Grim season for alternatives with the fall of New Times

When New Times, the feisty alternative weekly, shut down a couple of weeks ago, I first learned of it when I overheard a conversation between two colleagues at The Times -- precisely the way I learned, 40 years earlier, of a similar deal between two competing publishers that also left Los Angeles with fewer media voices.

I was in college, working part time at The Times on Jan. 6, 1962, the day Times Mirror, then the parent company of The Times, announced it was closing its afternoon paper, the Mirror; simultaneously, the rival Hearst Corp. folded its morning paper, the Examiner. That would leave The Times alone in the morning, and Hearst’s Herald-Express -- to be re-christened the Herald Examiner -- alone in the afternoon.

How convenient -- how lucrative -- especially for The Times. Afternoon newspapers were a rapidly dying breed. A morning monopoly was like a license to print money. Sure enough, the Herald Examiner struggled and ultimately folded while The Times thrived.

Flash-forward to October 2002. The Phoenix-based New Times chain of 12 alternative weeklies announces that it’s closing Los Angeles New Times, leaving LA Weekly, owned by Village Voice Media of New York, as our only alternative paper. Simultaneously, Village Voice Media announces that it’s closing Cleveland Free Times, leaving its rival, Cleveland New Times, as the sole alternative weekly in that city.

“This transaction,” said David Schneiderman, chief executive of Village Voice Media, “is consistent with the strategic direction of the company. We feel strongly about the markets we are in and will continue to grow the company, both internally and through acquisitions.”

“Strategic direction”? “Grow the company”? “Acquisitions”? It’s impossible for me to imagine any of those words or phrases being uttered by the pioneers of the alternative press movement -- people like Norman Mailer, Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher, who founded the Village Voice in 1955; Art Kunkin, who started the Los Angeles Free Press in 1964; and Bruce Brugmann, who created the Bay Guardian in San Francisco in 1966.

Their mission was political, not commercial. However, much of today’s alternative press has “an antipathy toward all things political,” says Kit Rachlis, editor of Los Angeles magazine, who was previously an editor at The Times and the Village Voice and was editor in chief of LA Weekly from 1989 to 1993.

The alternative newspaper movement -- founded amid idealism, independence and political activism -- is today often more Pogo than Che: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Increasingly dominated by large, profit-driven corporations, the 118 members of the Assn. of Alternative Weeklies generate, cumulatively, about a half-billion dollars in advertising sales annually; about half those papers are not independent but function as part of some larger media group.

It’s difficult to generalize about the alternative press since some of the papers -- the Chicago Reader, Boston Phoenix and Bay Guardian, to take just three -- are so idiosyncratic as to defy categorization, even in this age of what Brugmann calls “Chains-R-Us” alternative journalism.

“But once you get into chain journalism and you start empire-building, you take on the characteristics of the monopolizing dailies,” Brugmann says. “You get involved with bankers and venture capitalists to get cash and then you need big, fat numbers to satisfy them.

“That means you tend to use the same formula everywhere because it’s cheaper, and you cover entertainment because it’s cheaper -- and that tends to squeeze out local politics.”

Even for independent alternative papers, without the bottom-line pressures of corporate ownership, the choice of entertainment and culture over politics reflects the times. The United States is a far less political society than it was in the 1960s, the spiritual (and, in many cases, the actual) birthing ground for the early alternative weeklies. Vietnam. Civil rights. Feminism. The sexual revolution. All spawned activist movements and divided the country.

There are no movements or divisions of comparable intensity now. “Hey, hey, GWB, how many terrorists did you kill today?” would lack both rhyme and reason. But the mainstream news media have generally not done a very good job of covering youth culture, and that’s created a large vacuum into which many alternative newspapers have eagerly, and profitably, stepped.

Not all, of course. At 67, Brugmann still has the Bay Guardian attacking the San Francisco establishment from the left.

The Bay Guardian is not alone. But politics hasn’t been the defining mission of every alternative weekly.

“Many of today’s alternative papers are quite young,” says Robert Roth, who helped found the Chicago Reader in 1971. “They didn’t sell out; they started out on a different tack.”

But neither the general drift from political confrontation to pop culture nor the pursuit of profits is completely new to the alternative press. The alternative weeklies have long been stuffed with entertainment listings and ads for sexual activities in combinations and permutations that have little to do with the battles for peace or racial equality.

Still, I’m sorry to see New Times disappear -- and I say that as someone who was, on several occasions, the target of Editor Rick Barrs’ odious diatribes in his column The Finger. LA Weekly is bigger and more solid -- more journalistically responsible -- than New Times was. But the Los Angeles Times is big and solid and journalistically responsible. New Times was often an irreverent gadfly, needling City Hall, the LAPD, the Catholic Church, big land developers and -- yes -- The Times.

New Times was flawed, as were the Mirror, the Examiner and the Herald Examiner when they went out of business. But The Times too is flawed, and Los Angeles has now been deprived of another distinctive alternative voice -- a voice we’ll miss, even if it was often shrill and sometimes irresponsible.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.