but most of the people interested were not local and we weren’t successful. Then we went through this process of being romanced by all these different chains.”
The meeting with Hollinger’s speculators was particularly memorable. “They took our management group out to dinner and were talking about how great their company was, wining and dining us and asking questions about the Weekly. And I asked the guy, ‘Well, why are you interested in alt papers?’ He said, ‘Well, alt weeklies are the last unconsolidated niche in publishing in America.’ And I was like, ‘Wow … we’re the last unconsolidated niche.’ Needless to say, I did not recommend that we sell to them.”
Berger also recalled meeting with New Times, whose abrasive journalistic style clashed with the Weekly group’s journalistic commitment to community building and high-minded criticism for cultural elites. “Lacey and Larkin came from New Times. We had this lovely dinner, and everybody was talking shop. Then there was this silence after dinner, and I can’t remember whether it was Lacey or Larkin, but I think Larkin said, ‘Is there anything you guys want to ask us?’ And I said, ‘Well, why would a booze and testosterone fueled company like New Times, why would you guys be interested in running a matriarchy like the Weekly?’ Most of our managers were women. David ran the paper in a very sensitive way, very civil and courtly. We were kind of a matriarchy. There was a stunned silence, and then everybody roared with laughter. It was a hilarious mismatch. Even now, when I run into Lacey or Larkin, they always come up to me and say, ‘Hey, how’s the matriarchy?’ They wanted us quite badly. They made a bid, and they were very disappointed when we went to the Voice.”
“The Voice was a good fit for us,” Berger claimed. “The only thing I didn’t like was that they weren’t local. They understood the papers. We spoke the same language. And they’re a company with a great track record on editorial independence, as opposed to somebody who was going to apply a cookie cutter, or somebody who was going to come in and make cost cutting their first priority.” Not that VVM refrained from all cost cutting or formatting changes in its new investment. Since 1990 Brewster’s group had been publishing East Side Week, a suburban alt weekly targeting the affluent professionals working for local technology companies such as Microsoft, Concur, and GeoEngineers. Although it was not yet generating major revenues, the Week was helping to create a distinctive regional voice and public culture in a place full of innovative young people. The editorial staff was deeply committed to the project, as was Brewster, the publisher, and his investors, who recognized the potential to profit by targeting the resource-rich community. VVM owned and operated similar papers, the Long Island Voice and Orange County Weekly, which made it an especially attractive suitor. Yet VVM, which lacked an institutional interest in Seattle’s edge cities and suburbs and had a strong incentive to boost the bottom line, folded the Week within a year of the acquisition.
VVM also made substantial changes to the Weekly, albeit not in the news hole so much as in advertising, where national companies and the sex industry (escort workers, private dancers, phone sex services, and the like) established an unprecedented presence in the paper, decisively changing its look and feel. The Weekly was always a relatively prudish, high-brow publication, especially before competition with the Stranger, an upstart weekly started by the Onion’s cofounder Tim Keck, pushed the Weekly’s board to expand its pop culture coverage and convert from a paid subscription-based circulation model to a free paper in 1995. Brewster, who said that his ideal reader was “a thirty-five-year-old lawyer who was married,” and whose main concern was that the paper “was read by people who had graduated from college,” did not mind ceding the younger audience of rock fans and sex column devotees to a competitor. He was not even embarrassed by the Weekly’s legendary failure to cover Sub Pop Records, the pathbreaking independent music label that first recorded Nirvana, Soundgarden, and many other Seattle bands and helped to launch grunge rock into the stratosphere—even though the two companies were in the same office complex. Brewster preferred his 40,000 loyal subscribers to 120,000 people who picked up the paper for nothing.
