A New Force Downtown : Sue Laris and Her Quirky Little Newspaper Have Carved a Niche in City Life, Civic Affairs

A city newspaper was about the last thing Sue Laris had on her mind when she went looking for a paper to buy in 1972.

She was searching for something small, homey and rural--the kind of drowsy hometown weekly that gets delivered by car, survives on corny advertisements from local merchants and features a folksy column by the editor.

But with $1,400 to spend, even the smallest paper was out of reach. So she and her husband settled for the next best thing.

They started a newspaper from scratch. In downtown Los Angeles.

An Urban Reality

Sixteen years later, Sue Laris’ homespun dream has become an urban reality. More than 47,000 copies of the Downtown News appear every week in skyscraper lobbies and sidewalk news racks throughout the city’s financial center. The paper is delivered by company-owned vans, no longer hauled in the trunk of Laris’ old car. Each weekly edition is thick with ads from local merchants, but these days, they often compete with full-page glossy promotions placed by downtown landmarks like the Westin Bonaventure and California Plaza.

Barely known outside the freeways that circle downtown Los Angeles, Laris’ newspaper has become a growing habit among the 300,000 office workers and entrepreneurs who commute each day to work in the city’s core. With a quirky blend of chic and hick, the paper has carved out a market where there had previously been none, attracting loyal readers in such bastions of white-collar professionalism as the Pacific Mutual Building and the Atlantic Richfield Towers.

“If I don’t pick it up early in my building, it’s liable to be gone,” said John H. Welborne, a lawyer who works in the Pacific Mutual Building.

‘Recognizing the Boundaries’

“If you mentioned the Downtown News outside of its small perimeter, people wouldn’t know what you were talking about,” said Al Greenstein, manager of media relations for the Atlantic Richfield Corp. and a Laris friend. “But that’s it’s strength, and Sue’s strength--recognizing the boundaries of the area that they serve.”

Laris, 44, has settled into a role of mini-media mogul, not only running the News, but in recent months buying, renovating and selling off another weekly in Pasadena. Editor and publisher, Laris also gets to write the folksy column she always wanted to write, delving occasionally into knotty civic issues. In recent issues, she has worried aloud about the kissing habits her son might acquire at summer camp, discoursed on how the Ronald Reagan State Office building got its name and linked the popularity of the musical “Les Miserables” with the plight of the homeless on downtown Los Angeles streets.

Her success has not come without criticism. In the process of joining more than a dozen downtown clubs, committees and task forces, Laris has become an insider among the central city’s most influential movers and shakers. Critics of downtown’s relentless building pace suggest that she has become its cheerleader, using her paper to pitch for powerful development and government interests instead of concentrating solely on digging for news.

“My impression is that it is a good-quality newsletter for the developers,” grumbles Charles Woo, a toy manufacturer and chairman of the Central City East Assn.

Laris readily admits wanting to “build up, not tear down.” Like many of the financiers, builders and planners who have both contributed to and profited from downtown’s explosion of growth, Laris presumes that the fate of businesses such as hers depends on the areas’s continuing rehabilitation and development.

In her columns, she portrays downtown as an ostensibly urban place that, in fact, has many of the qualities of a small town--with its own restaurants and theaters, its own nightlife, its own distinct sections, its own civic leaders. “If you break it down, it’s not that intimidating,” she says.

Sober Examinations

Everything in her paper has a “downtown” spin to it, from sober examinations of city sewage ordinances to breezy features about skyscraper basements. There are downtown entertainment listings, downtown real estate ads, downtown business stories and downtown restaurant reviews. The paper even runs personal match-making ads with a distinct downtown, upward-striver slant: “New Chanel suit’s SWF owner waiting to do town/cocoon with 28-55 SWM’s Armani.” And: “Free lunch hour pampering for businesswoman by gentleman. . . . “

Hewing to Laris’ philosophy, the Downtown News covers the financial and commercial hub of the country’s second-largest city as it were a small town. When news was slack during the paper’s early struggle for survival, Laris filled holes with press releases straight from the office of Mayor Sam Yorty. She once ran a photograph of herself and several staffers painting newspaper racks. “We were desperate for a good photo and there was nothing else going on,” she says.

Then there was the “battle of the columns” that she waged with Jim Laris, her first husband and former co-publisher, before their divorce in 1979. The couple used their separate columns in the News to provide thousands of readers with a weekly, blow-by-blow account of the end of their marriage. “We didn’t hold anything back,” an amused Jim Laris recalls.

Not long after the divorce, Sue Laris--who has since remarried and bought out her first husband’s interest in the paper--went to lunch at a downtown Italian restaurant. According to a lunch companion, the owner approached Laris’ table to tell the embarrassed publisher that he missed “the column about your divorce.”

Despite her occasional discomfort, the downtown-as-small-town approach has paid off. Since Laris became sole owner of the News, the paper’s revenues have increased six-fold. Last year, the paper grossed $1.3 million. Once a thin eight-page bimonthly, the paper’s weekly edition now routinely runs as many as 30 pages.

When she and her ex-husband launched the Downtown News 16 years ago, they had no notion of how the paper would be received or whether it would survive beyond a few months. “We were too dumb to know better,” she says. “We just plowed ahead.”

She had come out of Northern California, from the town of Ferndale, population 15,000, where “the fog settles in like something out of ‘Brigadoon.’ ” Graduating from Humboldt State with a degree in English, she taught in the mid-’60s in Michigan and several school districts around Los Angeles before casting about for a new line of work that involved writing.

