Sign Of the New Times

Independent Media Is the New Multinational Hegemony

By Fritz Brantley

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illustration by M. Taft
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In what could only be considered one of the greatest ironies of all, the most revolutionary print medium of the later 20th century also proven the most traditionally operated, and most resistant to change. Behold—the alternative weekly newspaper, nearly unchanged since the founding of The Village Voice in 1955. Editorially, the Voice still provides scathing, openly slanted, and often revelatory looks at community issues, along with top-notch local arts coverage and is often provided free at neighborhood hot spots. To keep afloat, it runs advertising almost solely from local interests, including (occasionally hilarious) personal ads and classifieds. And as you might expect in the year 2005, they're finally selling the fuck out. On August 29, the San Francisco Bay Guardian reported that they had unearthed documents outlining the long-rumored merger of the two largest alt-weekly chains in America: Village Voice Media (parent to the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and Seattle Weekly, among others) and New Times Corporation (parent to Phoenix New Times, Denver Westword, the East Bay Express and others).

Aside from the money, some have seen the merger as the impending death of a progressive voice in journalism, as the achingly edgy Village Voice is subsumed by the New Times chain, which is viewed (perhaps unfairly) as its libertarian competitor. That's an argument well worth fighting out, but it seems to be missing the bigger mark; major corporate chain control of media markets has historically proven to make for less interesting papers, due to budget constraints and conflicts from advertisers. It's not a strictly corporate phenomenon, but the worst examples of this come from the leaders in print corporations—Knight Ridder slashed costs at the Miami Herald so drastically, that the paper has fallen into almost Victorian decay from lack of resources. Gannett lowered the common denominator of reporting through the floorboards with the creation of USA Today. The alt-weekly has always earned its credibility by offering what goes unreported by major news sources, due to those aforementioned constraints. The single-handed control of so many major markets by one corporation could easily spell the end of a vibrant, if aging print community that arguably could be one of the saving graces of media illiteracy in the 21st century.

There are only minimal statistics available for alt-weekly readership (and they largely match the dropping circulation of broadsheet newspapers), but there are frightening statistics about the average person under thirties' involvement with the news of the day. The Pew Center found that with the exception of the 9/11 attacks, the average person under thirty followed a sample of important news events (e.g. the liberation of Kabul, proliferation of anthrax) roughly twenty to thirty-two percent of the time. The alt-weekly seems useful as it embodies what media critics like David Mindich, author of Tuned Out, believe would revitalize the news: it diversifies ownership of and increases competition among media outlets, it provides easily accessible (both in cost and in style) political news that "matters" to younger readers, and it comes with about 10-25 pages of arts coverage that younger readers actually read.

The typically nattering blogosphere has remained reserved on reporting the merger, because a good portion of the deal is up in the air. VVM and New Times have a long, abusive romantic history, and par for the course, they also have a restraining order, or rather, an injunction prohibiting them from performing business transactions together unless they notify the Department of Justice in advance. This dates back to a baby merger of sorts, where New Times sold the assets of its paper, Los Angeles New Times, to VVM (whose LA Weekly had been trouncing it) in exchange for VVM selling the assets of Cleveland Free Press to help form New Times' Cleveland Scene. The Department of Justice found this in violation of current antitrust statutes, and set up an injunction to prevent future collusion. Russ Smith, a columnist at the New York Press (one of the Village Voice's competitors), points out these anti-trust concerns in a Sept. 13 column as the main reason why the merger is "unlikely."

The merger itself would give New Times sixty-two percent of private stock in the as of yet unnamed joint corporation, and VVM thirty-eight percent. It should be noted that this does not reflect either corporation's status as a profitable entity, but rather, the fact that New Times currently operates eleven papers to VVM's six. In fact, the deal is complicated yet again by New Times' current operating losses in Oakland, San Francisco, and Cleveland, which has led VVM to ask for a "renegotiation," according to Tim Redmond's exhaustive reports for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Perhaps most troubling to critics, though, is that representation on the new board of directors would be dominated by Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, the gonzo libertarian founding editors of Phoenix New Times and later, the New Times Corporation. While the claim that New Times as a whole operates as a desert libertarian outpost is spurious, Larkin and Lacey became known as loud, iconoclastic, and thoroughly libertarian voices through Lacey's bombastic editorials that periodically grace the chain's publications. They are particularly irksome to the largely left-leaning editors of the nation's alt-weeklies, despite the fact that the other publications in the New Times chain rarely share the two's outlook.

Slouching Towards Madison Avenue

A good portion of the Bay Guardian's report must be taken with a grain of salt—they're currently embroiled in a lawsuit with New Times claiming predatory actions regarding advertising rates. But the newspaper raises at least three fairly good points as to why to be scared of this merger.

