Alternative Weeklies, Inc.

It was almost eerie, containing elements of a death foretold. San Francisco's SF Weekly, in the cover story of its April 13, 1994 issue, unknowingly contemplated its own demise. Wondering and worrying about the future of alternative newspapers like itself, the Weekly cast a cold eye on a predatory Phoenix-based chain called New Times, Inc., the largest publisher of alternative papers in the United States. "New Times," wrote San Francisco freelance writer Hannah Nordhaus, "might be a paradigm for the new, mainstream brand of alternatives, sort of the Wal-Mart of alternative journalism." Less than a year after the Weekly published Nordhaus' doleful piece, the 6-year-old, 60,000 circulation tabloid became the sixth link in the New Times chain. Today, seven months after its purchase, the Weekly is definitely more well-heeled and probably more stable than it was as a stand-alone paper, but its newfound stability comes at a price: the loss of the Weekly's editorial independence, its rootedness in local community, its distinctive voice. It's a loss that mirrors many larger changes in North America's alternative press. The alternative newsweeklies of the 1990s are not, in most cases, the adversarial underground papers of the '60s all grown up. (New Times, in this regard, is an interesting exception.) Nearly all were founded in the '70s and '80s as businesses designed to penetrate a market -- unlike the undergrounds, which were political vehicles designed to empower a constituency. In effect, the underground press, which died out with the end of the anti-Vietnam War movement, did the research and development for its softer, more depoliticized successors. The alternative weeklies that sprang up in college towns and cities in the '70s emphasized entertainment over politics and redeeming the system rather than replacing it. College students and affluent young adults have always been its core audience, and the makers of popular music, movies, fashion and food its core advertisers. As daily newspapers folded and downsized, the weeklies stepped into the vacuum and prospered. By the early '80s virtually all alternative papers had discovered the final, key element in their commercial strategy: free distribution. Circulating for free means that advertising has become their exclusive source of revenue. It's a formula that has proved immensely profitable. Mark Hanzlik, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' (AAN) regional ad coordinator, estimates total revenues for the group's 105 members in the United States and Canada at $250 million. But it's also meant that the editorial content of many alternative papers is looking less "alternative" all the time, becoming in subtle degrees safer and softer, emphasizing more entertainment coverage and lifestyle journalism. Shopping guides, for example, are now mainstays in the pages of most large-scale alternative papers. Just as popular music has witnessed the meaning of "alternative" shift from an independent "do-it-yourself" insurgency to a marketing demographic, so has "alternative" become an increasingly mushy designation in journalism. Rebellious gestures stand in for political analysis; carping pieces about popular culture often supersede thoughtful essays and reviews. And even local political coverage -- one of the alternative press' traditional strengths -- becomes increasingly indistinguishable from that of mainstream competitors, concentrating on the electoral horse race and insiders' gossip. (Indeed, the distinction between the alternative and mainstream press has blurred to the point that the daily Toronto Star now owns and operates its own weekly, the Eye.) By now, this is a familiar critique of alternative weeklies. But what's only recently become apparent is that the same market forces behind the lucrative lifestyle turn have made alternative papers attractive targets for economic restructuring. In much the same way that the growing homogenization of other local news outlets helped spur the growth of the sprawling newspaper chains that now dominate most mainstream markets, America's alternative press gradually became ripe for franchising. Enter New Times, Inc. The name itself suggests many of the ironies embedded in the alternative press. Founded simply as New Times, in Tempe, Ariz., in 1970, by a campus antiwar collective at Arizona State University, the name originated as a statement of hope, an affirmation of belief -- an affirmation now neatly effaced by the summary "Inc." at the end. New Times, Inc. is now a profit-making, privately held corporation. The company operates papers in Phoenix (New Times), Denver (Westword), Dallas (The Observer), Miami (Miami New Times), Houston (Houston Press) and San Francisco (SF Weekly), with plans to add more. Together, the papers have a free circulation of nearly 600,000. Still tiny compared to mega-publishers like the Gannett Corp. or Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, New Times is nevertheless a major player among the newsweeklies. In 1991, the most recent year for which figures are available, the company reported revenues of $16 million and profits of $2.5 million. (This was also a recessionary year when it had but three papers.) That