About a year ago, we were summoned to Hartford, to a meeting with the publishers. We were given homework: write a mission statement for our respective newspapers.
By we, I mean the editors of the four newspapers in the Advocate chain. (That chain was broken with the sale of the Valley Advocate to Newspapers of New England in the fall of 2007; the Hartford Courant, which had owned all four papers since 1999, continues to own and operate our three former sister papers in Connecticut.) The attendees at this particular meeting included Andy Bromage, top editor at the New Haven Advocate at the time, then-editor Alistair Highet and his managing editor, John Adamian, of the Hartford Advocate, and Tom Gogola, then the editor of the Fairfield Weekly. I was there as editor in the Valley office, a position I took over in 2001.
This was the second time I'd been asked to write a mission statement for the Valley Advocate. The first time was shortly after NewMassMedia (the original corporate name of the Advocate papers) was sold by its independent owners, founding publishers Geoff Robinson and Christine Austin, to the Hartford Courant. The Courant, at the time, was owned by Times Mirror, which, a short while later, merged with the giant Tribune Corp. Fran Zankowski, the CEO of the new NewMassMedia, was homegrown talent, selected by the Courant's upper management to run the alt weeklies. Fran, who'd come up through sales to become publisher of the Hartford Advocate before the sale to Times Mirror, expressed a desire to take inventory of the editorial units in the four papers. He asked his editors for mission statements. And he requested some empirical data: how many columns did the papers dedicate to various general subjects—i.e. politics, the environment, music (by genre), and so on. He asked us to count every column in a year's worth of newspapers.
I swallowed my skepticism because I was sincerely interested in what an issue-by-issue count would reveal. I also thought I understood why a new CEO would want to test his editors' sense of the mission. By his deadline, Fran received the work he'd requested from his editors.
We never heard another word about the project. What value Zankowski or his bosses at the Courant derived from the hours of work the Advocate editorial offices put into the project is unclear. My suspicion: the work was only briefly reviewed, if at all, and it provided no value to speak of.
Now, in the fall of 2007, just weeks before the sale of the Valley Advocate to Newspapers of New England—a sale none of the editors could have anticipated—we were being asked again to formally state the mission of our newspapers. We gathered at the Hartford Advocate's offices on Wawarme Avenue in Hartford, in a commercial building owned by the Courant. (Courant management had insisted that the Hartford Advocate vacate its storefront offices at 100 Constitution Plaza, a prime location, and move to the Courant's austere facility on Warwarme, far removed from Hartford's downtown.) We went around the room; each editor took his turn reading the mission statement he'd prepared. All of us stressed the need for our papers to be focused locally, to provide point-of-view analysis of subjects that mainstream papers can't or won't explore. I described the Valley Advocate as a "fiercely independent& equal-opportunity critic."
When we were done, group publisher Josh Mamis, who had previously been editor of the New Haven Advocate, acknowledged that we all seemed to agree that we should "be local." He then went on to sound the same theme we'd been hearing for the last seven years: we must find ways to share editorial content between the papers.
That was pretty much it. No further discussion about our visions for our respective papers, no debate about what I viewed as the illogical suggestion that the four papers could focus locally at the same time that they faced continual pressure to share content. I should have spoken up, but by then, I knew it was pointless. I left the meeting shaking my head, wondering why I'd spent several hours working on yet another mission statement that was sure to be ignored by the very people who'd requested it. What a waste, I said to myself. It was a phrase that had popped through my head several times a week for several years.
A few weeks later, the employees of the Valley Advocate learned that they would soon be working for Newspapers of New England, publishers of the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Greenfield Recorder, among other papers.
Seven years earlier, I had felt a great deal of trepidation when I learned that the Advocate had been sold to a media conglomerate. The Courant had effectively bought one of its competitors when it acquired the Advocate chain, giving it a near-monopoly of much of the Connecticut media market. Yet now, though we were being acquired by the parent company of two of our chief competitors, I had not a single nervous moment. NNE was a small fraction of the size of Tribune, and it was privately-held.
I knew this much: Life with NNE couldn't be any worse than life under Tribune had been.
I came to the Valley Advocate in June of 1995, hired by newly-appointed editor Dan Caccavaro, with whom I'd worked at the TAB newspapers in greater Boston. Though I had fond memories of the years I'd lived in the Valley when I was a child, it was mainly the desire to keep working with Caccavaro that convinced me to take the job. That, and the presence of Geoff Robinson.
To me, Robinson was a hero. As an editor at the Hartford Courant, he'd become dispirited with mainstream journalism. He thought it was narrow, uncritical and dull. Instead of just whining, he and his Courant colleague Ed Matys, together with Matys' wife Linda and Robinson's partner Chris Austin, started the Advocate.
When I met Geoff before I accepted the job of managing editor, he spoke passionately about the alt press' role as a muckraking watchdog and as an amplifier for voices and ideas that the mainstream excluded or ignored.