Yet the success of other free weeklies and the threat from the outrageously funny and increasingly popular Stranger convinced Brewster’s partners that the model worked, and he reluctantly agreed to go along. When VVM took over, the paper that once refused to print personal ads that mentioned any body parts between the neck and the knees lost its inhibitions. “Lady Aurora. The Sweetest Bitch You’ll Ever Meet,” says one ad in the Fetish classifieds of a recent issue, listed next to “HellHouse Dungeon,” and across the page from a few dozen color photographs of women—“Busty Blonde!” “Sexy Student!” “Asian Dream!”—thrusting out from their thongs, bikinis, and lingerie. The impact of these graphic images was enormous, Mike Crystal, the former Weekly publisher who is now the publisher of the Chicago Reader, told me. “The body sculpting stuff that goes over so well in LA, sex ads in the back, explicit pictures that work in New York—those things had been successful for the Voice group. Although they may appear to be business matters, they have a huge impact on the way the paper feels as an editorial product. You get people who say ‘I like what you’ve got up front, but I don’t want it around the house.’ When those decisions are made at a corporate level, you can no longer control your own marketplace. You might think, ‘Oh, that isn’t going to really work for us,’ but suddenly that’s not your decision.”
THE WEEKLY’S EDITORIAL STAFFERS LEARNED TO LIVE WITH A RAUNCHIER version of their paper, but along with their colleagues at other VVM weeklies, they grew nervous when rumors about a New Times takeover circulated through the industry. Although both companies were chains, only New Times had a reputation for using a standard formula—deride activists and reformers, hammer the local government, focus the cultural coverage on national bands and Hollywood films while doing smaller pieces on local acts, and refuse to endorse political candidates—wherever it went, flattening the differences in cities as distinct as Phoenix, Miami, and Cleveland. Mike Lacey, the New Times cofounder with spiked gray hair and a tongue sharpened for lashing, found such anxiety predictable but misplaced. The man responsible for the chain’s journalism has long insisted that hard-hitting, locally focused, and objective investigative reporting is the hallmark of New Times publications, and he takes special pride in the hundreds of awards that his papers have won. In interviews, Lacey insists that New Times grants editors considerable autonomy, provides writers with good salaries and working conditions, and delivers a fresh and fierce paper to readers in each one of its markets. As he recently wrote: “The disgrace of the serial rapes at the Air Force Academy in Colorado first saw the light of day in our Denver paper. In Cleveland, we recently published grand jury documents that the daily sat on. In Phoenix, our writers broke the polygamy scandal in the Mormon sect on the Utah/Arizona border, as well as the stories about poor people submitting to unnecessary surgery so that doctors and patients both—but particularly the doctors—could swindle insurance companies.”12
New Times reporting has impressed some of the toughest critics in the business. The Slate press critic Jack Shafer, who edited the Washington City Paper for a decade before serving briefly as the New Times’ first editor at the San Francisco Weekly, told me that “Lacey and Larkin are engaged, savvy, and good newsmen,” and that “every one of the papers that they’ve started is ten times better than it was before they took over.” Mark Jacobson, who authored a long profile of Lacey for New York magazine after VVM announced the merger, reported that there is “a consensus that New Times often published excellent local investigative stories,” even if there is “the sense that Lacey and Larkin’s papers were vicious corporate sharks.” Not that this would bother Lacey, who called himself “this year’s Visigoth, the new asshole in charge,” and complained about the staff’s civility on his first visit to the Voice after the merger. “Someone could have at least told me to fuck off,” he joked.13
Although no writers were imprudent enough to flip off their prospective employer in person, in private many feared that they would either be downsized or defanged if the Department of Justice let Lacey and Larkin seize control. Editors at the most venerable VVM papers, the Village Voice and Los Angeles Weekly (which, like the Seattle Weekly, had rebuffed an earlier bid from New Times and been sold to VVM instead), were notably concerned. The Weekly group had competed with the short-lived New Times Los Angeles (NTLA), and veterans such as Harold Meyerson and Marc Cooper had assailed the company for bluntly applying its signature cynicism, libertarianism, and knee-jerk contrarianism to a city that had no interest. “Isn’t it possible,” Meyerson wrote after NTLA closed, “that one reason the New Times never made money in Los Angeles is that it was out of sync with L.A.’s politics—or, at least, the politics of the people who pick up alternative weeklies in this city? In the best tradition of the alternative press, New Times was an inveterate establishment basher, but its view of who was the establishment and who the outsider was classically neocon. In the world according to New Times, a beleaguered, largely white middle class was set upon by a slew of false messiahs claiming to represent the city’s nonwhite, downtrodden poor. Not that this doesn’t happen in L.A., but the majority of the city truly is nonwhite and poor, and some of the New Times’ purported demagogues were actually the people most responsible for helping that new majority.”14
