New Paper on Scene : Weeklies Think Small to Survive

For journalist Thelma Barrios, all the news that’s fit to print comes from San Fernando, Sylmar, Pacoima and Lake View Terrace.

As publisher and editor of the Independent, a new weekly mailed to 28,000 homes in the northeastern San Fernando Valley, she practices old-fashioned storefront journalism on San Fernando’s Brand Boulevard.

Her stories--about PTA meetings, mall openings and local chambers of commerce--rarely rate ink in the metropolitan dailies. Barrios says the Independent meets a demand for neighborhood news left unfilled by larger newspapers.

“It’s fun to go up the street and shoot the breeze,” said the energetic, 66-year-old editor. “There are stories there. These people make news.”

Bucking Trend

In starting an independent paper, Barrios is bucking a 20-year trend among Valley community papers toward financial collapse and corporate consolidation.

In 1960, about 25 independent, neighborhood-based newspapers were published in the Valley area, community journalists say. Now there are a handful, such as the Independent, the Acorn from Agoura and Westlake; the New Californian, serving the southwestern Valley; the Northridger, distributed in parts of the West Valley, and the Messenger from Topanga Canyon.

All of these papers are published weekly and distributed free, except for the Messenger, which comes out every other week and costs a quarter.

Barrios’ jack-of-all-trades journalism is a throwback to another time.

Although most of today’s reporters and editors gaze at glowing computer screens, Barrios taps out articles on a manual typewriter. In an era when responsibilities are sharply divided among editors, reporters, photographers and art directors, she edits copy, lays out pages and manages a staff of six others, including the paper’s advertising and office personnel.

Free-Lancers

Other than herself, there is only one full-time reporter. Free-lancers write other news and sports for the 16-page paper.

The Independent follows a regular weekly rhythm of production. The amount of advertising, which determines space available for, is calculated on Fridays. The pages are designed, or “dummied,” on Saturdays. On Mondays, Barrios finishes the layout but holds the front page open until evening to accommodate breaking stories. On Tuesdays, the paper is printed, and on Wednesdays it is mailed.

“You get to work in the middle of the night if necessary,” Barrios said.

Barrios launched the paper’s first issue on April 24, two weeks after she ended a 28-year association with the San Fernando Valley Sun and Breeze, a weekly community newspaper that was purchased by New York-based Hearst Corp. in 1981.

Hearst Purchases

As part of a 30-newspaper buying spree throughout Los Angeles County in 1981, Hearst also purchased 10 other Valley weeklies. The company has since cut the number of papers to five and closed several small offices, running all of its Valley operation from San Fernando, except for a small Toluca Lake office.

Barrios, an intense, bespectacled woman, was editor of the Sun and Breeze and the Valley View for six years, and later edited the Sun Valley Scene, all Hearst papers. She worked before that as an editor of the Sun’s society page, as a reporter and as a clerk.

Her staff consists entirely of former Hearst employees. Some lost their jobs through corporate reorganization or chose not to commute to South Gate when Hearst last year shifted some production operations there from San Fernando, Barrios said.

“Completely frustrated” with what she viewed as a lack of editorial focus under Hearst’s company, Herald Community Newspapers, Barrios decided to launch a competitor.

“It ceased to be a community newspaper,” she said of her previous paper. “Big corporations can get too far away from what’s going on.”

Editors of Hearst’s Herald Community Newspapers reject that charge and predict stronger local coverage in their five Valley papers, which have a total circulation of 120,000.

“It doesn’t make any difference if somebody in New York is involved or not, they have nothing to do with our news,” said Robert Lauffer, executive editor of the Herald group. “Corporate ownership is a bugaboo that Thelma and others like to throw around.”

Lauffer said Hearst is adding two writers to its 12-person Valley editorial staff and will carry more localized stories written for just one or two papers, instead of the current practice of running many of the same stories in all five.

Personnel Moving

Lauffer rated Hearst’s past news coverage as average. But, he said, a transfer of advertising, production and management personnel to its San Fernando office from South Gate, which began Monday, will sharpen the company’s focus on local news.

Scripps-Howard, a Cincinnati-based newspaper group, announced July 25 that it will buy a group of Hearst community newspapers in southeastern Los Angeles County.

Lauffer said that sale will allow Hearst to concentrate on the Valley. “People who read our papers a year from now are going to know their communities much, much better than they have,” he said.

Robert D. Gilliland, chief executive officer of Herald Community Newspapers, rejected speculation by Valley newspaper sources that it might sell some of its Valley papers.

Negotiations in July

Gilliland said he had received “no official word” from Hearst headquarters about selling Valley papers but acknowledged that negotiations took place in July for the sale of the Las Virgenes News Enterprise, a currently mothballed weekly now owned by the Herald group.

The sale was not completed. Rodger Sterling, the previous Las Virgenes publisher who sought to repurchase the paper, said Hearst rejected his offer as insufficient. No negotiations are under way.

Editors of independent community newspapers stress localizing news to steer clear of competition with the major dailies, but they differ significantly in their approach to community journalism.

“Names are news is our philosophy,” said Rose Marie Couch, editor of the Northridger, a splashy, 22,000-circulation weekly tabloid consisting largely of material from news syndicates and local press releases.

