New times at the RFT.
For those who lamented the sale of the Riverfront Times to New Times, Inc., the burden of absentee ownership grows heavier every week In the six months since RFT founder Ray Hartmann handed over control to the Phoenix-based chain, the 21-year-old paper has become a very different publication.RFT Editor Safir Ahmed and publisher Terry Coe, a New Times veteran who transferred to St. Louis from the Houston Press, say that at the end of the current transition phase, the RFT will be more magazine-like, and emphasize solid, investigative reporting.
The changes are "based on my conversations with Michael Lacey looking at what direction the paper should go in," Ahmed said. "It's clearly a New Times model."
Lacey is co-founder and executive editor of the company that now owns 10 alternative weeklies and the Ruxton Group, an advertising clearinghouse that places national ads in the New Times chain and 11 other newsweeklies. He is also at the center of the national debate surrounding the incorporation ("Gannettization" to its strongest detractors) of the alternative newsweekly industry.
Some have called the New Times formula cookie-cutter journalism, Coe has a softer view.
"There is a blueprint for what we do, but the details that go inside that blueprint are totally locally driven," he says. "New Times really has a belief that a newspaper should be independent."
Whatever the argument, the changes at the RFT are drastic:
* The four regular columns were canceled in early January. Ahmed said that the more newsy aspects of the columns will probably work their way back into the paper as short features.
* RFT News, a page or two of local news briefs, was removed in March.
* The average feature count has decreased. A year ago readers usually saw between four and six features; nowadays, three tops, sometimes less.
* The cover story has ballooned in average length.
* Restaurant reviews and mini-reviews have overwhelmed the back of the book.
* The A&E News section has been replaced by Night & Day, a two-page spread with calendar highlights and a few blurbs.
* The promotional events sponsored or co-sponsored by the RFT have been severely scaled down.
Ahmed, who speaks about the redesign and restructuring of the RFT with the zeal of a true-believer, says that the editorial jumble is necessary to allow writers more time to focus on lengthy features, and to shift away from opinion-based copy.
"The general direction of the Riverfront Times is a strong newspaper that emphasizes news reporting," Ahmed says.
The prime examples of this invigorated reporting is massive recent cover stories. Ahmed says that prior to the buy-out the average ran 4,000 to 5,000 words. That figure has nearly doubled (more than 7,000 words for the story on KWMU General Manager Patty Bennett). This is New Times story-driven journalism, the concept at the core of the company's editorial "blueprint"
Think of the RFT less as a newsweekly and more as "a national magazine reported locally," several staff members say. No specific magazine was ever mentioned, but one assumes that the national publication is more along the lines of Rolling Stone than Martha Stewart Living or The Economist.
But the analogy limps: Any magazine that a reader buys will need to offer more than one exhaustive story, random scraps of wit and information and a slew of restaurant reviews and event listings. But nobody has to buy the RFT - the crucial factor is moving the 100,000 copies off the stand and into the cars, hands or homes of the 18- to 34-year-olds, 56 percent male, 44 percent female, 82 percent college graduate, average household income $44,000, more likely to smoke, drink, buy compact disks, laptop computers and other electronic devices reader.
In writer D.J. Wilson's words: "The key to all of this is that the paper is free - all you have to do is bend and reach."
True enough, but the editorial staff, who are not really concerned whether college kids take a good look at cigarette and concert ads, have had to adjust to a new concept of the alternative press, and a different set of rules governing good journalism.
The cover stories have seemed, at times, to be long rather than in-depth. Staff writer Jeanette Batz said that the reporter's goal for a cover feature is now "total immersion" in a personality, group or issue.
Wilson said that "there's a tendency in some stories for people to empty their notebooks because they have to make the story longer."