Cooper, who was careful not to denounce his prospective employer, expressed concern that the New Times’ policy of refusing to endorse political candidates or campaigns masked its strong ideological orientation. “The Voice/L.A. Weekly papers are stolidly liberal-lefty and continue to keep a finger or two dipped into some nebulous conception of a counterculture,” he claimed. “The New Times chain, by contrast, takes pleasure in poking fun at P.C. liberalism and by refusing to take partisan stands, fancying itself as a group of lone libertarian lone-shooters. Sometimes the results are refreshingly unpredictable, hard-hitting exposés of politicians both conservative and liberal. Other times the product is sophomoric and snarky, lacking in any serious analysis.”15
In addition to their editorial concerns, the staff at VVM papers worried that New Times would eliminate journalists, substitute syndicated columns written from corporate headquarters for locally written film and music reviews, and redesign the format to create a homogenized big-brand identity. Editors responsible for cultural coverage were anxious that the New Times’ standard packages would necessarily limit the space for coverage of small bands and local film events. Mark Athetakis, who was the San Francisco Weekly’s music editor from 1998 to 2000 and a staff writer until 2002, said that the New Times dictated the shape of cultural coverage much more than his current employer, the Chicago Reader. “I was given a strict mandate when I started at the Weekly,” he told me. “New Times has a specific format, not just in terms of what gets reviewed, what fills the features, but also the tone you’re supposed to strike. There was a sense that central command was there and there were certain marching orders. Andy Van De Voorde [the executive associate editor for the chain] had separate meetings with every music editor and gave them some sort of advice.”
Athetakis admired the journalistic ambitions of New Times cultural reporting, but he was convinced that the chain’s editorial style, which usually emphasizes long stories about national acts making local appearances, leaves little room to cover emerging music scenes. “The Reader is designed to make as much space for interesting local music as possible,” he explained. “For example, we have something called the Treatment, which previews about twenty to twenty-five upcoming shows. Some will be big arena shows, but most of the previews are covering smaller acts, with a special interest in smaller local acts. Writers know they are not just encouraged but also responsible for keeping tabs on what’s interesting in the local scene. In the Weekly it didn’t shake out that way because you would be picking one or two bands that would be given the big push. There was not a whole lot of space for reviews, maybe one or two concert previews. There was impatience for the extended music essay. So much weight was put on the feature that there was less interest in criticism.”
VVM’s news and feature writers feared that, even if they kept their jobs, the New Times would place them on its infamous five-week reporting cycle. The chain, as industry insiders knew, kept its profit margins high by employing fewer full-time editors, writers, columnists, and critics than other major companies in the business, and the editorial divisions at the Los Angeles Weekly and Village Voice were significantly larger than any outlet in the New Times stable. Journalists competed for special permission to do longer investigative stories that the New Times could nominate for prizes, for which they would get generous reporting budgets and be exempted from the relentless publishing cycle. But these opportunities were rare, and in general Lacey and Larkin made their business model work by imposing strict production demands on each of the company’s writers, demanding a full-length feature story every five weeks (about ten per year) as well as a number of smaller articles. “It may sound okay compared to what newspaper reporters do,” one New Times writer told me in confidence, fearing professional sanctions from the industry’s main employer. “The problem is that they want to do a city magazine, and they expect us to write magazine-style stories without giving us enough time. We had three weeks to report, one week to write, and one week for edits. I started to feel like a hamster in a wheel.”
