The Inside Scoop From Outsiders

The corpses of dead dailies litter this country like the battlefield at Antietam, but in cafes, sidewalks and, yes, the cyberspace ether swirling above Santa Monica, it looks like a newfangled newspaper war could be brewing.

Run by a trio of Colorado carpetbaggers, the freebie Santa Monica Daily Press sneaked into town in mid-November like a guerrilla, materializing out of the newsprint jungle.

In a politically progressive town whose residents are starved for news about themselves, the flimsy tabloid--a compendium of wire stories, a few locally generated pieces and advertising--has a certain appeal. And a goofy charm.

The brains behind the operation, a Boston-born Aspen man named Dave Danforth, lists himself cryptically as “Test Subject” on the masthead. The paper’s interim motto: Serving Santa Monica for the past (today’s count: 58) days.

Danforth’s partners are publisher Ross Furukawa, a 31-year-old San Diego software entrepreneur, and editor Carolyn Sackariason, a 33-year-old native of Minneapolis, who writes most of the paper’s local stories. They met at the Aspen Daily News, a paper co-founded by Danforth in 1978, and the progenitor of a string of similar dailies.

Santa Monica, an affluent, educated city of 84,000, has not had a daily newspaper to call its own since the 123-year-old Outlook was shuttered by its owner in March 1998.

The absence of a daily paper in Santa Monica is notable, given that the famously rent-controlled coastal city makes national news, routinely passing some of the most progressive legislation in the country--banning ATM fees, strictly regulating the environment, trying to force businesses to pay resort employees a living wage.

“We have our own police system, our own bus system, and we are a very self-contained community,” says Kevin McKeown, Santa Monica’s Mayor pro tem. “But in terms of the Los Angeles Times and other major media outlets, Santa Monica is seen as just another suburban area. People forget there is a community in which they can play a part.”

Since the demise of the Outlook, a glut of publications has rushed to fill the vacuum. But success in Santa Monica has proved elusive, even for large papers. Within the last two years, as part of a shift in the paper’s business and journalistic strategy, the Los Angeles Times closed both of its neighborhood supplements that focused on Santa Monica.

The city is now served by three weeklies--the Santa Monica Mirror, Santa Monica Bay Week and the Santa Monica Observer. The Marina del Rey-based weekly, the Argonaut, also covers Santa Monica. The Santa Monica Sun, a monthly, focuses on entertainment. Until the debut of the Daily Press, only two publications--both electronic (www.surfsantamonica.com and www.oceanparkgazette.org)--offered a daily news report.

The Santa Monica Daily Press, which does not publish on Sunday , is printed in Gardena, has a press run of 4,000 and six full-time employees (only one of whom, Sackariason, is a full-time reporter). As of Tuesday, the city has approved a total of 54 news boxes, which are scattered throughout the city.

Jeff Hall, publisher of the Sun, once tried to get all the publications to join forces, but, he says, the experience was “like getting the Afghan tribal leaders together to create a country. Santa Monica, he adds, “is a very tough environment for newspapers. Everyone in the world wants to own a newspaper in Santa Monica. This is like the Holy Grail.”

Going Against

Conventional Wisdom

Dubbed the “father of the micro-daily” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Danforth, 51, has helped launch seven free daily papers since he co-founded the Aspen Daily News in 1978. He has managed to make nearly all of them profitable by ignoring conventional newspaper wisdom.

That wisdom says newspapers have been a mature industry for more than a century, and that the industry has been subject to consolidation so massive that most American cities are now monopoly markets for a single morning paper.

Furthermore, the development of other media such as radio, TV and now practically hourly updates on the Internet, continues to erode the security of even the most successful newspapers.

“If we had known that you can’t start a daily newspaper anymore we wouldn’t have done it,” Danforth says. Like his businesses, Danforth is lean, with a runner’s body. He enjoys needling reporters from big papers whom he regards as fat and complacent. He likes to make jokes and talks about how much fun he’s having with this whole micro-daily venture, but it’s clear he is dead serious.

The way Danforth tells it, his first foray into the news business happened by accident. The Aspen Daily News (Motto: “If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen”) debuted as a one-page wall poster, stuck on bulletin boards around town. The paper began accepting ads to cover its printing costs. Eventually the paper grew to 28 pages.

In 1989, Danforth ventured into New Hampshire, where he launched the Conway Daily Sun, followed three years later by the Berlin Daily Sun. In 1992, Danforth, who attended Yale as an undergraduate, enrolled in Stanford University’s MBA program and distilled his experience into a business plan which he and some classmates applied when they launched the Palo Alto Daily News in 1995, the Berkeley Daily Planet in 1999 and the San Mateo Daily Journal in 2000. He claims all the papers, with the exception of the Daily Planet, turned a profit after nine months to three years.