same year, co-owner Jim Larkin told Forbes magazine that he saw no reason why the firm couldn't be a $100 million company someday. New Times is not the only alternative chain, and it's not the first. Alternative newsweeklies have been stalking each other since at least 1972, when Boston After Dark publisher Stephen Mindich snapped up the rival Cambridge Phoenix; this was the origin of the Boston Phoenix, then as now one of the strongest alternative weeklies. The Advocate newspapers in New England, the City Paper cluster in the mid-Atlantic, the Midwestern Reader papers, the News & Review weeklies in northern California, and the jointly owned and high-profile Village Voice and LA Weekly are among the present-day alternative conglomerates. Twenty-five of the 105 members of the AAN are chain-owned. That's a smaller percentage than among U.S. dailies, but the market share of the weekly chains is growing. More and more, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes by design, the AAN papers are replicating aspects of the mainstream media they were founded to compete against: white male-dominated hierarchical staffs, devotion to the profit motive, antipathy to a unionized workforce (if it's their own), the promotion of commodity fetishism, the care and feeding of advertising-friendly environments at the cost of political engagement. In this respect, the history of the New Times group is a revealing microcosm of changes roiling the alternative press. It is a dramatic tale, complete with proxy fights, fistfights, frightening debt and shrewd leveraged buyouts. And it is a cautionary tale for alternative journalists. It is also a tale that will have to be told here without direct comment from New Times' principal partners, Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, who each own 40 percent of the company they co-founded. Larkin cut short a telephone interview by snapping, "I don't think In These Times is interested in how I make my living." Lacey was a man of even fewer words; he failed to reply to the messages left on his voice mail requesting an interview. But several dailies and admiring business magazines have won cooperation from Larkin and Lacey, so the decisive part they have played will not go unrecorded.The story begins in 1970, when Lacey, a construction worker's son from Newark, N.J., fell in with an antiwar group during the madness of Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. He helped hatch the fledgling New Times because, Lacey told a Phoenix magazine writer in 1990, "I just wanted to punch a few people in the fucking head." Larkin, a business-minded Phoenix native, joined Lacey, an editor and writer, a few years later. In 1973, to raise capital, New Times sold 38,000 shares for $1 each to left-liberal activists. In the mid-'70s, the paper was still keeping the political faith in Goldwater country. But it was limping along with a circulation of 16,000, very little money and diminished energy. Nevertheless, Larkin and Lacey (who had just returned from a long sabbatical from the paper) sensed a business opportunity. They began pushing colleagues to retool the paper's contents, following a formula that was already working for other papers in college towns and big cities: a mix of hip, flip movie reviews, voluminous rock music coverage, restaurant reviews, risque personals and exhaustive calendar listings. Copies were given away at music stores, laundromats, cafes, bars, bookstores and movie theaters.The new New Times incorporated a lengthy cover story in most issues, keyed to Arizona politics or commerce. Some of the stories were hard-edged and distinguished. For example, the paper is still justly celebrated for its ongoing coverage of the Mob-ordered 1976 murder of Arizona investigative reporter Don Bolles. In 1977, Larkin and Lacey made a bold move. Lining up proxy votes from other shareholders, the duo won a majority of the company's stock, gaining control of the paper. That same night, reports Forbes, "a flatbed truck hauled away the office furniture to Lacey and Larkin's new offices in Phoenix." A decade later, the partners bought out the other shareholders, taking the company private, and completing the circle from communal to managerial, nonprofit to commercial. Gradually, the newly reorganized Phoenix New Times prospered, going over 100 pages weekly, two-thirds of them devoted to advertising. It also posed a serious editorial challenge to the city's dailies, the sleepy and hidebound Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette. By the early '80s, the increasingly confident Larkin and Lacey were ready to launch their acquisition and expansion plan. As Lacey later told the Texas Monthly: "We can take this anywhere there are warm, breathing bodies and IQs that can be measured." In 1983, New Times made its first buy, swallowing Denver's weekly, Westword. In 1987, New Times bought its Miami outlet. In 1991, Dallas joined the chain, with Larkin and Lacey shelling out $3 million for the Observer. Two years later, they bought the Houston Press for $2.75 million. The partners got an additional boost when struggling second-place dailies folded in Dallas and Houston. Their aggressive expansion in the Lone Star State prompted the Texas