Thoughts on New Times' 40th anniversary

New Times notes its 40th anniversary this week; there's a party for staffers this weekend but otherwise the paper isn't doing much to mark the occasion.

So I will.

“New Times” means two things these days, and for one of them it’s not even the right term. There’s New Times the paper, which Phoenicians have read for forty years now, and New Times the newspaper chain, which now comprises some fourteen papers and is in fact called Village Voice Media, after the ground-breaking NYC alternative weekly the chain bought four years ago.

There was a time when the very idea of New Times owning the Voice or its counterpart on the west coast, the LA Weekly, was pretty unthinkable.

(I speak as a longtime veteran of the alternative newspaper industry who worked for one of its philosophical rivals for many years and was then hired and fired by New Times itself, so take that into account as I continue.)

But the combination of poor management of the Voice papers, upheavals in the newspaper industry, and the focus and ambition of the New Times' owners, the colorful and lacerating Michael Lacey and his rather-less-well-known but arguably even-more-formidable partner, Jim Larkin, who built the pair’s business, made the two of them acknowledged titans of a significant corner of the U.S. newspaper industry.

Why was it so unlikely? I’ll tell you.

As a teen growing up in Phoenix in the years after the paper started, I didn’t understand how unusual it was; I liked the attitude, the reporting, the critics, the crusades.

But it was unusual, not least because of its catholic appeal; my parents, right-wing Republicans, liked the paper too. New Times didn’t even distribute the way others did in big cities. There wasn’t a hip part of town the weekly dominated; it was available everywhere and never felt the need to kowtow to one constituency, or play to its prejudices.

Another key factor was that the paper had a sense of fun and humor; I’m sure I’m not the only person who remembers writers like Dewey Webb and Dave Walker with some fondness.

The Phoenix paper grew and, one by one, the paper expanded into somewhat similar cities: Denver; Houston, Dallas, Miami.

As the 1980s became the 1990s, there were basically three alternative-newspaper industry models. One had the Voice as an avatar and included papers like the LA Weekly and the Boston Phoenix. They were aggressively, crusadingly, leftist.

They had national pretensions, often covering national issues and, not infrequently, international ones. Their arts sections were unashamedly intellectual and sometimes academic. Many writers became national figures. As the industry grew and consolidated the Voice became a chain and eventually took over the LA Weekly and papers in Seattle and Minneapolis, among others.

A second model was that of the Chicago Reader and its associated and offshoot papers, in San Diego, for a time L.A., Berkeley, and Washington D.C. (I worked under the Reader’s aegis for more than a decade.)

These papers were generally locally focused as well but (sometimes irritating) unattuned to civic events. They were nowhere near as editor driven or politically doctrinaire, and they generally prized contrarian opinions; indeed, they became known for letting their writer corps essentially write whatever it wanted, at whatever length.

New Times was different. Their papers' staffs were directed to produce investigative reporting—and created more of it than any other weeklies in America, and of course far more than their daily-newspaper competition. There was no advocacy journalism, and no overweening liberal and leftist columnizing; attention to affairs on the national level, much less international, was almost entirely absent.

Virtually everything in each city’s paper was about that city and nothing else, with the focus unerringly on difficult storytelling about government or corporate malfeasance, leavened with occasional traditional features. (The local New Times, for example, offers regular cover stories on local visual artists.)

Readers might not appreciate how difficult those long investigative features are to produce. There’s a reason light and trivial fare populates the pages (and, more importantly, the covers) of most publications. It’s cheap to produce, and readers (and advertisers) like it.

By devoting staff time and cover space to such stuff, New Times was investing financially in the work deeply in several ways.

And finally, where the other papers displayed their nonconformity and distinctiveness like some many pirate colors, the New Times papers were for the most part rigidly formatted and run.

As Lacey and Larkin’s empire grew, their ambitions did as well; they kept picking up papers across the country—San Francisco, St. Louis, Cleveland, Kansas City—and finally were able to put a deal together to take over the Voice chain.

There was a downside to a lot of this, but this isn’t the time to go into all of that.

Over the last decade, the alternative weekly industry has imploded even more severely than the daily one has; Craigslist, particularly, vaporized a lot of the personals and classifieds the industry’s profit margins were based on.

This is of course the fault of the industry itself, and the long-term repercussions of this have yet to fully play themselves out; the Chicago Reader chain, for example, has been bought and been through bankruptcy.

There’s always people in the industry who will mutter darkly about New Times’ future as well; the chain is a private company and no one knows what its finances are. While many of its papers make money, many might not, and the company has not only to worry about the debt it took on to buy the Voice but a nagging legal battle going on in San Francisco, where it has a $21 million (and growing) predatory pricing judgment against it.

But right now the chain remains that unlikely titan. Lacey, the editorial chief, oversees as formidable a corps of reporters as exists in the country. I think Lacey and Larkin are the only editor-publisher pair who have been jailed for practicing journalism. (It’s symptomatic of how under the radar the pair are that their arrest at the hands of Joe Arpaio on entirely spurious grounds was not front-page news across the country. Can you imagine what would have happened ten years ago if a Manhattan DA had hauled the editor and publisher of the Village Voice off to jail?)

I have no reason to suck up to the pair, so I’d like to say this: Aren’t they everything we supposedly value about the press in the U.S.? They are idiosyncratic and uncorruptible, uncompromising and fearless; unlike a lot of places that adopt the motto, Lacey and Larkin really do print the news and raise hell. And as this troubled time for a troubled industry continues, they just may end up being the last men standing.