Not only does this tight production schedule drain reporters and drag down newsroom morale; it also reinforces the decidedly antigovernment political slant of New Times papers. According to staff writers, the five-week cycle pushes them to report often on public institutions and individuals, for whom it is easier to gather information, rather than on private-sector firms for which investigative reporting requires more time and effort. Writers also learn to gain time in the cycle by adopting the chain’s standard slash-and-burn tone with stories designed to do damage. Jeremy Mullman, a former San Francisco Weekly writer, told me that “the paper had a reputation for throat slitting.” Yet when the communications scholar Rodney Benson conducted a content analysis of the chain’s reporting in San Francisco and Los Angeles, he found a distinctly political pattern to its choice of whose throat to cut. “Journalists at the two New Times papers cover government aggressively, ever on the lookout for corruption, dishonesty, or hypocrisy from politics,” Benson found. Yet “more typical of the New Times approach to business and economic issues is a focus on the colorful, controversial entrepreneur or the off-beat enterprise … Just as often, business stories are stripped entirely of politics, focusing instead on the amusing and bizarre.”16
To be sure, the New Times has printed important investigative stories about corporate corruption and profiteering, but the thrust of its coverage is so focused on discrediting local public figures that New Times critics accuse the company of “anticommunity” reporting that stands against everyone and everything, from small theater companies to neighborhood organizations and, especially, activist groups. “They’re wary of people who protest for a living,” Mullman told me. “A professional activist is someone they’re inclined to roll their eyes at and make fun of.” “The editor humiliated me in a staff meeting when I pitched a story about some local activists with a good cause,” another former New Times reporter confided to me. “So I quickly learned to censor myself and stick with stories he liked.”17
During the late 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, one of the San Francisco Weekly’s pet projects involved criticizing critics of gentrification, even though they were on the losing end of a furious development process driven by the dot-com boom and the soaring Bay Area real estate values. In May and June of 1999, the Weekly editors summoned up the spirit of the genre’s founders and planned an elaborate hoax. The paper printed a prominent ad announcing a “Stop the Hate” rally for YUPPIE rights in response to a series of attacks by vandals in the Mission district, where young professionals and hip commercial establishments were displacing working-class residents at an alarming rate. In a dramatic reversal, the Weekly had turned the countercultural movement from which it had arisen into the primary object of its scorn.
“The ad,” explained John Mecklin, the Weekly editor at the time, “was written entirely in the gooey vocabulary of underdog leftist social protest; at the same time, the ad’s content clearly called for the masses to rally and rescue professionals who had used six-figure salaries and Silicon Valley stock portfolios to buy homes in the Mission District.” It listed a phone number and a contact person, named “Bradley,” for press inquiries. A number of local media outlets called immediately, only to get a recorded message or, in the case of a San Francisco Examiner reporter named Emily Gurnon, a returned call saying the organizers were too busy for an interview. Mecklin was thrilled when Gurnon wrote a story about the fake event anyway, and he was delighted to see some 250 counterprotestors show up to oppose a group that did not exist.
“Bradley,” Mecklin wrote, “did not appear. But that didn’t stop the demonstration. This is, after all, San Francisco. No need for reality when protesting is in the air.” The paper’s prank did not amuse the neighborhood’s Latino, blue-collar, and elderly residents, many of whom were struggling to keep their homes and maintain their communities. Nor did it help the Weekly writers, who earned the distrust of both local sources and colleagues at other papers. Yet such concerns have no place in the world according to New Times, where the young professional readers they target are encouraged to enjoy a good laugh at the expense of the do-gooders and the downtrodden. According to Mecklin, “If a couple of hundred people in the Mission are so focused on neighborhood politics that they cannot recognize absurdity staring them right in their faces, is it not the clear duty of SF Weekly to bring humor back into their lives?”18
NOTHING ABOUT THE NEW TIMES’ REPORTING IN THE BAY AREA HUMORS Bruce Brugmann, the founder and publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Brugmann, whose burly, six-foot-five-inch frame and bushy gray beard can barely contain his roaring contempt for chain weeklies in general and New Times in particular, has been the industry’s strongest advocate of locally owned and operated publications committed to defending urban underdogs against the power elite. The Guardian has a special place in the universe of alt weeklies. It was the first alternative paper explicitly designed to challenge the local dailies, the Chronicle and Examiner, which were locked in a Joint Operating Agreement, and it won the funding to become a weekly (about $500,000) by settling an antitrust lawsuit against the “Chron-Ex” in 1975.19
The Guardian’s mission statement—“It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell”—has stayed constant since Brugmann and his wife, Jean Dibble, printed the first issue on October 27, 1966, when they were both thirty-one years old and lacked the resources to publish on a regular basis. So has the editorial style, which dedicated readers appreciate for the unwavering progressivism of its reporters and critics, including some whom the industry justifiably ridicules for their predictability and occasional myopia. “You tell me the issue,” taunted Mecklin, when we met during his last months as Weekly editor. “I’ll tell you what the Guardian is going to say.”