Monthly to label Larkin and Lacey "mad-dog publishers from the desert." This rapid expansion was financed by heavy borrowing. "At one point in 1988, the company had a staggering debt-to-equity ratio of 48 to 1. Strong cash flow has whittled that down to a still high but tolerable 4 to 1," Forbes reported in late 1991. By now, the New Times pattern of rolling into new cities, snapping up underperforming properties and remaking them in the corporate image was becoming well-established.Larkin and Lacey, who appear to revel in the mad-dog image, put their mark on their property in other ways, too. In a widely reported incident, Lacey punched one of his Phoenix writers after the two exchanged words. Lacey has never denied the reports; indeed, he seems to thrive on the notoriety. "Larkin and I are people who say if you want to fight, fine," he boasted to the Texas Monthly last year. Lacey, the executive editor of all the New Times papers, went on to tell the Monthly: "I'm not particularly nice to deal with. If I read something that I think is stupid, or a writer has not explained enough, I let them know." Two-fisted editing and devotion to the bottom line have made the New Times papers lucrative enterprises. Forbes estimated their annual return at 20 percent in 1991. These days, the flagship Phoenix New Times has a circulation of 140,000, making it one of the largest weeklies in North America. All copies are given away free; thus, revenues are not derived directly from readers with enough of a stake in the paper to buy a copy, but from advertisers with enough money to buy space. In this regard, the New Times papers are like nearly all their AAN colleagues; they are even more beholden to advertisers than are the local dailies they obsessively muckrake as unimaginative observers of -- and interested players in -- local business and politics. Compromised or not, New Times is generally respected by executives at other alternative weeklies. Ray Hartmann, owner, publisher and editor of St. Louis' Riverfront Times, and a past president of AAN, praises the chain's papers. "I think they're very good," he says. "The quality of writing is extremely high, making them among the leading papers in our industry." John Raeside, the editor and part owner of the Berkeley-based East Bay Express, echoes this view, adding: "The New Times papers are always very tough and focused on local politics. They have a very aggressive editorial policy." Raeside defends chain ownership, provided the owners are good journalists, because of the resources chains can pour into a small paper. Raeside allows "that it's probably true that a locally owned, independent press is more likely to be livelier." But, he continues, journalistic quality is also likely to be compromised "if the paper is financially weak and vulnerable." If a flush buyer comes along to rescue a struggling paper, Raeside contends, "that is to be applauded." Which brings us back to the SF Weekly. The Weekly's rising profile in a very politically minded market offers a useful template for testing the notion that enhanced resources translate into reinvigorated alternative journalism. Here, the early going under New Times ownership and management suggests, chain ownership is a mixed blessing at best.As an independent, the Weekly was unquestionably smaller and weaker, reflecting its shoestring origins. The paper was founded in the early 1980s as a giveaway sheet of music calendar listings called, appropriately enough, the Music Calendar (later simply Calendar). It was launched as the SF Weekly in 1989, under co-founder Scott Price, himself a part-time musician. Price and the Weekly, under a succession of editors, chased, but never quite caught, the weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian. An entrenched alternative founded in 1966 by Bruce Brugmann, who is still its co-owner, editor and publisher, the senior paper held onto its crusading liberal format while successfully enlarging its target audience from the Baby Boom to Generation X -- thanks largely to the persistent prodding of the younger and hipper Weekly. By 1994, tired of the chase, Price sold out to Larkin and Lacey. The sale price for the marginally profitable paper, never officially disclosed, is estimated by former Weekly staffers to be in the $1.2 to $1.4 million range. Larkin, Lacey & Co. quickly put their stamp on the Weekly. They redesigned the paper, making it look exactly like the other New Times properties, and forced out key staffers such as editor Andrew O'Hehir, senior editor Vince Bielski, special projects editor Karen Croft and entertainment columnist Michael Fox. The paper's editorial page was jettisoned entirely, along with its tradition of political endorsements. Brought in to edit the new SF Weekly was Jack Shafer, editor of City Paper in Washington, D.C., where he attracted attention by penning a media insider column and publishing provocative liberal-bashing features such as "Why Do I Hate NPR? Let Me Count the Ways." Shafer proceeded to hire other out-of-towners for key jobs. Like hopscotching executives at Gannett, the new hires alighted in San Francisco, in hot pursuit of careers. If this is Tuesday, that must be the Golden Gate Bridge. The Weekly's only