The newspaper business seemed as good a prospect as any. Raising two sons, the Larises sought a paper they could work on at night, augmenting her daytime teaching career and his job with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. She had in mind a small hometown paper like the one she grew up with in Ferndale. But there was nothing comparable in the Los Angeles area within their price range.

So they started their own paper. They chose downtown as their base because no one else was there. With a $1,400 investment, she and her husband were the paper’s original staff. They reported, edited, sold ads and pasted up weekly copies in their Pasadena kitchen. They had no market studies to identify their potential readers’ habits or desires. Instead, the couple spent their lunch hours in depressing office building cafeterias, sizing up the hungry bureaucrats as potential readers.

“We aimed at the downtown workers, the 9-to-5 crowd,” Sue Laris recalls. It was a shot in the dark back then. There was no real downtown, no Civic Center, no Bonaventure, no Broadway Plaza, no Bunker Hill, no World Trade Center, no Security Pacific Tower, no Citicorp Building. Other than the Civic Center area, downtown didn’t exist.”

As each of those projects was announced and built, the Downtown News gained new topics to cover, new readers, new advertisers. The lesson apparent to Sue Laris was that she and her newspaper had a definite stake in downtown’s continued growth.

After moving from their garage, Laris based the paper’s growing staff in a suite of tunnel-like offices on Spring Street. She recently moved again, into a squat gray building on West 1st Street, at downtown’s fraying northwestern edge. Although long blocks from the heart of the financial district, the building affords a picture-perfect view of office spires rising out over a copse of trees and behind them, the Harbor Freeway.

Playing the Role

After taking complete control of the paper in 1980, Laris began to involve herself in downtown’s civic affairs. “I had never had a business lunch in my life,” she recalls. “I began to see that I needed to play a role. The incentive was that I thought I knew this place well and I wanted to help make some of the decisions that would make it better.”

It was time, in her favorite phrase, to “get real.” Laris dieted, lightened her dark blonde hair, stopped coming to work in jeans and took to wearing stylish business suits. Soon enough, she no longer had to ask to be invited into civic groups--she was sought. She joined city planning and promotion task forces and became a member of the Central City Assn., a largely male group of civic insiders. She was the second businesswoman asked to join the downtown Rotary Club.

“People ask her to be involved because she can contribute,” John Welborne says. “She fits well into downtown circles because she cares about the place,” says James M. Wood, a powerful labor leader and chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency.

For a recent Central City lunch meeting, Laris reserved a table for a group of high-profile friends--among them, the CRA’s Wood, William Luddy, the new head of the Los Angeles Planning Commission and Fran Savitch, a former top aide to Mayor Tom Bradley. During their conversations, Laris scribbled down story ideas in a notebook she keeps in her purse. “I always try to keep at least one memory cell going,” she said.

Critics suggest that as she has become a major player downtown, Laris has embraced many of the attitudes of the decision-makers covered by her newspaper. “It’s a paper for yuppies,” said the Central City East Assn.’s Charles Woo. “That’s fine for the white-collar community. It does enrich those lives, but it doesn’t represent all of downtown.”

Laris and her downtown colleagues justify her involvement in downtown activities as beneficial both to her newspaper and to the area’s future. “It gives her understanding about projects that outsiders don’t get,” Wood says. “It helps her and her people to write with authority about what’s going on downtown.”

The Downtown News is often quick to publish stories that come out of Community Redevelopment Agency meetings and other downtown planning decisions. Laris and her supporters view those exclusives as a result of her paper’s incisive reporting of downtown developments.

“I think the paper gives a good sense of what’s going on downtown,” Arco’s Greenstein says. “The downtown community knows that the best way to speak to investors and real estate people and business people is through the Downtown News. It is simply a paper that downtown people have to read.”

Sometimes, critics say, Laris’ closeness to downtown power brokers has directly shaped her paper’s news content. According to one former Downtown News staff member, Laris often returned from meetings with major developers and government officials with scoops that were then parceled out to the staff.

“I always wondered whose agenda we were serving,” the former staffer said. A particular favorite seemed to be the Community Redevelopment Agency. “Every time the CRA cut a ribbon, I had to be there,” the staffer said. “We did not cover other planning-related stories as equally as we did the CRA. If there was something in one of my stories that cast the CRA in a negative light, I would hear it from her.”

“I think there are people who are critical of the agency who would like Sue to be more critical of the agency,” the CRA’s Wood said. “Their motives are suspect. Her paper has reported on plenty of things that have made me hit the roof.”

Nancy Minty, an activist attorney with the Inner City Law Center, suggests that while the News does stray into boosterism, it still manages to provide a steady diet of news and features essential to most downtown readers.

“There is a definite slant, but it doesn’t prevent the paper from being a good source of information,” Minty said. “It tells those of us who are not in the inner circles what is going on in those circles and what their attitudes are. That is very helpful information in this town.”

To Laris, it is only natural that her newspaper should be close to the community it covers. For her paper to remain successful, downtown must be successful. But recognizing that, she insists, she and her paper do not shrink from controversy. “If you were to look at a year’s worth of papers,” she says, “you’d see that our coverage of downtown is whole and fair. It’s wrong to call us boosterish.

“We’re not here for the purpose of ripping this community apart,” she says. “We don’t glance over problems, but we don’t go looking under rocks for bad guys, either. If it affects downtown, we cover it. I don’t think you can ask much more than that.”