And he bragged about the carpeting in his newspaper office: the cheapest industrial grade he could find. Robinson said he'd rather invest money in the newsroom than waste it on the d?cor. In the five years I worked for Robinson, I saw the benefits of this philosophy and shared in its intangible rewards. (Maybe I should have paid a little more attention to the fact that his office was a great deal plusher than the rest.)
Between 1995 and 2000, the Valley Advocate grew as a business and as a newspaper. The newsroom expanded. After Caccavaro and I joined veterans Stephanie Kraft and Mark Anderson, we hired arts editor Sean Glennon. Reporter Maureen Turner came aboard a while later. When Glennon and Anderson moved on, Amy Kroin and Mary Bagg and Trish Asklar came on. We hired Josh Westlund to cover news in the upper Valley, and later Jo Ann Dilorenzo joined our merry band. With a deep pool of freelancers, we had a lot of boots on the ground.
And we needed them. Every one of them. And we could have used more. In those years, we had lots of space to fill. The paper was bigger in those days, at least dimensionally. From 2000 to the present, like many others in America, it was reformatted a number of times, inches cut from height and width in face of the rising cost of paper. In addition to taller, wider papers, the Advocate in that era routinely published at a 50:50 ratio, advertising to editorial content.
We used every drop of space: we had plenty to say. With the help of Stephanie Kraft, the staff studied not only current events, but the history of events, looking for as much background as we could find. We dug voraciously into newspaper archives and public records, developed deep sources, chased tips. We took seriously our mission to focus locally, to be independent-minded and fearless.
No subjects were off limits, though we preferred to stay local. We wrote about anything and everything. From bank deregulation to Bondi's Island, Barney Frank to Frank Black, from the Wally Byams to WalMart, we followed our curiosity, trying to connect the dots.
And we caused trouble. We exposed the lies of Mike Albano, the disgraced former mayor of Springfield, and of other scoundrels in his administration. We went after corrupt pols and misbehaving cops in Holyoke. We kept a spotlight on Pat Goggins, a Northampton realtor and former county commissioner and city councilor, for his role in the collapse of Heritage Bank—a story that was in and out of the pages of the Advocate for a decade.
In some cases, whether we were writing about a local politician or a local business or a local arts group, what we wrote caused offense among advertisers, and we lost business.
Never did we feel pressure from above to reel it in.
In Kathy Nylic, who came to the Valley Advocate as a sales rep in the 1980s and served as publisher of the paper from 1997 until she died of breast cancer in 2000, the newsroom had a true champion. I believe she saw not only the inherent value in what independent newspapers do—though it was for that vision that I most admired her—but she also saw that letting a strong, passionate, hardworking newsroom run is good business.
Rather than asking us to cool it, rather than apologize for the Advocate's hard-hitting reporting, she diversified her portfolio so she was never dependent on a single advertiser or market segment. Deeply committed to the community, Kathy also earned ample goodwill by supporting events and charities in the Valley, donating thousands of dollars in ad space and cash to sponsor worthy causes and local happenings.
Sadly, Kathy Nylic passed away as the Advocate was in the throes of its transition after the sale to the Courant. I am not the only employee of that era who wonders what might have been different if Kathy had lived to guide us through our days under corporate rule.
If I had not been at the Advocate between 1995 and 2000, I might never have really known what a giant corporation can do to a fiercely independent publication.
The TAB chain had been a hard-hitting independent for most of my time there, but I left shortly after it was acquired by the giant mutual fund company Fidelity. I only got a brief but unpleasant taste of what became Fidelity's 100-plus newspaper company, Community Newspapers, Inc.
Having witnessed five years of the Advocate as an independent, on the whole, I'd judge the Hartford Courant's ownership of the Valley Advocate as an almost utter failure. In seven years, the Valley paper spent an enormous amount of its time and resources in dubious and rudderless efforts to become something other than what it was. As one of my colleagues noted incredulously, "They took a business that had been successful doing things its way, but instead of leaving it alone to make money, they made it do everything their way. And then they complain when it doesn't make the same kind of money it used to make."
Operationally, intense pressure came from Tribune to have all its various business units do things the Tribune way: one benefits package, one commission structure, one information technology platform, and so forth. Tribune's financial officers in Chicago were not satisfied with the profit margins the Advocates produced. Though by alternative newspaper standards, the Advocate, a free paper, was very profitable, Tribune pressed for a higher return on its investment. To achieve higher profitability, Tribune repeatedly demanded reductions in expenses, which led to layoffs. As the Advocate chain had many of its operations eliminated and functions—human resources, finance and accounting, information technology and eventually its classified department—taken over by the Courant or the Tribune, it became more reliant on the mother ship.
As Tribune fell on harder and harder times, eventually selling out in a controversial deal with billionaire tycoon Sam Zell, the Advocates were increasingly vulnerable to the resulting disorganization. When, in an attempt to stanch its financial bleeding, Tribune outsourced its IT help desk to a firm overseas and we had to call India to have someone figure out why our email wouldn't work, we had mixed feelings. The folks in India were quite as handy as, say, Justin Baldini, our crackerjack IT guy, had been when he worked directly for the Advocate papers, and they were quite a bit more responsive than the IT help desks in Hartford or Chicago had been in their undermanned and demoralized state.
