New Wave on Beach Causes Stir : High School Unhappy About Sharing Newspaper Name With Newcomers

A High Tide rises from a basement classroom on Diamond Street in Redondo Beach every two weeks.

Several miles up the coast in Manhattan Beach, a High Tide rises at about the same time in a second-floor office on Rosecrans Avenue.

The two High Tides, unlike their nautical namesake, are movements of words not oceans. They are newspapers.

But while nature carefully orchestrates its tides into harmonious highs and lows, the journalistic tides of the South Bay seem to be caught in a stormy debate over how many Highs the area can absorb.

The Redondo Union High School High Tide is a twice-a-month student publication that has provided news and information to generations of Sea Hawks for 67 years. A couple of dozen journalism students write and lay out the paper 20 times a year from a bright yellow room in the basement of the school’s science building.

High Tide News for the Beach, as the Manhattan Beach paper is formally called, is a twice-a-month community paper that started publishing last month. It is the dream of Brian McClure and Jill Gottesman, who were formerly with the weekly Beach Reporter of Manhattan Beach, who established the slick throw-away as a “positive-energy” alternative for residents of their city, McClure said.

But while the excitement of starting a new newspaper has swept the news and advertising offices of the High Tide in Manhattan Beach, it has prompted calls of foul play from the science building basement several miles to the south.

With years of tradition behind them and copies of school newspapers from the past six decades in their classroom, several journalism students of Redondo High last week spoke harshly about the other High Tide. They say McClure and Gottesman have stolen their paper’s name, will siphon away their advertisers and have attempted to capitalize on a “community full of 60 years of Redondo graduates” to attract unknowing readers.

In a letter to McClure and Gottesman, David Sussin, the 18-year-old editor of the student newspaper, last month accused the two of using “bad judgment” and “a total lack of creativity” in choosing the High Tide name. He asked them to change the paper’s name.

“Associating yourselves with our newspaper provides unnecessary confusion among businesses that we solicit advertising from,” Sussin wrote. “You cannot rely on the name High Tide and its established reputation for your own publication’s success; you must rely on your paper’s content.”

McClure and Gottesman, who recently published their third issue of High Tide, said they were concerned when they first heard from Redondo High about the conflict with the names. McClure, who is publisher, said the paper’s staff immediately contacted some readers and advertisers to determine if there really is a conflict.

“I didn’t get any public impression that there was a problem,” said McClure, 28, who moved to Manhattan Beach three years ago from Washington, D.C., where he helped establish a similar community newspaper. “We circulate in Manhattan Beach and the high school paper has a limited market. It is a closed circulation kind of thing.”

McClure and executive editor Gottesman said they did not know about the Redondo High paper when they chose the High Tide name, which they said they registered with the state in January. The high school High Tide has never officially registered or moved to protect its name, school officials said.

McClure said he would change the name of his publication if there was “a clear and present conflict” between the two papers, but he said the staff has too much money and energy invested to change the name for any other reason.

“We are young, too, and we are just starting out,” said Gottesman, 26, a graduate of Mira Costa High School and a native of Manhattan Beach. “We are not making money at this point. We are living off our savings.”

McClure said the two have spent more than $900 to print advertising rate information, business cards and stationery and to register the paper’s name. High Tide distributes 15,000 free copies of the paper in Manhattan Beach every two weeks, he said.

“I am wondering how we got to be such bad guys in this whole thing,” McClure said. “It isn’t necessary for us to rely on a high school publication for our reputation.”

But the journalism students at Redondo High, and their adviser, Margaret Lee, think differently. Lee said a house advertisement in the Feb. 13-27 Manhattan Beach High Tide shows how the paper has attempted to exploit the high school newspaper’s reputation.

The ad read: “The spirit of High Tide newspaper has been around a lot longer than you may think. . . . The fact is, we’ve grown up here, enjoying it all.”

McClure denies that the ad was designed with the high school newspaper in mind, saying it was intended to let readers and advertisers know that the new publication has a staff with roots in Manhattan Beach.

“I don’t know where she is coming from or what her motivation is,” McClure said of Lee. “I’ve worked on papers for free, and I am doing it now. We do it out of love for writing and design. Naturally it is a business, but there are no millionaires at this level. You go into journalism for other reasons than big bucks.”

Lee and her students say they are not asking McClure to close down his operation, rather to simply change the name of the paper. Lee said her newspaper operates like a business, too, with $4,500 of its estimated $6,000 annual budget from advertising.

“Readers and advertisers will be confused and it will diminish the reputation of our paper,” said Lee, who has taught English and journalism at Redondo High for about a year.

Turned to Board

Last week, in an effort to put pressure on the Manhattan Beach paper, the high school newspaper staff began contacting graduates in Manhattan Beach and also turned for help to the South Bay Union High School District Board of Education.

Sussin and news editor Ursula Wiljanen, 17, asked the board on Wednesday night to seek a court injunction that would force the Manhattan Beach paper to change its name or cease publication because they said it violates laws against unfair competition.

“The school newspaper is a symbol of the school and it is strongly associated with the school,” Sussin told the board. “Can the school board allow a paper to publish whatever political views and articles it wants under the name High Tide that is immediately associated with Redondo High School? Can the school board run the risk of someone looking at the ads for the local bars and associating that with the school?” he asked.

The board members, while sympathetic to the students’ plight, acted cautiously, voting to ask the county counsel for an opinion on the school district’s legal rights.

“I think it is a rip-off, frankly,” said Trustee Noel Palm.

Student Problems

Wiljanen said later in an interview that the Manhattan Beach paper’s attitude seems to typify problems she has encountered as a student journalist.

“Too often they take advantage of the fact that we are student journalists,” said Wiljanen, who plans to attend the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in the fall. “It is a real insult when we put so much work into a paper, and you are not treated seriously. It kind of hurts that professionals in the community that used to be student journalists themselves are now taking advantage of us.”

But McClure and Gottesman said they have worked many times with high school journalism students in Manhattan Beach and elsewhere. McClure said he taught a newspaper course at a high school in Washington, D.C., and said the Manhattan Beach High Tide would be happy to become involved in the journalism curriculum at Redondo High.

If the school district decides at its meeting this week to take the newspaper to court, McClure said the Manhattan Beach High Tide would be in a bind because it has so little money.

“We would have to wait and see what the circumstances are,” he said. “We are not evil folks. . . . It is not like we are forming enemy camps here or anything like that.”

But Trustee Armando Acosta, who once served as an editor on the school’s High Tide said that regardless of what happens, the Redondo journalism students will come out on top.

“There is more to journalism than just writing,” he said. “It is a super process they are going through.”