‘Human Immortal Cells’

A recent Page 1 banner headline read: “Human Immortal Cells Proven.” The story inside said the cells were immortal in a laboratory culture dish as part of a cancer research project. Underneath the headline was an unrelated photo of actress Sandy Duncan, dancing in a mini-dress, flanked by headlines such as “Oldest Find of Dinosaur in Arizona.”

The Northridger runs on income generated by printing several pages of $65 legal notices of fictitious business names, a county legal requirement for starting a private business.

The 40,000-circulation New Californian features tax and real estate columns written by local financial experts. It also has health columns and “Local Focus” pages detailing the activities of area groups and companies.

The Messenger, a 3,000-circulation biweekly published for Topanga Canyon residents, offers an ample fare of features and photographs, as well as fiction and news. “The paper reflects a diverse community up here, from rednecks to screenwriters,” said Colin Penno, editor on the paper’s two-person staff.

Agoura Hills Paper

Irving Shear, editor of the Acorn, a weekly with a circulation of 20,000 serving Agoura Hills, Agoura and Westlake, said his philosophy is to provide “an in-depth news package” about local issues. The Acorn, established in 1974, is the largest community newspaper in the Valley, both in number of pages and in editorial staff. In the past two years it has doubled in size to 32 pages and now employs seven full-time reporters and editors.

Income from display advertising exceeds revenue from legal notices for the Acorn, Shear said.

The Independent relies entirely on display and classified advertising. Barrios said it is “holding its own” financially and will eventually expand into Granada Hills.

Editorially, the Independent generally uses its own reporters’ legwork to find stories, as opposed to rewriting press releases from government agencies, local businesses and organizations.

No ‘Canned Release’

“I don’t take a canned release, put a head on it and run it,” Barrios declared.

The Aug. 7 issue featured articles on zoning questions raised by two Sylmar building projects, as well as a look at San Fernando’s 95-year-old Odd Fellows Lodge.

Inside were shorter articles on a Pacoima neighborhood celebration, the political race in Sylmar for honorary mayor and a boy’s baseball league, with a photo of the league’s all-star team of 10- to 12-year-olds.

The Independent also carries a two-page news section in Spanish that reports local events for the northeastern Valley’s many Latinos and is supported by Spanish-language advertising. In addition, Barrios on July 31 put out the first issue of an entirely Spanish-language paper, El Independiente, which she plans to publish weekly.

“The community newspaper is the only place the average person can get their name in the paper,” Barrios said. “The more names, the better the reading.”

Local Angles

Other functions of community newspapers, Barrios contends, are to find local angles on city or regional news and to provide upbeat coverage of neighborhood stories when other publications have dwelt on the negative.

For example, Barrios maintained that community papers can publicize positive developments in public schools that are forgotten in media treatment of student crime, truancy and low academic performance.

“A community newspaper can turn that around by finding what’s good in the schools,” she said. “I don’t want to hide problems with a blanket, but there’s more to a community than problems.”

The upstart paper has been well received by area residents because it reports local issues vigorously, said Derward P. Loomis, a former San Fernando mayor who recently wrote a history of that city.

Sun Criticized

Loomis said the paper may have jarred Hearst into expanding coverage of the northeastern Valley. The quality of the San Fernando Sun “went down badly until Thelma started the Independent,” he contended.

A strong community identity among longtime northeastern Valley residents may explain the early success of the Independent and suggest reasons for the general decline of independent, neighborhood journalism in the Valley, Barrios and other editors of community papers said.

Barrios, who has lived in Sylmar 28 years, said the northeastern Valley, in contrast to most Valley communities, is home to many families who have lived in the area for two or three generations. Homeowners predominate, reducing transience. Those factors instill the sense of neighborhood needed to support community papers, Barrios said.

Rapid Growth

A common view in the community newspaper business is that the rapid growth of Valley residential neighborhoods in the two decades after World War II may have helped to kill many local papers, as expanding neighborhoods merged into a suburban mass and lost distinct local identities.

“I get the feeling that a lot of people just sleep in the Valley. Their hearts are not there,” said Charlie Ferrell, a former managing editor of Hearst’s Valley papers and now the editor of the weekly Chino Champion in San Bernardino County.

“San Fernando is kind of an exception. They have a rallying point--a city. There’s a sense of community,” he said.

Factors such as the rising cost of newsprint and aggressive competition for advertising revenue by the Los Angeles Times and the Valley News, predecessor of today’s Daily News, also sapped profits from local weeklies through the late 1960s and 1970s, contributing to their decline, local editors said.

Shaky Finances Suspected

Several of the papers Hearst purchased in 1981 were said to be in shaky financial condition at the time.

“It was a very healthy, large market for weekly papers, but it’s been lost,” said Tom Reilly, chairman of the journalism department at California State University, Northridge.

Reilly also worries that corporate ownership of a string of community newspapers may conflict with solid neighborhood-based journalism.

“You run a higher risk of losing the local touch of a community newspaper through corporate ownership,” Reilly said. “Papers are looked on in terms of what’s good for the corporation, not the community.”