Through it all, only sporadic attention was paid to the Advocates' newsrooms. Interest from above came in the form of two oft-repeated questions: How can you do more with less? And how can you make yourselves more attractive to younger readers? The later question was anathema to the Advocates, which had never set out to reach a particular demographic segment. The former question was simply offensive: the Advocate had always done more with less by spending little on carpeting so it could spend more for words and pictures. Neither the Tribune nor the Courant shared our priorities.
That's not to say that the people who worked at the Courant or for the Tribune were bad people. In fact, I mostly encountered good people, bright professionals who wanted to do a good job, who tried to be helpful. And it's not to say that it was impossible to do good work under Courant/Tribune. All the papers in the Tribune family, from the Los Angeles Times to the Valley Advocate, did some good work over the last few years. Ironically, though the Valley Advocate's local coverage was not as strong as it had been in the '90s, its analysis of some national and international affairs in the post-9/11 world has been much stronger than before—and a hell of a lot stronger than any of the mainstream newspapers that supported George Bush and his misadventures in Iraq.
Nor was it only people at the Courant and the Tribune who were responsible for the time wasted and the opportunities missed during the last seven years. If I say that we were often done in by our own people, I'm articulating a perspective that may be unique to those of us at the Valley paper. Under independent ownership, the four papers had been encouraged to compete with each other in search of their own individual identities. Under corporate ownership, we in the Valley office often felt that we were being forced into the Hartford Advocate mold. Having been publisher of the Hartford Advocate before becoming CEO of the whole chain, Fran Zankowski viewed the Hartford paper as the best of the four. Fran told me, directly and through his emissaries, that the Valley paper was too serious, too gray, too preoccupied with corrupt local officials. One of his lieutenants once referred to the Valley paper and its readers as "puritanical." Fran and his publishers repeatedly asked us to brighten up the Advocate's look with more empty space and trendy graphics, shorten the length of stories and share content between papers. He cut our budgets and eliminated staff positions, a trend that continued long after he left the papers to become a publishing consultant.
Why didn't his editors quit? Why didn't I, given my criticisms, go find another job? It was more than a family to feed and a mortgage to pay that kept me and others working at the Advocate. In a word, it was love. Love for the Valley. Love for the work. Love for each other. Love for what the Advocate had been and what it still could be.
There was never a single request from Fran or the company above him that, in and of itself, seemed sinister or unethical. Rather, it seemed that the Advocate was being systematically undone by a kind of groupthink, a set of assumptions made largely in a corporate environment by people who were legally bound to put their shareholders above their readers. None of the Hartford Courant's top brass ever stepped into my office, phoned me or emailed to tell me what we should write or what we shouldn't write. In fact, I had little direct interaction with the Courant's chief executives. When the Advocate chain was sold in 2000, Marty Petty, Courant CEO at the time, made a brief visit to the Valley Advocate newsroom in our offices in Hatfield. Smiling broadly, she said she was excited about the purchase. "We want our papers to be Best in Class," she said a couple of times, without further explication. I never saw Petty again. About six months later, the Courant's parent company, Times Mirror, merged with the Tribune Corp. and a short time later, Petty left the Courant.
I met Petty's successor Jack Davis at a meeting at the Courant's offices on Broad Street in Hartford. The meeting was to review a focus-group study of the Hartford Advocate. Wearing a bowtie, a copy of the New York Times under his arm, he told me that he'd enjoyed reading the Valley Advocate and we chatted for a few minutes about politics. I never saw Davis again: during a subsequent Tribune retrenching, he was replaced in the top job by Steve Carver, who'd come up through one of Tribune's broadcast units in Atlanta. Carver visited the Valley Advocate's offices in Easthampton once, a day or two after he'd announced a round of layoffs at the Courant. Like his predecessors, he spoke enthusiastically about the paper. Unlike those who came before, Carver also described, in the most general terms possible, the "reality of business" that we faced: the expenses a newspaper incurred could not exceed its revenues. To manage our bottom line, we must, Carver said "do more with less" and "work smarter."
The players changed constantly. The tune remained the same.
It's only been nine months since we were split off from the Advocate chain and sold to NNE. We hear daily from our former colleagues how lucky we are to be free of the Courant as it and its parent company Tribune continue to struggle. Stories of the Tribune's current travails can be found in the business news nearly every day.
We feel lucky.
But for many of us, having been released from the belly of the beast, the scars remain. We have been closer to the main current of the American corporate media than any of us ever wanted to get and we have seen that it is as shallow and unquestioning as we suspected, as profit-motivated and risk-averse. As journalists, we can pray we never have to work for Big Media again. But as citizens we remain vulnerable to its feckless ways.