The Guardian’s editorial team insists that predictable criticism is exactly what principled journalists should produce when the institutions they cover make predictably dangerous decisions. Whether the issue is unchecked urban development or an unsound rationale for military aggression, the Guardian is not shy about reporting a story with a frame that reinforces its politically progressive editorial line. The New Times publications revel in their rival’s apparent misjudgments, and the Guardian staff is eager to spit back. During a two-hour conversation in his large but cluttered office, Brugmann recounted that before President Bush announced plans to invade Iraq, “we came out and said that the war is wrong. It’s preemptive. It’s immoral. It’s based on lies. It has no exit strategy.” After the U.S. military toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime and took over Baghdad, the San Francisco Weekly gave Brugmann a mock “Best Local Psychic” award. “We came out early and gave their editors a special award for ‘Best Premature Ejaculation,’” Brugmann gleefully exclaimed. “And now they’ve regretted it ever since, because guess who was right!”
“We’re an activist paper, a paper that has a point of view,” said the Guardian’s executive editor, Tim Redmond, during my visit to the Weekly’s two-level, lofted office space in the Portrero Hill neighborhood. “We think that a good newspaper should be out to change the world, not just to make money. We energize and promote progressive activism in San Francisco—to be useful to people, and to provide intelligent, insightful arts and entertainment coverage that also supports the local arts community. While we are critics, we are not boosters. At the same time, we feel like it’s partially our responsibility to give the little guys a break. We do it because we care. That’s really our editorial mission, to try to make San Francisco a better place.” Thirty years ago many other alt weeklies shared this editorial philosophy, though others—the Seattle Weekly and the Chicago Reader, for example—aimed for the sophisticated literary style associated with the New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly rather than the activist model associated with the underground press. The Guardian’s activist voice is exceedingly rare in today’s market, yet it expresses something essential in the spirit of the “left-coast city” it covers. It is utterly San Franciscan, and although Mecklin, the Weekly editor, told me that “unless you’re an idiot, if you’re a reasonably intelligent person, this [the Weekly] is what you read,” the Guardian remains the more popular local paper.
Unlike Seattle, no one in the Bay Area is confused about who runs the leading alt weekly, especially once the Guardian began stamping the phrase “Locally Owned and Operated” on every newspaper box. And as the battle between the Guardian and the Weekly turned into a bloodbath, San Franciscans had a rare chance to witness a newspaper war over competing visions of the future of local media.
Like the Voice, the Guardian started with a small staff that let the city’s young literary aspirants and muckrakers use the paper to launch their writing careers. They had plenty of juicy subjects, from San Francisco’s summer of love, corrupt local draft boards, and the booming music scene in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the late 1960s to the fledgling movement to curb high-rise development on the waterfront and the fight to increase public input for the city’s new public rail system, Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), during the early 1970s. The Guardian has always featured strong coverage of the city’s dynamic cultural environment, with bracingly open and honest discussions about sex and drugs. But the paper’s greatest initiative, which to this day Brugmann calls “the granddaddy of all civic scandals,” involves reporting the story of how the for-profit company Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) maneuvered to block a municipal electric system that, in the paper’s view, would save San Francisco residents hundreds of millions of dollars each year. A biochemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley, named Joe Neilands broke this story for the Guardian on March 22, 1969, and since then it’s become an unspoken rule that “almost every editor and reporter on the staff at one time or another … investigates or reports on the story.”20
No one has ever called the Guardian a writer’s paper, and even its editors will say that literary quality is relatively unimportant because they aspire to be a “reporter’s paper” instead. The weekly earned this title in 2005, when its staff writer Adam Clay Thompson’s “Forgotten City” series on public housing problems in San Francisco won the prestigious George Polk award for best local reporting. Unlike the Voice (before it merged with New Times), the Guardian has let go of veterans and retained a predominantly youthful reporting corps, it rarely publishes the kind of political feuding among columnists that made the New York paper so feisty, and its news section rarely contains a story that’s not driven by a progressive political line. Mecklin told me that “nobody writes anything that Bruce Brugmann doesn’t say is okay,” while the paper suffers because he insists on “paying people like shit, treating people like shit, and running them off the lot.”