major, made-in-S.F. hire was cityside political columnist Larry Bush, a former Village Voice writer and a former aide to progressive Mayor Art Agnos. Bush stayed on the job only three months. Taking pains not to sound like a disgruntled ex-employee, Bush told ITT he was grateful for the chance to write every week, but found the remade Weekly indifferent to politics. In a draft of a major feature on the 1995 San Francisco mayoral race, Bush says, the Weekly excised nearly all his references to Mayor Frank Jordan's wife, banking executive Wendy Paskin, on the grounds that she wasn't running for mayor. This, despite the fact that San Francisco political commentators are virtually unanimous in holding that Paskin is enormously influential in guiding her husband's career. Bush says that he found the Weekly's editors tone-deaf to politics in their adopted city, and intellectually disengaged in general -- which he cites as one of the principal reasons for his resignation. "They're producing an airline magazine," declares Bush. "The paper could be produced and read anywhere." For his part, Bielski says that he believes that the Weekly, consistent with New Times corporate culture, has taken on a libertarian coloration under Shafer. Says Bielski of Shafer: "He's very dismissive of anything that smacks of a social movement or a cause. They've probably not written a word on affirmative action. They're not addressing the controversial issues of the day. It's fearful journalism." Not surprisingly, Shafer begs to differ. At last, Shafer submits, the SF Weekly is a real newspaper, covering the things that really matter, and it's doing so under the rubric of what he is pleased to call "literary journalism." As an example of finely crafted, locally rooted writing, Shafer points to a recent cover story by new staff writer Ellen McGarrahan, headlined "Ship Happens," on safety violations by the massive ocean-going vessels that sail into San Francisco Bay. "It was written with all the dramatic structure of a tale well-told," Shafer says, "and it also points out [issues of tanker safety] from beginning to end." Former Weekly columnist Bush agrees that the shipping story was a strong local piece, but argues that it was an exception in a long list of cover features about, among other topics, Beatle wife Linda McCartney's unpalatable line of frozen vegetarian entres, orchid smuggling and the rising epidemic of hepatitis B. Most of these stories, Bush says, "would be good reads in any city, but didn't have a particular San Francisco character." Maybe that's because the shots in San Francisco are being called by top Phoenix executives. Vince Bielski, observing that New Times executive editor Michael Lacey was much in evidence in the Weekly's offices just after the sale of the paper, says the main criteria for employment at the Weekly "seemed to be the loyalty of the writers to the editor [Shafer], and the almost palpable loyalty of the editor to Lacey." Departed editor Andrew O'Hehir also recalls seeing Lacey, oozing machismo and self-regard, swaggering around the Weekly's offices shortly after the purchase. "He likes to be confrontational," O'Hehir says. "He's always testing your manhood." The significance of New Times, Inc.'s rise goes well beyond individual idiosyncrasies or personal style, of course. New Times is, quite simply, the leading vehicle for the franchising of alternative newsweeklies. Its newspapers, while not unprofessional or bad per se, are nevertheless typically bland and virtually interchangeable. As a McDonald's burger tastes the same in Moscow, Beijing or Atlanta, the lookalike New Times papers hardly vary at all in editorial direction, design and outlook. Reading their polished but politically detached prose, scanning the pages of classifieds and personals (eight pages out of 72, in a recent Weekly issue), it's hard to find much that remains alternative about them. They are increasingly tepid tributaries of the mainstream press. Instead of serving as alternative papers, they settle for being additional papers. For papers like the SF Weekly, the absorption into chains is a kind of death-in-life. The name remains; the body walks the Earth, but the soul is gone. The old Weekly, often preoccupied with arty posturing and giving good attitude, was not a perfect newspaper, but it reflected its origins and faithfully fulfilled its mission of, as O'Hehir puts it, "speaking to and from San Francisco subcultures and from them to the mainstream." Sadly, as the newest New Times clone, the Weekly has lost its specificity and its reason for being. It now reflects more of the sensibility of the Sagebrush Rebellion than the Barbary Coast. Chain ownership is unlikely to stop there. As New Times president and chief operating officer Hal Smith told the journalism magazine The Quill last November: "As we've gotten bigger and a little more developed and sophisticated, we're starting to pick up the pace. Over the next few years, we expect start-upsand acquisitions at a much faster pace." Should New Times and other acquisitive chains have their way with independent alternatives, it won't be long before readers of once-alternative weeklies will be able to read airline publications without leaving the ground.