In Battle of Weeklies, Local Focus is the Key

In Battle of the Weeklies, Local Focus Is the Key

The San Francisco Bay Guardian, a 44-year-old alternative weekly newspaper, is thinner than it used to be, but it remains determinedly local, and that is its major strength.

By Jonathan Weber

Bruce Brugmann, who founded the San Francisco Bay Guardian 44 years ago, could be doing a lot worse in his lion-in-winter years.

His paper, which helped define the genre known as the alt-weekly, lives on, much thinner than it used to be and not making any money, but remarkably faithful to its own idiosyncrasies. He now owns his own building in Potrero Hill, and his talented No.2, the executive editor Tim Redmond, remains at his side after more than 25 years.

If Brugmann was relaxed, even genial, when I met him for breakfast last week, it was most likely because of the warm glow from a recent huge victory in his six-year legal war with the rival SF Weekly. An appellate court unanimously upheld a lower court ruling that found the Weekly guilty of anticompetitive conduct for selling advertising below cost in an effort to drive the Guardian out of business. The Weekly now owes the Guardian some $22 million.

Yet as Brugmann knows as well as anyone, there is nothing genial about the local newspaper business. His baroque courtroom battle with the Weekly only spotlights a question that looms over alt-weeklies everywhere: Is there a future for their kind of journalism, whose days of highest impact seem to have passed?

Brugmann, a one-time infantryman, has a simple strategy: keep marching. “We'd never give up print -- I'm a newspaper guy,” he said. “We're a valuable resource, kind of irreplaceable.”

From one perspective, the keep-doing-what-we've-always-done approach looks hopeless. Surely, innovation is required, lest the rest of the business go the way of the lucrative classified and personal ads that long ago migrated to the Internet. Plenty of people around town consider the Guardian an anachronism and would hardly miss it if it weren't around.

But consistency and sense of place have their merits. When you pick up the paper, with its solid reporting on local politics and strong point of view, you know what to expect. A well-defined sensibility, deep local roots and a focus on its one and only market give the publication staying power.

Brugmann's legal team worked the local angle in court, framing the case as independent, local business vs. voracious, out-of-town chain. Village Voice Media, which owns SF Weekly and 13 other weeklies around the country, is the end result of a string of acquisitions by New Times, based in Phoenix, and the pugilistic style of Michael Lacey, the New Times co-founder, evidently did not endear him to the jury.

Alt-weeklies share an editorial formula that marries anti-establishment politics with heavy entertainment coverage and listings. But as David Brewster, the Seattle Weekly founder, notes, they have also long reflected the personality of their founders and the culture of their communities. The in-your-face, libertarian-leaning approach of New Times was perfect for Phoenix, just as Mr. Brugmann's old-school leftism was a fit for San Francisco.

In the Internet era, there are plenty of options for those attracted to an alternative sensibility. But even if the Salons of the world capture some of that audience, there's still a place for the distinctively local approach -- and chains, by their nature, find that harder to cultivate.

The SF Weekly is in many ways a richer, more contemporary paper than the Bay Guardian. But its most recent issue, as an example, features a cover story -- about the persecution of border migrants -- that's part of a chainwide project and doesn't have much to do with San Francisco.

Lacey said in an e-mail that Village Voice Media is profitable, and Bill Jensen, the company's new media director, said Web traffic had quadrupled since 2007 and there were now a half-dozen new revenue streams from online and mobile. . (Though half of the Weekly's ad revenues are being diverted to an escrow account, Lacey remains contemptuous of the legal verdict and vows to appeal.)

Many alt-weeklies can probably get along fine for a while by keeping editorial costs down, relying on entertainment and lifestyle advertising and building their Internet presence.

But a strong local voice and brand identity are key to possible new strategies in areas like live events production and participatory journalism. Even on the Internet, where scale matters, local coverage remains a promising frontier. This is an issue close to my heart, as the success of The Bay Citizen depends on our ability to build close ties to the community by cultivating a distinctively local journalistic approach.

After all these years, Brugmann and the Bay Guardian, whatever their weaknesses, remain steadfast in their local focus. For that, they may yet be rewarded.

This column also appears in the Bay Area edition of the New York Times.

Jonathan Weber Jonathan is Editor-in-Chief of The Bay Citizen. Before joining as the founding editor of The Bay Citizen, Jonathan served as CEO and editor-in-chief of New West Publishing, the Missoula, Montana-based media company that he founded ...