While Danforth says the papers are not cookie-cutter, they all share certain characteristics: They are free, and generate revenue through ad sales. They all publish in the morning and contain hard news, which Danforth defines as cops, courts, schools, business.

Finally, all the papers all have significantly lower advertising rates than their competitors. So far, Daily Press advertisers include local restaurants and stores.

Danforth tries to enter a new market without fanfare. That’s because after he announced the launch of his second newspaper, in Conway, N.H., the local weekly with its own printing press instantly went daily. “It took four years to get them out of the market,” he says.

While the journalistic merits of Danforth’s product can be debated, there’s no question a certain spirit is at work. When he launches a new paper, says Danforth, he aims to win a community’s confidence with a select few hard-hitting stories. Each of his papers, he says, has published a story that put it on the city’s radar. In Aspen, the paper focused on alleged favoritism within the Police Department. In Palo Alto, the paper honed in on a controversial downtown developer’s project.

Last month, a story written by Danforth with the inflammatory headline “SM City Hall: Savior or Slumlord?” addressed the city’s struggle over how to improve one of its last mobile home parks.

Bob Moncrief, the city’s housing and redevelopment manager, says he thinks the piece was balanced and well researched. “It documented all the issues rather than establishing any new kind of insight.”

The Big Papers

Take on Local News

Every community benefits from a local, daily paper, says Bryce Nelson, a journalism professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. But a city like Santa Monica is in a curious position.

“The general problem is that for big metropolitan papers like the Los Angeles Times, the [Chicago] Tribune, the [Washington] Post, is how to provide enough local news to places like Santa Monica, Pasadena, Burbank,” says Nelson. “It’s expensive, and that’s why they have backed away from it.”

Those who have tried to make a go of it in Santa Monica say there is simply not enough advertising in the city to cover the costs of a daily. The city is increasingly dominated by chains that do not advertise much in local papers. Grocery stores, once the financial lifeblood of newspapers, such as the Outlook, no longer provide the kind of revenue they once did.

McKeown, the Santa Monica politician, laments the dearth of debate on political issues, which he attributes to the lack of a well-produced daily paper in the city.

“An informed electorate is one of the real pieces of democracy,” he says. “We are at a disadvantage if we don’t have daily news. Someone with deep pockets can afford to put misinformation in your mailbox every day. Free information negates a lot of the evil of campaign money.”

Santa Monica resident Peter Coopersmith gets his local news from friends, fliers and word on the street, an anachronism in a wealthy 21st century city. “There are no sources for local details about what is going on,” he says. “There is no real investigation of anything. It’s a real shame.”

While the appetite for better coverage is strong, the bigger question remains: Can the Daily Press deliver the in-depth stories Santa Monicans crave and can it spark the higher quality news often generated by a newspaper war?

“Unless you can produce something of some quality,” says Nelson, “it is going to be a tough sell.”

Jorge Casuso, a former Outlook reporter who is editor and founder of surfsantamonica.com, misses the keen sense of competition. “I find that I look at the other papers, when I can find them,” says Casuso. “If we miss a story, I’ll kick my desk or something, but there there is not this kind of intense rivalry.”

Carolanne Sudderth, the founder and editor of the online Ocean Park Gazette, which subsists on grants from businesses and organizations such as Santa Monica College, says she feels rivalry with her online competitor but reserves judgment about the Daily Press. “It’s another in a series of ... papers that are trying to take the place of the Outlook but aren’t willing to walk the walk,” she says. “They don’t go out and gather the news. Jorge and I are the only reporters who go out there and attend the meetings, read the environmental impact reports. The Mirror, the Observer and now the Daily Press are basically wannabes.”

Skip Rimer, former executive editor of the now defunct Outlook, likens the Daily Press to a hopelessly out-of-shape person working out at a gym. “Some people would laugh,” he says. “I say more power to them, at least they are trying. But I personally wouldn’t bet my life savings on starting a paper in Santa Monica.

Rimer, director of communications at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, says a lot of papers have tried to make a go of it since the Outlook folded. “I would bet that none of them are making money hand over fist because of the competition and because it is difficult to survive as a small city newspaper today, especially when you are in the Los Angeles Times’ shadow.” As for whether this mini-news war in Santa Monica will ultimately benefit readers, Rimer is skeptical. “This is not like the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News battling it out for journalistic supremacy,” he says. “They are all just battling it out to make a buck.”