It’s Boom and Bust as Downtown Newspapers Scramble to Survive

It’s as if they’ve appeared overnight, these free newspapers, like a journalistic version of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. From City Hall to the court house, on street corner racks and in restaurants, they seek readers throughout downtown San Diego.

Some are luxuriously fat with ads. Others appear to have been printed from typewritten sheets. There are at least 22 of them, enough to make a person wonder how many the great forests of North America can support.

There’s a lively mix to their numbers. Some are quintessentially Californian, offering readers help in bunnetics (exercises for tight buttocks) or advice in psychic searches, while others are merely localized clones of national publishers.

A few are seriously earnest, as much a “newspaper” in their way as the city’s dailies. Most are more specialized, running the gamut from computer news to the latest in triathlon training.

Regardless of their bent, the majority subsist on a diet of upbeat feature stories intended to soothe rather than bruise. One new publication has even created a serial called “Downtown Soap.”

What many have in common are shoestring budgets and publishers who dream of success in an business noted for its mortality. The majority, while available downtown, depend on a countywide circulation. But a handful have staked their future on downtown, one of the most fickle of territories.

Using a variety of formulas to win readers, these papers hope to ride the wave of downtown revitalization. Others papers before them--like Downtown and City Pages--had similar aims. But that wave was more like a ripple, and they drifted until they went out of business.

Some say that, at best, the center city will never be able to support more than one “downtown” newspaper.

One of those vying for that mantle is Uptown, which bills itself as “the news and life style monthly for San Diego’s urban communities.” In this case, that’s defined as territory running from the waterfront up to Hillcrest.

Uptown’s publisher, ad salesman, circulation director, paste-up supervisor, reporter and editor is the energetic Neil Good. By day, the 38-year-old Good works full-time as an administrative aide to county Supervisor Leon Williams. By night, he’s a newspaperman.

“I work out of my house and I have an answering machine,” said Good, who adds that he has just moved from Clairemont to Hillcrest.

Good put $5,000 of his own money into Uptown. The first edition appeared in March, offering neighborhood ads, an events calendar, a restaurant guide and yuppie features on the young professionals who live and work in the downtown area, packaged in a clean, easy-to-read layout.

“I would like to think that we’re the paper for our area,” Good said. “I envision someone sitting at the City Deli and reading our paper over a cream cheese bagel.”

Unlike some competitors, Uptown doesn’t hide at the sign of controversy. Its October edition, for example, contains an editorial on the big-spending culinary escapades of City Councilman Uvaldo Martinez, who represents most of downtown, and a piece on retailers in Hillcrest experiencing slow business, in part because of Horton Plaza.

With a circulation of 20,000, one might expect that Good would soon have the luxury of only holding down one job. But such is not the case. “The paper pays for itself,” he said. “If we dropped everything today, I’d be out about $2,000.”

“You got to love this kind of business,” he said. “No one with business sense does this. It’s an expression of your ego, no doubt about that. But I’m very proud when the paper comes out. I see this as an effort to have impact and influence on your community.”

What Good is banking on is establishing reader loyalty from what he calls the “eclectic” audience of downtown, using in part a formula he describes as treating readers “as tourists in their own town.”

“Uptown is as much a state of mind as it is a place,” said Good. “We assume people live in an urban area because they want to. Even if they don’t live here, people relate to downtown. The number of papers available downtown is a sign that San Diego is becoming a city.”

But even if that’s true, it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s room for everybody, says Jean Scott, editor-publisher of Trolley Line News and founder of the defunct Downtown.

“This is like ‘The Perils of Pauline,’ ” said Scott, who runs her paper out of a small office in her printer’s plant. She knows what she’s talking about because, aside from Downtown, she worked at La Jolla Magazine and Military News, two San Diego-area publications that are now only memories.

Three years ago, Scott bought the Trolley Line News. At the time it had a part-time publisher and did little beyond printing trolley schedules.

Since then, the monthly has expanded to 25 pages and a circulation of 20,000. It did this by providing upbeat features about downtown. “We target as much positive material as we can,” Scott says. “We’re not looking for the sordid or the negative things like the bigger papers do.”

That good-news-only formula is apparently successful. More than any of its direct competitors, the Trolley Line News is loaded with advertisements from a wide variety of central city businesses, from the Aerospace Museum and Seaport Village to the Independent Barber College and real estate companies.

“There are several other newspapers down here, but I’m not sure what their direction is,” Scott says confidently. “I don’t let it bother me.”

Another recent entrant in the competition is the San Diego Weekly News, which a year ago decided to make a push into downtown. “I really wasn’t too crazy about downtown, but now we’re working at it, although we’re not doing too great with business down there,” says the paper’s owner and publisher, Marti Sterton. “It’s ridiculous. Everyone who ever thought of bringing in a newspaper goes downtown. A lot of newspapers have come and gone. The survival rate is very low.

“The difference about downtown is you have to do a lot of politicking . . . going to happy hours and that kind of stuff.”

Until a year ago, the Weekly News circulated mainly in Mission Valley, Ocean Beach, Point Loma and Tierrasanta, but now 10,000 of its papers go downtown.

Its niche, aside from legal ads, is a concoction of humanism, personal health care, psychology and body awareness. There’s a column called “Psychic Search” and another titled “You are Peace--Peace is You--You are Peace.”

“This is a positive, impact newspaper that wants to report on successful things and what people are doing to improve themselves,” Sterton explained.

Just last month, a publication called San Diego Metropolitan was quietly unveiled. Touting itself as the paper “serving the people who work, shop, live and enjoy the culture of downtown San Diego,” this monthly is heavy on eye-catching graphics and pro-business features.

It also offers one thing its competitors do not: a serial.

Called “Downtown Soap,” this continuing saga takes the supremely confident Jonathan Sterling, a wealthy developer transplanted from Denver, and hooks him up with the sexy Annie Holding, she with the “cat-like smile.”

Their relationship begins at Dobson’s, where Sterling and Roger Hedgecock exchange nods. The first installment ends with Jonathon and Annie riding the Meridian elevator together at night, headed for one or the other’s expensive condominium.

But the editor-publisher of Metropolitan, Sean Patrick Reily, doesn’t want to talk about the serial or anything else. Reily declined to talk about his paper, saying it’s too early to make statements and that he wants people to judge Metropolitan on its own merits for now and let it gain some credibility.

Even with the crowded field, there is one publication many of these neophytes want to emulate, at least financially: the highly successful San Diego Reader, a weekly noted for its off-beat, irreverent stories, good writing, free classified advertisements and extensive entertainment guide, which offers notices on everything from the opera to Adam Ant.

Running more than 120 pages fat with money-producing ads in three sections, the Reader circulates 115,000 copies throughout the county. Twenty thousand of those go downtown.

“We’ve always recognized that we have directed an inordinate amount of attention to downtown. Part of that is because we’re located here,” says the Reader’s editor, Jim Mullin. “But overall, from what I’ve seen, there’s been a tremendous overkill on the downtown life style that often is publicity in the disguise of news.”

Howard Rosen, who has been with the Reader since its inception in 1972 and is now business director, says it’s extremely difficult for any paper to make money catering only to the center city.

“There’s never been enough downtown to justify publication, and I suspect that’s still the case,” Rosen said. “I have real doubts whether there’s enough to break even, let alone make a profit, even with Horton Plaza.”

And that eventually leads many to chase a mirage. “In a print ecology like that, it’s enough to break even for a while,” says Lee Brown, journalism professor at San Diego State University. “But what happens is that that keeps hopes up without ever coming to fruition.”