Bringing Flair to the Point Reyes Light

Robert Plotkin, the upstart newspaper publisher in this isolated hub of organic farmers, bistro owners and wealthy Bay Area refugees, is on the move, his journalistic campaign in overdrive.

He seems to be everywhere at once -- snapping news photographs, reporting stories, schmoozing with subscribers and courting advertisers -- as he whisks about west Marin County in his racy black BMW.

“Gimme a hug,” Plotkin says with a politician’s polish, opening his arms to the grumpy, tattooed proprietress at the Pine Cone diner, where he holds court.

Last fall, when he bought the Pulitzer Prize-winning Point Reyes Light, the 36-year-old former freelance journalist and Monterey County prosecutor emerged as the biggest story in this no-stoplight town near the scenic national park and the newspaper’s namesake lighthouse.

Brash and ambitious, resembling comedian Jerry Seinfeld in hip, retro clothes, the self-styled onetime “Bolinas-based foreign correspondent” fashions himself as a new breed of “press lord” taking on profit-driven journalism. He is, he boasts, an unapologetic “P.T. Barnum” luring new writing talent to town and a media Michelangelo creating the “Sistine Chapel of journalism.”

From his very first issue, Plotkin promised a thoughtful, more literary Light. But he has angered some readers by injecting what they see as sensationalist, tabloid-style journalism into a weekly paper that had long fashioned itself as a humble deliverer of small-town news.

The Christmas edition featured a haunting front-page mug shot of an accused rapist and a lengthy article about the crime that many called ill-timed for a holiday issue. Plotkin later explained that he was reading Truman Capote’s nonfiction crime bestseller “In Cold Blood” at the time.

During recent rains, the Light published a headline -- “Chinese Water Torture Will Intensify” -- that some readers found insensitive.

Others complain that Plotkin forsakes local news for his own preaching on world and national issues, such as a column in which he argued that China needs a free press. He also allows less room for letters to the editor -- a sore point for a readership that relies on the Light as a community bulletin board.

Plotkin, a San Diego native with a master’s degree in journalism from New York’s Columbia University, admits to some beginner’s mistakes.

“I should have been more sensitive; it was the Christmas edition,” he said of the rape article. “But I reject the pure xenophobia, the complaints that said, ‘Why write about this? A drifter who raped a tourist. She wasn’t even a local!’ ”

Plotkin also has drawn attention for his bitter public feud with the Light’s former owner and publisher, David Mitchell, 62, one of the town’s most well-known personalities. Plotkin charges that Mitchell tried to strangle him and run over him with his car.

Mitchell, whose Light won journalism’s top award in 1979 for a series on Synanon, the drug rehab center-turned-cult, says Plotkin’s claims are overblown.

Still, recently the pair agreed in Marin County Superior Court to a three-year restraining order that would keep Mitchell away from the new publisher and his family, as well as the Light offices where Mitchell had labored for three decades and was still working as a consultant.

Mitchell has threatened to sue Plotkin for breaking the terms of the Light’s sale and calling him a manic-depressive in a column.

“The symphony is just tuning up,” Mitchell said. “What the judge has said is that a family of skunks has moved into west Marin County and has told me to stay away from them. And I say, ‘Your Honor, I’m not messing with any skunks.’ ”

Plotkin says he wants to concentrate on running his newspaper. The new Light replaced Mitchell’s 100-watt news bulb with a journalistic floodlight. He wants to emulate the thoughtfulness of the New York Review of Books, the serendipity of the New Yorker’s pithy “Talk of the Town” and the gravitas of Granta, the renowned British literary quarterly.

Plotkin has visited top journalism schools looking for “the best and the brightest” talent willing to venture out to Point Reyes Station (population 1,200), an hour north of San Francisco, for four-month unpaid internships.

His ads seek “literary journalists who plan on becoming the next Orwell, Kapuscinski or Didion,” referring to the late British socialist, an esteemed Polish writer and a dyspeptic California native.

When talking excitedly about his cause, Plotkin mixes metaphors freely.

“The only way to get the right esprit de corps -- the people directed to a higher calling -- is to invite them to join the Round Table and go on a quest for the chalice,” he said. “I fashion myself as sort of a Che Guevara. This paper is the Dunkirk of literary journalism. Our backs are against the wall. The Huns are upon us. It’s time to fight.”

