New Times’ Moves Toward Goal of Killing Progressive Weeklies

The New Times Corp.’s purchase of the most prominent remaining stars of the alternative weekly press---the Voice and LA Weekly---marks a sad turning point for progressive activists. While the Voice lacked the luster of its 1960’s-80’s pre-Internet heyday, the paper still featured important progressive writers like Sydney Schanberg and filled important information gaps in mainstream coverage of New York City politics and culture.

For those of us in California, the likely future purging of the progressive LA Weekly is even more troubling. The LA Weekly helped link the city’s geographically scattered progressives, promoted the agenda of Progressive LA, strongly backed the Villaraigosa mayoral campaigns both in 2001 and 2005, and has writers like Harold Meyerson who are among the most perceptive in America.

The LA Weekly is far and away the best progressive print source on state politics, and the best general circulation source on local and state labor union issues. Based on the New Times track record, the LA Weekly’s strong pro-union tilt will soon be gone, as will its in-depth coverage of worker issues from a labor perspective.

In the mid-1990’s, there were three progressive weekly newspapers in Los Angeles. Thanks to New Times, soon there will be none.

New Times provides a cookie-cutter product that includes massive advertisements, a thorough entertainment calendar, a few short news items, and one long story that rarely addresses social or economic unfairness. When New Times does touch such topics, it writes cover stories with titles like “The Case Against Rent Control.”

New Times owners Michael Lacey and James Larkin are political libertarians whose publications routinely criticize progressives and their institutions. Both the East Bay Express and SF Weekly shifted to this New Times paradigm after acquired by the corporation.

Unless the Bush Justice Department intervenes to stop these latest acquisitions on antitrust grounds (fat chance),New Times will soon control 25 percent of the 7.6 million in circulation claimed by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. If the San Francisco Bay Guardian believes that New Times is already engaging in predatory advertising pricing (the basis of a Guardian lawsuit against the SF Weekly and New Times), the company’s new acquisitions give them even more market leverage with national advertisers.

As much as New Times deserves scorn for replacing home-grown, innovative papers with its homogenized, consumer-driven product, there are market forces at play as well. Just as video killed the radio star, the Internet has facilitated the demise of the politically alternative weekly.

For example, prior to Craigslist weeklies like the Voice had an extremely lucrative classified ad business. Weeklies still have ample display and entertainment ads, but ads for jobs and rentals----the latter was particularly important in NYC--- have shifted online.

Moreover, activists are no longer dependent on weekly publications for breaking political news and progressive analysis. Activists seeking a progressive election analysis can get this information the next day from a variety of on-line sites, rather than wait for the weekly’s next edition.

But while laptops are increasingly common in cafes, they are no substitute for reading an old-fashioned hard copy tabloid while riding MUNI, BART or sitting in a park on a nice day. Many political activists have read the Voice, LA Weekly, and Bay Guardian for years, and it is hard to believe that soon only the latter will under its traditional editorial control.

The Bay Guardian was the only local news source covering the negotiations leading to New Times’ announcement. The weekly has reason to be concerned, as New Times’ 25% control of the weekly market and its new presence in New York City and Los Angeles does not bode well for Guardian advertising revenue.

The SF Weekly disputes that it is offering cut-rate ads as a strategy to put the Guardian out of business, and instead attributes the Guardian’s financial decline to increased printing and occupancy costs and reduction in advertising reductions following the dot-com boom. While a court will decide this controversy, one need only look at the practices of the Gannet Corporation to see where New Times may be heading.

Gannett is the USA's largest newspaper group in terms of circulation. The company's 99 daily newspapers in the USA have a combined daily paid circulation of 7.6 million. They include USA TODAY, the nation's largest-selling daily newspaper, with a circulation of approximately 2.3 million.

Gannett’s longtime strategy is to enter a market with an established home-controlled paper, destabilize the competition through selling ads below-cost, and then offer to buy its competitor at a price too generous to refuse. Following the sale, the original paper is closed down and Gannett sets new advertising rates reflective of its monopoly in the marketplace.

New Times’ recent history shows that it appears to be following Gannett’s lead. And unless San Francisco residents and business begin to speak out against monopoly control of the local “alternative” weekly media, then the Bay Guardian could well go the way of its New York City and Los Angeles colleagues.

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