Ahmed disagrees "Obviously, I'm not going to include information that I don't think is pertinent," he says Bigger issues, though, surround the weekly's politics
The Riverfront Times of the past had no ideological rubric that determined a story's newsworthiness, but the Ray Hartmann era was marked by a distinctive bend to the left Par for the course for most alternative weeklies; they are the descendants, after all, of underground anti-war and "movement" papers from the late '60s and early '70s - including the original New Times in Phoenix. There was an unspoken rule, according to several reporters, that certain groups and activists were tucked neatly underneath the RFT's advocacy umbrella.
"Before - under Ray - I defined alternative as advocacy journalism with a definite liberal, activist bias. Now the ideology is not what drives a story; it's a quest to understand the complexity of things," Batz says.
Ahmed agrees that before the takeover there was no motivation to spy in the allies' camps. "In the past it would have to be something fairly egregious before we looked at it. Now we have a different way of looking at a story," he says.
But Ahmed resists a label of definite political characterization. "This thing about a political agenda is the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard. I don't know what political agenda means; I don't think in those terms," he says.
Instead, Ahmed gives the alternative press - or "independent," as he prefers to call it - a more practical definition. "I've never been big on the idea of 'alternative' journalism. A lot of people have taken that term seriously and used it as a code word for leftist," he says. "I took it as doing what nobody else in town is doing.
"Our mission," Ahmed says, "is to find the good stories. It's not a question of 'has anything changed in our mission?' Our mission is the same but our resources are better. Our job is not to charge up the hill against the William Buckleys of the world."
The paper isn't moving to the right; it's becoming de-politicized, replacing its liberal slant with a commitment to reporting conflict and controversy minus the ingrained ideological perspective. The reality is that if reporters do enough "investigation," look hard enough and write long enough, they can find conflict virtually anywhere. Almost any local personality, activist or group given enough attention is bound to be contentious and controversial.
But if the emphasis is on investigative journalism, then the RFT can hardly hope to be the only game in town New Times trumpets the work its papers have done, through tenacious reporting, to uncover hypocrisy and corruption in business, government and elsewhere. This style, though, is not the point-of-view journalism traditional in the alternative press. The magazine-style investigative reporting is a much more mainstream approach to news gathering.
Batz went so far as to say that now she sees the paper as alternative only because it has "the scope to really get into issues. Dailies don't often have the time or permission to dig and do the research."
But comparisons with more conventional media, especially the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and local television, seem to have been removed from the table. Ahmed seemed anxious to unyoke the RFT from its cross-town daily rival, and despite his reputation as a vicious Cole Campbell critic, he passed up (mostly) the opportunity during our interview to attack the daily. Gone too is Richard Byrne's media column which regularly trashed the Post, or Post-McGwire as Byrne renamed it during last summer's home run fantasy show.
And there doesn't seem to be any fundamental difference between this sort of news gathering and traditional newspapering, another tactic enables the paper to remain more of an alternative: becoming less current. "We've tried to be less reactive to what happened this week or last week, and we'll hopefully ignore the Post more and more," Wilson says.
Ahmed says that a Friday afternoon news tip would have almost no chance of growing into a story for the next Wednesday's edition. "It better be really, really, really important," he says. "Clearly one of the changes we have made is that we are not as current as we used to be. The emphasis today is on doing fewer stories and doing them better. Our stories will stand up or die on the basis of the research and the quality of the writing."
What makes this focus on deep reporting possible, Ahmed says, is the inflow of capital that allows his writers to work for two months on a single feature.
"We have better resources than were available under Ray Hartmann, especially staff and research resources," he says. "We're growing staff wise and we'll have the resources to do the big stories we have never been able to do."
Coe, who handles all the paper's business matters, says that New Times' business model supports this process, and that the paper should expand in the future.
"We have targets in mind," he said. "Our goal is to bring the ads up and grow the editorial with them."
The Riverfront Times is the most established and financially successful paper New Times has purchased, but, compared with the corporate atmosphere that New Times espouses, the financial operation before the sale was much less restrictive, according to one former employee.
