Mugger: Antitrust Silence
Ill try to make this as graceful as Al Gores withdrawal from the 2004 presidential race. Now that New York Press has new owners, its unlikely Ill be subjected to the consistently inaccurate reporting of the Village Voices Cynthia Cotts. Miss Cotts, the weakest Voice "Press Clips" columnist in the papers history–she follows Alex Cockburn, the late Geoffrey Stokes, Doug Ireland and James Ledbetter–belatedly threw in her two bits about this papers sale in last weeks Voice, and managed in about 400 words to tot up her requisite number of errors. /> Where was Cotts 15 years ago when New York Press began publishing in Manhattan? Hard to tell, and barely worth the research, but its clear she wasnt one of the papers first readers. She wrote: "When Russ Smith launched the New York Press back in 1988, he dreamed of making it the citys number one alternative weekly... Russ [uh, thats too familiar for my taste] was going to huff and puff and blow the Voice down. But now he seems to have lost his wind."
A few facts. Had Cotts no set agenda, she couldve logged on to Nexis and found that I never claimed the goal of "blow[ing] the Voice down." As recently as Jan. 3, in an interview with the trade organization Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, I told reporter Ann Hinch that the concept behind New York Press had nothing to do with blowing down the Voice shanty. Hinch wrote: "Even arch-conservative Smith, who says the Voice is stuck in a late-70s mindset, says he had no ambition to put the Voice out of business when he started the Press.
"I wasnt that presumptuous, he says. Rather, it was the belief that New York City was big enough to support two quality weeklies. Also, commercially, the Voice, which was a paid [and far more profitable than today] paper at the time, had outpriced itself with small advertisers, so I saw an opening there."
When the paper started in April of 88, just weeks after the Voices sister publication 7 Days, which inundated the city with advertising and was the recipient of a slew of puffy newspaper articles (and folded two years later), it was a very modest roll-out. New York Press first issue was 20 pages, with a minuscule circulation of 30,000 (all below 14th St.); the startup period was two months.
It took years for the paper to make any dent at all in the citys consciousness–which was planned, to let it grow by word-of-mouth–and the Voice understandably didnt take the paper seriously. At least, until the spring of 1996, when, with its paid circulation in free-fall, the owners finally decided to convert to free distribution.
But enough about me and the sale of New York Press, a mere blip in the media landscape.
Whats far more curious is that Cotts–or any writer at the Voice–hasnt written a single word about the Dept. of Justices ongoing antitrust investigation involving the alleged collusion between Village Voice Media (VVM) and New Times, Inc. (NT), the two largest "alternative" weekly newspaper chains. Last fall, NT agreed, for the sum of $8 million, to shutter its New Times Los Angeles, which competed with VVMs LA Weekly; in return, VVM closed its Cleveland weekly, which battled with an NT counterpart. The transaction had "antitrust" written all over it, and I wondered at the time why corporate lawyers for the companies had given the owners such bad advice.
When the transaction was made public, Cotts wrote in the Oct. 9 Voice: "For some of us, the raison detre of an alternative weekly is to speak truth to power [oh, brother], to publish stories that are smart, social-minded, and fearless. But lets not kid ourselves. When the majority owners of an alt-weekly are not newspaper people, but venture capitalists and banks, producing quality content is not their top priority. The current owners of the Voice seem to be just such a group, willing to do whatever it takes to satisfy the bottom line."
Power to the people, right on, and see you at the next anti-Iraq-invasion demonstration, but the Voice, since the mid-70s, has been owned by Rupert Murdoch, who then sold it to pet-food czar Leonard Stern. Hardly the kind of men whod be sympathetic to fist-fucking primers in the Voice, yet by all accounts they didnt interfere with the editorial staff at the paper.
Its been a brutal two years for the "chains," which, like most of the print media, have seen advertising decline drastically during the economic downturn and following Sept. 11. The Voices page count for its last issue of 2002 was 140, the lowest in memory.
In any case, its odd that Cotts hasnt addressed the antitrust investigation, which, according to the Los Angeles Times Tim Rutten (Jan. 11), has federal, state and local prosecutors taking testimony from current and former employees of both NT and VVM. The Voice has a decades-long tradition of airing its dirty laundry in print: every three years, the papers union threatens to strike and columnists advise readers in advance of managements penny-pinching, with some advocating a boycott of a possible "scab" paper. Its all saber-rattling, since the union always settles, but still makes for decent theater.
And though the practice has been toned down in the last decade, the letters section of the Voice regularly featured angry exchanges between its own writers.
