When I started work at the Advocate in 1974, just a year after its founding, I became part of a motley crew with a passionate interest in news and arts and very little training in journalism. Our tiny staff included two reporters: Preston Gralla, who ran around the Amherst-Northampton area gathering news of all sorts, and Eric Benjamin, who worked in the Springfield office writing music stories and exposes of the Springfield Police Department's use of flesh-ripping dumdum bullets.
We were going head-to-head with well established, historic local dailies, including the Springfield Republican and the Daily Hampshire Gazette. We didn't do the birth announcements, the obituaries, the auction notices. Our paper, started up on $3,000—the pooled savings of our founders, former Hartford Courant reporters Ed Matys and Geoff Robinson—was a raw newbie on the Valley's journalism scene. How, we asked Robinson, could we compete with papers that had, in the Republican's case, 80 reporters or more, and room for dozens of stories every day?
It's not the number of stories we can cover, Geoff said. It's our point of view. If we write stories that give people the Advocate's unique perspective (one of Geoff's favorite phrases), they will know how to apply that perspective to other stories. And as we do that, as we tell readers what they aren't hearing from other sources, we'll get those readers on our side, and the advertisers will have to come along.
So that was the game plan. Write a few stories demanding environmental safety, honest management of public money, truth from your elected representatives, and your readers will get it. Our job was to find a voice.
Before I came, the Advocate had tested out a new kind of news voice by emitting a combative cry about nuclear power, decades before the mainstream press began to question its safety and utility. A story about Sam Lovejoy fighting plans to build a nuclear power plant on the plain in Montague announced to the world that we were here. Soon more sophisticated environmental writing in the form of an investigative series by Don Michak and Paul Bass on Monsanto's pollution of the Chicopee River moved our credibility a giant step forward. People called for years with requests for copies of those stories.
In the early 1980s, we began to carve out a niche doing stories other papers didn't get tips about or wouldn't do. Freelancer Kathy Stoddard, married to a building contractor, learned that a highly publicized redevelopment of the empty Mountain Farms Mall in Hadley was a fraud—that no national chains were coming to the mall as the developer had advertised. The Advocate, under editor David Reid, was the only paper to publish that story, and a story about a crooked barter association manager in Springfield who was draining 400 local businesses of goods and services, even building houses to sell for his own profit with construction material from his member companies.
A different kind of story fell into our laps when I went to interview an assistant district attorney in Northampton about a public housing tenant who had collected money from several local institutions to help his neighbors with food and transportation. Though both the donors and the neighbors agreed that the money had been used for those purposes, someone had set the DA's office on to charge him with running a con scheme. No sooner did I mention the name of the man, who was an African American, than the zealous ADA quipped, "You mean Mr. Jive? He's a street operator!" We printed a story that was received with gratifying good sportsmanship at the DA's office, and that led to some soul-searching about cultural stereotypes that bordered on race discrimination.
By this time we had gained a reputation as a paper that would do stories other papers wouldn't do, and we were getting a steady trickle of tips by phone and mail. Our readership was shored up by a lively, inclusive arts section, created first by Chuck Smith and continued by Faye Frail, and the brilliantly paced, jocular sports writing of Chip Ainsworth. On the investigative side, it still remained for us to get deeper traction in the Springfield area, but Michak cracked away, aiming deft hits at politicians there. In the late '80s reporter Kris Hundley, with support from editor Bill Swislow, persisted in contacting a family who had received a secretive settlement from Westfield State College and eventually induced the mother to reveal that the college's president had sexually harassed more than half a dozen male students.
The Advocate broke a story that led to a trial in which the president was acquitted on the specific charges of rape. But he was forced to leave the college. Hundley's reporting on Westfield State, the Springfield mob and the early developments that led to the end of Matthew Ryan's corrupt tenure as Hampden County District Attorney laid a foundation for our work in Springfield that was brilliantly elaborated, during the editorship of Kitty Axelson, by Al Giordano in his political coverage of the city from 1989 to 1992. Among other things, Giordano exposed the circle of bribery and influence peddling that centered on one-time tax collector Charlie Kingston.
Meanwhile Stoddard produced a never-to-be-forgotten story about how police in Holyoke, in an incredible display of excessive force, battered a woman's head against the wall of her car. The victim, a mother of small children, begged them to stop because she had a previous head injury. They went on battering, and she died
Our work attracted attention in some quarters that surprised us. In the early '90s, the leading family in the West Springfield mob had a relative in prison for murder. The computer that had chosen the jury had omitted the letter C and failed to select from certain inner city neighborhoods in Hartford, where the trial had taken place. I was invited to meet half a dozen men from the family for lunch at a restaurant near our office (unwilling to get in a car with my hosts, I had suggested a place within walking distance). There they made their case that a liberal paper should challenge a verdict handed down by a jury that had been selected improperly, since the computer might have discriminated against inner city residents and minority members. I told them politely (after all, they were paying the check) that we didn't like murder even when the victim was a career criminal, and, in effect, that we wouldn't play. They were courteous and jovial and there was never any retaliation.
By this time we had what Geoff had talked about: voice. And we were grateful to be in an area where people were avid readers of print. It was readers that made the Advocate from the beginning, picking us up after they'd finished the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the local dailies, supplying us with tips, and reading stories so long any Journalism 101 class would have told us people would never wade through them. But that didn't matter much. After all, most of us had never taken Journalism 101.