"If New Times—which eschews activism, disdains editorials and endorsements, and holds a somewhat libertarian political philosophy—took control of the nation's most venerable alt-weekly, there's reason to fear that the best of the Voice and the other VVM papers would be destroyed," according to Redmond. Well, maybe not destroyed. It's true that New Times papers don't run editorials (with the noted exception of Michael Lacey's occasional columns). They do, however, run editorially charged news and gossip roundups like Westword's "Calhoun" and the East Bay Express' "Bottom Feeder." Redmond's prediction also discounts the advocacy journalism for which the chain earned its reputation in 1991, when they uncovered and reported on transactions that led to Arizona governor Fife Symington's conviction of bank fraud.

And let's not also forget that while the Phoenix New Times still operates under that aforementioned "desert libertarianism, on the rocks," (as the Bay Guardian claimed in an unsigned editorial) the other papers in the chain may or may not. Each New Times paper is run by a different editor, and not under particularly strict editorial control from the corporation, speaking from personal experience as a former New Times intern at the East Bay Express. This characterization of free-wheeling libertarianism is not wholly accurate if one considers my former editor, at the least. While politics rarely came up between us, I can offer that he was a thoughtful, if conventional Democrat, and that he demanded his writers treat material as even-handedly as possible. The specific example that the Bay Guardian provides as one of the chain's lapses into libertarian rhetoric is a long-winded, and negative review of liberal media critic Ben Bagdikian's recent book, The New Media Monopoly. Notably though, the author, Will Harper (a staff writer at the Express) spends perhaps more time praising Bagdikian's earlier work than he does attacking it. This name-calling also gives VVM a completely free pass - I won't discount the work that's been done in New York and Los Angeles as a result of their reporting, but Redmond seems to forget that VVM appears to be just as complicit as New Times in the financial ends of this deal.

VVM currently controls a large share of AWN, (the Alternative Weekly Network), a cooperative which places ads in the nation's alt-weeklies. New Times controls a similar corporation, the Ruxton Group. The Bay Guardian, and numerous other weeklies in the country rely on AWN for ad revenue, which is especially tough these days—alt-weeklies are getting hit just as hard as broadsheets by the collapse in ad revenues that's forcing newspapers to come up with unintentionally hilarious schemes to attract younger readers (the New York Times Magazine's "funny pages," or the grand failure of the Los Angeles Times' "wikitorial"). Though even worse: classifieds, personals, and erotic service advertisements, once the bread and butter of alt-weeklies, have moved at a staggering rate to free-of-charge online markets like Craigslist. Vince O'Hern, publisher of Madison's Isthmus, is quoted in the Bay Guardian as saying, "the biggest problem I see is that they would have a stranglehold on the larger markets. It would make it difficult for any of the other [alternative] papers to secure a national representation for ad sales."

Michael Lacey, in a characteristically batshit editorial appearing in SF Weekly and the East Bay Express claims that even with control of AWN and Ruxton, "We would hardly have enough share of any part of the American market to raise rates like a monopoly." Neither editorial provides exact figures to this nebulous ad market for alt-weeklies, but the fact that two major ad networks will merge in this proposal almost shuts the coffin on any competing papers in any market the New Times-VVM venture wishes to control.

End Of A Century

Bay Guardian reporter Redmond, in his initial reports addresses the danger of one corporation owning so many major media markets (if the merger takes place, the New Times-VVM venture will control the alt-weekly market in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, and Miami).

Again, it's naive to say that slashing resources to damaging extremes is strictly a corporate phenomenon, but it's become part and parcel of the way larger corporations run newspapers, and a very likely consequence of the merger; New Times is running heavily in the red, despite offering fairly modest wages, and VVM's newly announced cuts in pay rates for freelancers (pushing them to levels similar to New Times' current pay scale). With the New Times-VVM corporation owning alternative weeklies, not to mention the means of creating advertising revenue in most major markets, it'll become difficult for anyone to create a competitive foothold in the market since newspapers require immense amounts of venture capital to form, and typically take 10 years or more to become profitable. Most ironically, this is how Knight-Ridder, Gannett, and others have created monopolies in their own markets no matter how low the quality of what they publish. Russ Smith of the New York Press is again, an optimist, who looks past the financial incentives, and reminds us instead that even though New Times' papers are very similarly formatted, "the content is tailored to each city, and in general is a lot more enterprising than the vast majority of nearly identical (in political leanings and rote cultural criticism) 'indies' that make up most members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN)."

Perhaps sadly, he brushes this discussion aside as just another example of New Times' corruption. The fact is, the venture capitalists and media moguls going into this don't really have much interest in the longevity of the corporation, as they're allowed to cash out and leave the board of directors after five years. This is certainly a way for a bunch of enterprising newspapermen to make a quick buck, but more than anything, it's an allegory for why alt-weekly readership has declined so much: alt-weekly editors are old. Their concerns and methods have arguably not changed since the 1970s, and frankly, youth culture (formerly the largest readership of alt-weeklies) has changed a great deal. The fact is, while this merger could shape the media landscape for years to come, it seems just as important to understand why the two institutions that most embodied why I and so many other young people used to love the news, are now in such a dog-eat-dog landscape that they are forced into such decidedly depressing and square business practices.

Fritz Brantley B'07 only reads Parade.

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