Bad times

SF Weekly's parent company cuts a deal to kill competition in L.A. and Cleveland.

By Camille T. Taiara

MEDIA SAVVY PROGRESSIVES have been sounding the alarm for some time now about how the "chaining" of alternative weekly papers has been selling communities short. But a deal consummated last week between the nation's two largest alternative newspaper companies reveals just how closely chains of the weekly industry have begun to parody daily newspaper behemoths like Gannett, Knight-Ridder, and Hearst – the very establishment they are meant to offer an alternative to.

On Oct. 2, New Times Corp., owner of the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express and the largest alternative weekly chain in the nation, shut down New Times Los Angeles, leaving that city with only one major alternative: the LA Weekly. In exchange, Village Voice Media, which owns the LA Weekly, paid New Times a fee that insiders place at anywhere between more than $1 million (according to the Los Angeles Times) and more than $8 million (according to the New York Times). VVM also agreed to close its Cleveland Free Times for a smaller fee. The only alternative left in that city: New Times' Cleveland Scene.

Each of the now defunct weeklies handed over its client lists to its former competitor. Anyone who tries to call New Times Los Angeles or log on to its Web site is automatically forwarded to the LA Weekly. The Cleveland Free Times' phone number and site bounce over to the Cleveland Scene's.

In effect, the two big chains traded monopolies: VVM gets Los Angeles. New Times gets Cleveland.

The fact that New Times would pull out of Los Angeles, one of the largest markets in the country, signals financial troubles at the Phoenix-based company, which still owns 11 weeklies nationwide.

"Their style only works when they are the only game in town, or [when they're up against an alternative that doesn't have] the resources they do," says Joy Gilbert, who worked as an advertising representative for New Times' Riverfront Times in St. Louis and tried unsuccessfully to start a competing alternative in that city before becoming advertising director at the Fairfield County Weekly in Connecticut.

"New Times ignored the strength of established weeklies in their local markets," former New Times staffer Terry Garrett explains. As advertising director at the chain's main office in the '80s, Garrett helped build the company's sales, marketing, and management practices.

Revenue figures recently released by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies support Gilbert's and Garrett's conclusions. In Los Angeles, VVM's LA Weekly brought in more than $8 million in the past year. New Times Los Angeles's revenues were less than half that amount. In San Francisco, the SF Weekly's reported revenue range is between $4 million and $6 million, and the Bay Guardian's exceeds $8 million.

"New Times went into those markets with the intent of shutting the other alternative down," Garrett told us. If that doesn't work (as it didn't in San Francisco), the company tries to undercut the independent alternative by selling ads at below-market rates (see "The Predatory Chain," 3/6/02).

New Times papers are identifiable by a cookie-cutter format and increasingly centralized editorial content. Film reviews are all written in Los Angeles. Music coverage and much of news and paper policy is managed out of corporate headquarters. New Times weeklies make no elections endorsements, and although their editors insist the papers have no specific political leanings, their views often tend toward the libertarian.

Joseph M. Alioto, who's been litigating antitrust cases for almost 35 years, says there are legal problems with New Times' and VVM's moves to carve up markets and create convenient monopolies between themselves.

"Competitors cannot say, 'You take this market, I'll take the other,' " he told us. But unless readers, advertisers, or someone else adversely affected by the deal steps forward and takes up the case, the weekly leviathans will probably get away with it: "The [federal] government simply won't enforce antitrust laws," Alioto said.

Between 70 (according to the Los Angeles Times) and 100 (according to the LA Weekly) New Times Los Angeles workers lost their jobs Oct. 2. Close to 50 full-timers were left unemployed by the shuttering of the Cleveland Free Times.

Former staffers are by no means the only ones who've lost out. Businesses in Los Angeles and Cleveland can expect higher ad rates. Readers can expect less coverage of local politics and arts. And truly alternative perspectives will have no forum in which to get heard.

"This is another example of how some of the alternative press is becoming as mainstream as the mainstream press we tend to criticize," says John Fox, copublisher and editor of the independently owned Cincinnati CityBeat.

Neither New Times executive editor Michael Lacey nor chairman and CEO Jim Larkin responded to Bay Guardian calls. SF Weekly editor John Mecklin would only say he had no comment.

LA Weekly reporter Howard Blume had nominally better luck. "The reaction was short and blunt from Michael Lacey," Blume wrote in an Oct. 4 article. " 'Go fuck yourself,' said Lacey, who was reached Wednesday morning at a Santa Monica beachside hotel. He slammed down the phone without responding to questions."

In Cleveland, where the New Times' Cleveland Scene is now the only alternative, community members worry about the void left in the wake of the trade.

"The deal definitely leaves Cleveland with the weaker of the two papers. Everyone in Cleveland is really heartsick," says Cindy Barber, who helped found the Cleveland Free Times to cover the local underground scene and was its editor until shortly after VVM bought the paper in 1998. "I spent six years of my life birthing this child so that two guys in a back room could kill it."

For links to other papers' coverage of this issue, go to www.sfbg.com/37/02/news_new_times_links.html.

E-mail Camille T. Taiara at camille@sfbg.com.