Guardian staffers acknowledge that they don’t get the financial support that the Weekly offers reporters when they’re working on major investigative pieces. Yet they receive roughly the same starting salaries as their equals at the Weekly (between $35,000 and $42,000 a year, depending on experience), and they were spared from the downsizing that New Times imposed on its papers after 9/11. “There’s just not a sense of security working there,” said Athetakis. “Back in 2001-2, NT was laying off reporters throughout its papers. And nobody in the office was hearing a damn thing about it except secondhand from the people who were getting fired. There was no explanation from Lacey or Mecklin saying, ‘We’re sorry we’re doing this because …’ It was just sort of like, ‘Okay, well, it’s happening, and this is the kind of corporate culture that exists here.’”
IN MARCH 2002 REDMOND PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE ANNOUNCING THAT A Guardian advertising executive who resigned without notice on a Saturday night in August 2000 and began working for the Weekly the following Monday had “printed out more than 1,000 pages of confidential Bay Guardian account records on her last day in office … Among those records was detailed account information for every single Bay Guardian advertiser, as well as contracts and related information for the Alternative Weekly Network, a cooperative organization that sells national ads for alternative papers.” Although the former employee settled with the Guardian for ten thousand dollars, this was small compensation for the theft of information whose potential value Brugmann estimated at “tens of millions of dollars.” Redmond also reported that the Guardian’s attorneys sent a letter to the Weekly citing evidence that the paper “offered music retailers discounts of 40 percent off published rates and free half- and full-page four-color ads; offered clubs and club promoters discounts of as much as 70 percent and told smaller clubs that they’d only get a price break if they agreed not to advertise in the Bay Guardian; [and] offered resort, casino, and travel-related advertisers 13 weeks or more of free full-page ads, and run free ads for real estate and housing clients without the knowledge of the advertisers.”21
Mecklin, the San Francisco Weekly editor, responded the next week with an article written in the New Times signature style.
The Bay Guardian is failing, but the roots of the failure lie not in evil-doing by SF Weekly and/or New Times; most everything Redmond claims in that regard is either untrue or a real distortion of reality. No, the Bay Guardian is headed down because Bruce Brugmann and the Guardian have abused the paper’s readers and advertisers at length. On the editorial side, the paper has trampled journalistic standards and bored readers with a stream of repetitive and predictable ideological lectures. On the business side, among other things, the Guardian has failed to maintain the type of basic circulation auditing that would assure advertisers they are getting what they pay for. Yes, the San Francisco Bay Guardian seems to be suffering—from self-inflicted wounds.
… A huge portion of the Guardian/Redmond claim that SF Weekly has engaged in anti-competitive behavior appears to rest on the Guardian’s shocking—shocking!—discovery that the Weekly sometimes offers discounts to attract new advertisers. People on the Weekly ad staff tell me that the Guardian is itself a past master at bartering, giving away, and discounting ad space. And public records prove that the paper has given away tens of thousands of dollars of ad space to a favored political cause. But you know what? It’s OK with me if the Guardian discounts or gives away its ad space, because discounting is a fairly ordinary part of the newspaper business. Our business side sometimes discounts ads to gain new business—within the context of making profit. That’s called enterprise, and the last time I looked, even here in San Francisco, enterprise and profits were still allowed.22
Mecklin’s article achieved its intended effect, bringing the Guardian’s steaming publisher to a furious boil. The New Times’ Weekly and the East Bay Express, amid high-level reports that they were losing money in the tight Bay Area market, continued their standard business practices.23 On October 19, 2004, the Guardian filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco superior court, charging the New Times with predatory pricing by selling advertisements either at or below cost, and of offering secret deals to clients willing to stop advertising in the independent paper. The Guardian’s complaint argues that “the defendants … knew that by offering and selling advertising space at below-cost prices, they could cause the Guardian to lose money on its advertising space and eventually be forced out of business, while defendants would be able to subsidize their own losses caused by that practice through profits derived from other newspapers in the New Times publishing chain that do not face significant competition.”24 Once again, Mecklin replied immediately in the Weekly.