Having answered Plotkin’s call, unpaid intern Ashley Herrell has written several eloquent stories, including a January piece about activists who attended a nude rally -- and didn’t disrobe.

Herrell earns her keep at a nearby ranch, feeding horses and chickens before reporting to the Light. Each week, she helps deliver the paper with another intern and a full-time reporter.

Sometimes, when an animal gets sick, journalism comes second. “It’s tough. This is where I’m living; this is helping me be here,” said Herrell, 25, who earned a master’s degree in journalism at New York University. “I can’t skip out on that.”

Like the Light itself, the newspaper’s readership is in flux. Spread across 14 unincorporated towns such as Inverness, Bolinas and Stinson Beach, wealthy urban immigrants and environmentally progressive farmers have slowly pushed out the old hippie-and-artist crowd that colonized the area in the 1960s.

Yet some want to draw the line on change when it comes to the 58-year-old weekly. Many longtime readers considered the former Light an organic product of the community and felt a paternal sense of ownership. Now their Light is owned by an outsider who often is so brusque that many assume he is from New York.

“We miss the comfortable old shoe: the little weekly rag with its town gossip,” said rancher Steve Doughty. “Now we get this tight pointed shoe from New York and we wonder, ‘Can we fit into this?’ We still don’t know.”

Pine Cone owner Joan Kwit says Plotkin’s Light fits just fine.

“He brings the world to Point Reyes,” she said. “But being a loud Jew from New York -- and I’m Jewish too; I can say this -- he’s stirring things up.”

After starting as a lawyer, Plotkin switched careers to attend journalism school and then interned at the Miami Herald.

At one point, he also ventured as a freelancer to the Middle East where, as he wrote in a Light column, he “interviewed tank commanders surrounding Arafat’s Ramallah compound, witnessed a suspected collaborator being shot in Jenin, and interviewed a Hamas leader in Gaza.”

Last year, Plotkin brought his wife and young son to Marin County, where he planned to launch a career as a freelance correspondent. While he was house hunting, a real-estate agent joked that Plotkin should buy the Point Reyes Light, which had suffered through a difficult financial year.

“A ding went off in my head,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I am going to buy the Light. Everyone laughed, ha-ha-ha. Everyone but me.”

There was one problem: The Light wasn’t for sale. So Plotkin began to woo Mitchell, a lanky, scholarly wordsmith. He sent him e-mails, critiqued the paper, spent hours at Mitchell’s cabin discussing journalism.

Mitchell, in turn, felt out his suitor -- preferring to turn over his beloved Light to an individual rather than a faceless corporation.

For years, Mitchell had kept the weekly going by burning through a family trust fund. His vanity license plate hinted at his passion for his paper, reading “Light.” But recently, he had lost his old newsman’s zeal as he struggled to keep the Light in the black. Some say he became elusive and often argumentative.

The two struck a deal: Plotkin bought the Light for $500,000, agreeing to pay Mitchell $175 a week for five years as a consultant for the 4,000-circulation paper. Plotkin declined to discuss how he paid for the Light.

But the relationship soured quickly. In February, the pair engaged in what Mitchell calls a “ridiculous confrontation” in his car over how the paper should handle a local land-use story. Plotkin claims Mitchell grabbed his neck “and shook,” and later tried to drive over him.

Mitchell insists that he was parodying strangulation and denies trying to run over Plotkin with his car. “Suddenly a shouting match has turned into attempted murder,” Mitchell said, sitting in his living room, packing his pipe with Captain Black tobacco. “If that isn’t a young guy with a wild imagination.”

Although the Light carried none of the details of the fight, Plotkin mentioned a “petty scandal” in a column about recent Light awards won under Mitchell. Plotkin’s column went on to say Mitchell has made no secret of his “manic-depression.”

Mitchell says Plotkin’s column helped prompt a sheriff’s deputy to take him into custody for a psychiatric evaluation.

“I have to keep reassuring people I run into that ‘Yes, I’m in perfectly fine mental health; the person suffering is Robert Plotkin, not me,’ ” said Mitchell, who acknowledges that he suffers from seasonal affective disorder. “He’s emotionally so impulsive. He’s not in control.”

Plotkin, for his part, accuses Mitchell of throwing tirades. “From the very first day I took over the paper,” he said, “it became clear Mitchell wasn’t emotionally stable enough to lose something he loved” for decades.