Nanci O'Dea was the RFT's director of promotions before the buy-out. When New Times took over she was informed that local events like the MRMF and Riverfront Blues Festival would be considered on a case-by-case basis.
"It really became pretty obvious pretty quickly that they [promotions] would change in scope or be eliminated," O'Dea says.
O'Dea moved over to the Ruxton group as the RFT's regional ad director. "The main difference that I noticed was that the decisions are driven by a bottom line rather than having a business plan that incorporates community involvement and plugging into the place where we live," O'Dea says. "Everything is driven by the sales division - that's the way I interpreted their business philosophy."
O'Dea, who has since left the company, says that "an alternative newspaper has a responsibility to the community it serves."
Perceived tension between the business interests and community-oriented aspects of weeklies are at the center of the alternative chain debate. Robert McChesney, a media expert from the University of Illinois, said that large corporations - both owners and advertisers - often don't like overt displays of politics, especially with a liberal bias.
"If you have a smart capitalist, it would be stupid for them to mess with the editorial too much, but at the same time it puts tremendous pressure on people to produce money," McChesney says. "There's a tension, a basic contradiction, in the fact that you're trying to have an alternative newspaper while you're a commercial medium. Ultimately, the power has to go to the owners."
According to several writers, the difference in the atmosphere is noticeable. "The place is definitely more corporate; that's hard to adjust to. There are more suits around and there's more of a sense that you're controlled by someone else," Batz says.
Other than columnists Richard Byrne and Jake McCarthy, there has been little carnage on the editorial side, unusual for a New Times takeover. When the chain bought the San Francisco Weekly in 1995, almost the entire editorial staff quit or was fired within a week.
When Hartmann signed the deal last year, he included a severance provision for any writers let go within a year of the sale. Several writers said that there is some anxiety on staff, but such is to be expected.
"These New Times people, they're not going to sweat the details if they want to get rid of somebody," Wilson, who wrote for the Houston Press when the chain bought that paper in 1993, says. "I think anybody that's not anxious about the future is stupid, wherever you are. Any place you work, you don't know what's going to happen next."
Both Batz and Thomas Crone say they feel they have to prove themselves in the new system.
"We're asking them [writers] to meet a higher standard. The bar has been raised, and I'm glad it has," Ahmed says.
According to Crone, the staff is encouraged to read New Times' other papers to get a better feel for the style, and that after some initial confusion people are settling into their new roles. "We're definitely more organized in terms of deadlines and planning," Crone says.
"The stakes are higher; the bar is higher. You spend so much time on a story that this better be good. I'm sure that come November the anxiety level is going to shoot back up again," Batz says. "This is prove yourself time, really. The anxiety is temporarily abated, but will come back with a vengeance next fall. I'll do what comes naturally, if it isn't what they want, I probably wouldn't stay anyway. I don't think we're bending over backwards trying to do cartwheels we can't do."
Regardless of who's still working in December, the RFT will have furthered its transformation, Ahmed says he doesn't expect the transition to be complete for at least another year.
What the New Times' Riverfront Times will look and read like then is a matter of conjecture. Hartmann, who is signed on for three more years to write his column, said that the paper "will be as independent and as hard-hitting as it's ever been."
But for now, the turmoil will continue. "We got bought by somebody and they're telling us what to do; some of it makes sense and some of it doesn't," Wilson says. "Somebody said that Camp Hartmann is over - I won't argue with that.
"In my experience with New Times papers, most people vote with their feet." Bill Mulvey is a St. Louis free-lance writer.
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Title Annotation: | newspaper Riverfront Times |
|---|---|
| Author: | Mulvey, Billy |
| Publication: | St. Louis Journalism Review |
| Date: | Jul 1, 1999 |
| Words: | 2383 |
| Previous Article: | It's the 10 p.m. news: do you know where the viewers are? |
| Next Article: | Post sports has unclear fiscal policy. |
| Topics: | |