Of late, you may have noticed (or been unable to avoid) some elements of a smelly BS-offensive emanating from Brugmann-land (or would that be Brugmania?). As usual, in this offensive, the Guardianistas have depicted SF Weekly and its parent company, New Times, as conscienceless violators of all norms of civil society. Think of Col. Gen. Grubozaboyschikov of SMERSH in the old James Bond novels, crossed with John D. Rockefeller, Osama bin Laden, and the grand vizier of the Ku Klux Klan, and you’ve got an understated notion of the Guardian’s take on New Times …
I am not intimately involved in the business operations of SF Weekly. After years of enduring it, however, I think I know enough about the smell of Guardian bullshit to be pretty sure the same analysis of that newspaper’s problems is applicable now … The Bay Guardian stink machine runs 24/7/365, and its output is prodigious. Even so, I think its smelly distortions of reality will be even less enchanting to a court of law than they have been persuasive in the court of San Francisco public opinion. Excuse me. I have to go buy some cologne.
The war of words would only intensify during the next twelve months. In May 2005 Redmond wrote that “opponents of newspaper consolidation—including me—are starting to worry about the flurry of rumors and unconfirmed reports that there’s some sort of merger in the making between the nation’s two largest alternative newspaper chains.” The Guardian warned that a New Times takeover would affect the industry’s advertising market as well as its editorial content because the VVM’s papers would likely join Ruxton, the New Times’ national sales group, depriving the other major alt weekly marketer, the Alternative Weekly Network (AWN), of its most valuable clients. With the leading alt weeklies in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Denver, Seattle, Phoenix, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, Ruxton would control access to most of the major alt weekly markets, and the remaining papers in the AWN group would have less to offer national advertisers. Redmond noted that the DOJ would have to approve a merger, but he also quoted an “industry insider” who said the takeover was “pretty much inevitable.”
The Guardian turned up the heat in late August, announcing that “several reliable sources have told us they’ve spoken to senior executives at New Times and have been told a deal is imminent,” and speculating that recent cuts in VVM’s freelance pay rates were designed to achieve parity with New Times compensation levels.25 The next week Redmond found his smoking gun, reporting that the Guardian had obtained documents from “a May 27, 2005, draft of a merger agreement … The draft calls for the creation of a new company controlled by a nine-member board. Five of the members would come from Phoenix-based New Times and its primary venture-capital firm, the Boston-based Alta Communications. New Times … would have 62 percent of the equity in the new venture, and VVM … would have 38 percent.”26 The deal was on, and the Guardian called for both state regulators and the DOJ to block it.
On October 24, 2005, the New Times and Village Voice Media announced their plans to merge by early 2006, pending approval from regulators. According to their press release, “Village Voice Media will have a combined weekly audited circulation of 1.8 million papers and 4.3 million readers weekly when the merger is completed. Village Voice papers will join New Times’ national advertising sales agency Ruxton Media Group. Ruxton will represent 35 weekly alternative publications from coast to coast with audited circulations of 3.1 million weekly. The merger also will bring VVM online classifieds into New Times’ backpage.com, which combines the popularity of free classified online bulletin boards with new revenue opportunities for affiliated papers. The addition of the six Voice papers means backpage.com is now licensed to 37 newspapers in major American markets.”27 The press release did not explain that the merger would give the new company control of about 25 percent of the Association of Alternative News-weeklies market, consolidating the industry to a level that no other media—radio, television, or daily newspapers—had yet reached. Nor did it say that other members of the AAN were clamoring to have the new company, which had lost any serious claim to being “local” or “alternative,” kicked out of the group.