So why the silence on the Los Angeles-Cleveland deal? Perhaps its because the consequences are potentially dire for both newspaper groups. In a Nov. 16 L.A. Times article, Rutten quoted Don T. Hibner, an antitrust specialist with the law firm of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, as saying: "[I]t means theyre thinking beyond civil penalties to criminal prosecution. Involving the U.S. attorneys means theyre looking toward grand juries and indictments. Thats not surprising, since what theyre investigating looks very unusual, a pure market division involving cartel-like activity."
Rutten continued: "If Voice Media and New Times are found to have violated antitrust laws, according to Hibner, the executives involved could be liable for individual fines of up to $300,000 and the companies for as much as $10 million. If the chains actions affected interstate commerce, they could be held liable for fines many times that under a separate federal statute, he said."
The Voice isnt the only New York newspaper thats ignored the investigation. While the New York Times David Carr (formerly editor of Washingtons City Paper) wrote an article on Oct. 7 about the deal between NT and VVM, he hasnt followed up on the antitrust angle, which obviously could adversely affect VVMs flagship weekly here in New York. Aside from a brief New York Post article that essentially cribbed from Ruttens reporting, the citys media was mute until last Friday when the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the subject by Daniel Akst, a business columnist.
Aksts "Taste Commentary" article was somewhat prosaic, perhaps because Journal readers arent familiar with the alternative press. His opening repeats the kind of cliches that are typical of mainstream newspapers when commenting upon the hundreds of weekly newspapers in the United States.
He writes: "In almost any American city, no matter how provincial, the workaday world of bourgeois life masks an alternative universe of funky bars, smoky clubs, street protests, performance art and indie film festivals...[Alternative weeklies] typically feature offbeat journalism, sex listings, quasi-radical politics and hefty portions of self-righteous disdain for the smug corporate daily paper, faulted for favoring powerful interests and ignoring the little guy."
A version of that very paragraph has been written, ad nauseam, since the late 1970s, when the "underground press" evolved into a cluster of profitable weeklies. And while Aksts description of the papers isnt far off the mark as regards kneejerk liberal politics, he mightve cited a few exceptions, such as the San Diego Reader, whose owner is a pro-life militant; the Chicago Reader, which since 1971 has largely eschewed politics in favor of lengthy, esoteric articles; and any number of the NT papers, which dont issue election endorsements, and break news stories that the dailies wont touch.
However, Akst also says of NT and VVM owners: "Like many capitalists, they have a taste for monopoly rents... Both companies pride themselves on their devotion to truth-telling in print, yet when they announced the deal, in October, their tough-minded editors apparently had the day off. The headline on their press release said: LA Weekly and Cleveland Scene to Increase Level and Value of Service to Readers and Advertisers in Respective Communities."
Akst, like Rutten, says that a possible outcome of the case may be that "authorities will exact a settlement that can be used to revive [L.A.s] New Times or fund the launch of a successor... Then Village Voice Media will really have to act like a capitalist–by competing."
One of the more absurd theories tossed off by the alternative press is that Attorney General John Ashcroft is the brains behind the antitrust probe. Mike Lacey, an excellent editor who along with Jim Larkin owns a majority of NT, was quoted in the Journal article as saying, sarcastically, "[W]ere relieved the Justice Department has decided to draw a line in the sand in this case."
And John Powers, a columnist for LA Weekly (which, unlike the Village Voice, has actually commented on its owners predicament, as has Seattle Weekly, another VVM property), wrote in the Dec. 27 issue: "If I were of a politically suspicious nature, I would wonder whether DOJ is targeting alternative papers like this one because we are an alternative to the corporate media–opposing the Iraq war, chronicling Ashcrofts efforts to dismantle the Constitution and challenging our governments near-religious faith in the market."
Talk about naive.
Currently, there are 49,749 employees in the Dept. of Justice, a fair number of them, its reasonable to assume, holdovers from the Clinton administration. Do Powers and Lacey really believe that John Ashcroft cares what the alternative press writes about him, if hes even familiar with any of the papers? Its not as if the LA Weekly is alone in making the spurious charge that Ashcroft is attempting to "dismantle the Constitution." Theres plenty of that nonsense in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times.
More likely, it was some mid-level, L.A.-based DOJ bureaucrat–possibly someone who was involved in the Clinton administrations persecution of Microsoft–who was bored one day and decided to poke around. Maybe he or she was disappointed that a personal ad placed in either LA Weekly or New Times Los Angeles didnt pan out.
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