Now on Twitter: "Faux Mike Lacey"!

Lacey, top editor of New Times, investigative reporter extraordinaire and motherfucker about town (as the mug shot above attests), has an alter-ego on Twitter who attempts, with intermittent sucess, to capture his outsize personal in 140-character bursts.

Here are a few:

FauxMikeLacey: WHEN I SEE A BULLET WOUND I THINK PAY RAISE THAT’S HOW IT WORKS IN THIS COMPANY

FauxMikeLacey: GONNA TELL MY REPORTERS TO STOP DICKING AROUND WITH THE TWITTER IF NOBODY WILL ARREST THEM FOR IT THEN IT’S NOT JOURNALISM

FauxMikeLacey: HEY DOLL IS THAT A CACTUS BETWEEN MY THIGHS OR AM I JUST REAL HAPPY TO SEE YOU?

FauxMikeLacey: TWO MORE SHOTS THEN I’M GONNA RIP OFF @BOSSY_BRUGMANN’S DICK AND SERVE IT TO HIM ON A DUTCH CRUNCH ROLL

The first three are fairly self-explanatory; the last one is a reference to Bruce Brugmann, the owner of the Bay Guardian, a weekly that New Times' SF Weekly has been engaged in a death match with for some 15 years.

“Bossy_Brugmann” is a fake Twitter account that spoofs Brugmann similarly.

FauxMikeLacey can be read here.

(N.B.: PHXated worked for New Times in SF, many years ago.)

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.

An in-depth story on the Great New Times San Francisco Range War

New Times bought the SF Weekly, an alternative paper in San Francisco, in 1995 and instituted a now-fifteen-year-long fight with a longtime local operation, the Bay Guardian. It’s still going on.

The Seattle Stranger, which has the distinction of being run by Dan Savage, of Savage Love fame, has a very long look back at this fight, with a starring role played by New Times exec editor Michael Lacey.

PHXated worked for SF Weekly during this period. (Hired and eventually fired by Lacey.) I’m not done with the story yet, but I have some major issues with it. More on that later. Still, it’s a fascinating read for Laceyologists. I’m one.

The Arpaio Follies begin to get some national reviews

Both the LA Times and Talking Points memo have major pieces up on Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, the Dimmer Twins.

The Times story concentrates on the continuing range war between arpaio and his political enemies, with a special focus on just trying to lay out the scope of it all. The thing is 1200 words long and still manages to glide over a lot of Arpaio’s nuttiness.

You don’t hear much about the the tag team legal brutality he engages in with Andrew Thomas, and the the story doesn’t even mention the late-night arrests of the owners of the Phoenix New Times.

The result is long passages like this:

has escalated his tactics in recent months, not only defying the federal government but launching repeated investigations of those who criticize him. He recently filed a racketeering lawsuit against the entire Maricopa County power structure. On Thursday night, the Arizona Court of Appeals issued an emergency order forbidding the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office from searching the home or chambers of a Superior Court judge who was named in the racketeering case.

Last year, when Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon called for a federal investigation of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement, the Sheriff’s Office demanded to see Gordon’s e-mails, phone logs and appointment calendars.

When the police chief in one suburb complained about the sweeps, Arpaio’s deputies raided that town’s City Hall.

My biggest criticism of the LAT piece is its over-reliance on he-said/she said balance.

Sure: We hear lines like, “It’s just extraordinary, the kind of thing that takes place in Third World dictatorships”—but they come not from a neutral observer but from Don Stapley’s lawyer, which minimizes the force of it in readers’ minds.

Further, the story contains no hint of what will be Arpaio’s ultimate role, which will be target of a federal investigation. When the criminal sheriff is ultimately removed from office, stories like this will seem pretty timid.

Meanwhile, Talking Points Memo has a good overview of the current shenanigans created by the Dimmer twins in a new round of intimidation tactics against local judges. The writer, is less complacent about federal intervention:

The Justice Department could step in and end Arpaio and Thomas’s reign of terror, which threatens the integrity of the entire judicial and law enforcement systems for the nations’ fourth-most populous county. But DOJ appears to be working at a leisurely pace: its probe has been underway for over a year, and there’s no sign that it’s having any effect in checking Arpaio’s actions.

And finally, speaking of New Times, Michael Lacey, the chain’s top editor and one of the owners who was arrested in 2007, has an expansive cover story this week called The Pink Negro.

The title is a reference—one I find pretty indigestible—to Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro.” (The idea is that Obama is a buttoned-up preppy black.)

Leaving that aside, Lacey’s thesis is that the Obama administration is taking too long is investigating:

Yes, [Obama’s] federal investigators are here examining the assaults against human rights perpetrated by Sheriff Joe Arpaio and County Attorney Andrew Thomas.

But, after 20 months, we must ask: Are they unearthing evidence or burying it?

There is, as yet, no remedy, no redress, no recourse.

President Obama, unwittingly, put the glacial timeline of his Arpaio/Thomas investigation into perspective during his speech to America last week. He said his troop surge will see our soldiers depart Afghanistan after 19 more months of combat. In other words, the war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban will end triumphantly in less time than the feds have spent — without result — probing Arpaio and Thomas.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon formally summoned a Justice Department task force in April 2008. As we usher in 2010, federal officials have yet to contact the very first political victim of the sheriff and the county attorney. Critical documents remain unexamined.

In the source of making its case the extravagantly long piece is an effective overview of the current state of Arpaio’s many, many criminal enterprises.