Back in Phoenix, where the new Village Voice Media would be headquartered, the company’s future CEO, Jim Larkin, declared that “together, New Times and Village Voice Media create a truly national media company with highly desirable demographics, geographic diversity and a unique print and Internet platform that is poised for tremendous growth.”28 Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the Guardian tried to reverse the spin. “Stop the merger,” it pleaded. “If this merger goes through, [the new company] will be in a strong position to increase media concentration, damage competition, hurt readers and advertisers … It would also add to the homogenization of media in the state and damage the vigorous marketplace of ideas envisioned in the First Amendment.”29
The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) did not agree, and it didn’t take them long to decide, either. On November 23—less than a month after the merger announcement—the FTC Web site listed the deal among a number of cases that the federal government would not challenge. The merger was legal, and all that remained was the paperwork. Days later, VVM CEO David Schneiderman, who got a $500,000 bonus for completing the deal, e-mailed his employees to say, “I am pleased to inform you that the Department [of] Justice has approved our merger with New Times. We expect to close in about a month or so.” The Guardian would not give up, calling upon California attorney general Bill Lockyer to request a public review before approving the merger in his state, and suggesting that the aggressive office of New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer “also has a good case here.”30 But most others in the industry were resigned to the outcome. On December 5 Dan Forst announced that he would step down after nine years as the Village Voice editor in chief, and although he publicly stated that he was not leaving because of the merger, few of his colleagues believed him.
The new VVM management took control of the Voice on January 31, 2006, a dark and blustery winter day. One staff writer, who asked to be quoted anonymously so as not to risk reprisals from the company that now dominates the alt weekly labor market, reported that Lacey immediately began meeting with individual employees, and within days called a meeting with the full editorial staff.
It was forty people in a conference room, and the meeting did not go very well. Lacey is a no bullshit kind of guy, which is a good thing. But he came across as a bully and a blowhard.
He quickly started attacking [Washington Bureau correspondent] Jim Ridgeway and [staff writer] Nat Hentoff, saying their work was subpar. While Lacey may have had legitimate critiques of their work lately, or a particular piece, they’re both highly respected people and to call out those two people grated on people. Hentoff and Ridgeway represent the old ideal of the Voice. It’s obvious that Lacey does not like the political side of things. He says we’re overly obsessed with Bush.
He made these broad proclamations about what he wanted to change. Some of these things, there was no disagreement. He wanted better writing. He ended the health column. He got rid of the essay in the front of the book, and that was good because none of us could ever figure out what it was. Lacey also says he wants more “impact stories.” But at the same time, he says he doesn’t want us to touch hard news like the dailies. He says he [doesn’t] want wonky stuff. It had us worried that he was changing what the Voice does.
The annoying thing about Lacey in that meeting, and which he had [previously] admitted, was that he hadn’t read the paper very much. It’s like he picked up the most recent two issues and read them and all his comments were based on that. It seemed like he walked into that meeting to set us on our heels. It had that effect. We left the meeting shaken up and angry.
That May, Lacey announced that Erik Wemple, the editor of the Washington City Paper, would take over as the Village Voice’s editor in chief in July. Wemple is a widely respected journalist with ample alt weekly experience, yet he had never lived in New York City, and critics questioned how the decision to hire him squared with Lacey’s professed commitment to improving the paper’s local coverage. It turned out not to matter, however, because within weeks Wemple, after telling Voice staffers that working under Lacey’s heavy-handed command would be a challenge for everyone, himself included, realized that he was not up for the struggle. He resigned, citing disagreements over newsroom managements, and promptly returned to the City Paper in D.C.
As editors and writers at the VVM papers in Los Angeles and Nashville pondered their future and the Voice scrambled to find a new editor, Knute Berger resigned from the Seattle Weekly, ending his short-lived relationship with Lacey. In California the former Voice and Guardian music contributor Jeff Chang published “Eulogy for the Alt Weekly.” “Competition in the ‘alternative weekly’ sector has been all but eliminated,” he wrote. “There is no longer anything ‘alternative’ about the alternative. The long goodbye to an oppositional politics and aesthetics begins now.”31 Chang’s article, which included the requisite barb that VVM “is now the Clear Channel of alt-weeklies,” was notable not so much for what it said as for where it was published. Not in a daily newspaper, nor in a weekly. Not in a magazine, nor even in print. Chang wrote it for his personal blog, and it was available to anyone with an Internet connection from the very moment he hit the “Enter” key. In a completely consolidated media marketplace, perhaps the future of “alternative alternatives” is online.