SF Weekly

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

You’d think that this was a Republican town, with the way the local news media have been bashing not only the left but also some of the better, more effective, and more functional progressive institutions in San Francisco. I wouldn’t waste my time with this stuff, but there are real issues here.

I woke up Aug. 21 to a San Francisco Chronicle headline proclaiming "Anti-gentrification Forces Stymie Housing Development." The piece, by Robert Selna, opened with the sad, sad tale of a poor auto shop owner who wants to "build eight apartments and condominiums on an empty lot next to his Mission District auto shop and rent some of the apartments to his mechanics."

Well, it turns out that the evil Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition is fighting that plan, Selna reported, "insisting that [the] project not go forward until the city evaluates how new development on the city’s east side will affect industrial land, jobs, and housing."

The message: a little entrepreneur is getting hosed by a big, bad "not in my backyard" group that wants to stop new housing. The implication (and this is just the latest example of this stunning lie): the left in San Francisco is against building housing.

Well, for starters, MAC is playing only a modest sideline role in fighting the 736 Valencia project, a five-story structure that is designated legally for condos and includes no affordable housing. The real opposition is a group called Valencia Neighbors for Community Development. The issue, Valencia neighborhood activist Julie Ledbetter said, is that as many as nine new market-rate housing projects are in the pipeline for a short stretch of Valencia, and they shouldn’t be approved one by one without any regard for the cumulative impact.

MAC activist Eric Quezada told me that the organization has indeed taken the position that the city shouldn’t go forward with any more market-rate housing projects until it’s completed a legally mandated environmental study of the cumulative impacts of high-end condos on displacement, blue-collar jobs, and overall land use.

But that doesn’t mean MAC is against housing.

In fact — and this is the killer here — MAC emerged in the dot-com era almost entirely out of the nonprofit housing community. Some of its earliest and most prominent members were (gasp) housing developers. Just for the record, nonprofits have built something like 25,000 low- and moderate-income housing units in this city in the past 25 years. That is housing the city needs, housing that meets the city’s own clearly stated goals. And the progressives, people like the MAC members, are essentially the only ones who have built any affordable housing in the city at all.

Selna told me that he didn’t write the headline and "isn’t taking sides in this." I realize it’s not all his fault that he’s stumbled into a political hornet’s nest — but he has.

Then in the Aug. 22 SF Weekly, Matt Smith wrote that the left is turning this city into nothing but a tourist trap by promoting "a price-goosing apartment shortage of 30,000 to 70,000 units." That’s what, 140 giant new towers, or 7,000 10-unit buildings … that will go where? And what if (as is likely) rents still don’t come down? (Smith had no comment when I called him.)

And now C.W. Nevius of the Chronicle wants to shut down the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council Recycling Center so that homeless people won’t have any money … and will what — panhandle more aggressively? Break into cars? Makes perfect sense to me.

Winner, by TKO …. boxing boot camp

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By Rob Quintiliani

Usually the things that you least want to do end up giving you the most. When I was presented with the option to go through six weeks of intense boxing training, at 6am every weekday, at Third Street Gym, and to fight someone from the SF Weekly at the end it was an easy decision…Hell No!

But then I looked a little deeper, beyond the gimmick that was fighting the Weekly. I saw guaranteed weight loss, changing my eating (and getting drunk) habits, seeing the sun come up every morning, strutting like a pimp every day because of sore legs, beating my brother in a bare knuckle push-up competition, and on and on…So I changed my tune and figured, what the hell… and six weeks and 1 win by TKO later, it’s hard to believe that I almost turned down the opportunity to throw down.

I learned quickly that signing on for bootcamp and finishing bootcamp are two very different propositions. The group of over 50 shrank to about 30 by the end as injuries and exhaustion led people to stop showing up…Of course my opponent from the SF Weekly was also one of the 20 to go, despite being the one to pursue the contest in the first place.

New rumblings in the alternative press

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By Tim Redmond

So many interesting and odd things going on in the world of alternative media. Yesterday’s news: Creative Loafing, a small chain with four papers in Atlanta, Tampa Bay, Charlotte and Sarasota, just bought one of the granddaddies of the alternative weekly world, the Chicago Reader, along with the Reader’s Washington City Paper.

The fascinating element: Village Voice Media, the chain formerly known as New Times, has had something of a standing bid in for the Reader for years now, and that’s never gone anywhere. I know the folks in Phoenix are going a bit crazy today; that would have been a prime addition to the 17-member VVM empire, and it got away.

I don’t know why yet, but a couple of ideas occur to me – and one is that, with the losses mounting in San Francisco and Cleveland, and the prospect of big damages in the Guardian’s lawsuit, VVM simply didn’t have or couldn’t come up with the cash. And it would have been a bunch of cash, probably at least $25 million.

It’s also possible that the Reader owners just didn’t want to sell to the jerks at VVM.

Speaking of those jerks, a few interesting tidbits out of San Francisco: The web editor at the SF Weekly (part of the VVM chain) quit last week in a huff, in part, he wrote, because he didn’t like it when the bosses in Phoenix kept telling him to write nasty stuff about the Guardian.

And this is always interesting, from the anonymous crew at altweekly death watch.

The golf club

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› news@sfbg.com

For the better part of a century, San Francisco’s public golf courses have offered players relatively inexpensive rates, belying the view of some that this is an elitist sport incompatible with progressive civic governance. But since a botched revamp of the Harding Park course several years ago, golf operations have landed in the rough, siphoning large sums from city coffers every year. Now Mayor Gavin Newsom and his Recreation and Park Department claim that private businesses would do a better and cheaper job of running three of the city’s most valuable links.

Sup. Jake McGoldrick and other privatization opponents say outsourcing control of the Harding, Fleming, and Lincoln courses would inevitably lead to less access for the general public and higher costs. "A lot of folks don’t realize that the Golden Gate Yacht Club and the St. Francis Yacht Club are public assets that are now run as private membership clubs, elitist things," McGoldrick told the Guardian. "That’s certainly the way this could go."

McGoldrick has called for the formation of a Golf Course Task Force to explore nonprivatization solutions, including converting some of the courses into parks or open space, as the Neighborhood Parks Council has urged. On July 10 the Board of Supervisors will decide between McGoldrick’s plan and Rec and Park’s "hybrid management" resolution, which would award leases of 20 to 30 years for the courses. Political handicappers say the vote could go either way.

In addition to their concerns about prices and accessibility at privately run links, McGoldrick and others have serious reservations about who will run the courses if the mayor’s plan succeeds. No one we spoke with could name potential bidders with any certainty, but if the past is prologue, the choice is likely to involve political cronyism.

Golf advocate Sandy Tatum engineered the deal that turned Harding Park over to the management of Kemper Sports, which has been accused of overspending public funds and turning the course into a huge drain on the city treasury. Kemper also rents space to Tatum’s First Tee program. More recently, another nonprofit started by Tatum and former city attorney Louise Renne initiated and funded a study for Rec and Park that recommended more privatization by turning over courses to entities such as theirs.

The SF Weekly, which has run stories critical of the city’s golf privatization scheme, revealed a 1990s deal that privatized a city-owned course near Burlingame and, in what it deemed a corrupt selection process, handed control of the course to former Willie Brown staffer Tom Isaak.

In 2004, Tom Hsieh, one of Newsom’s key campaign consultants, submitted the sole bid for control of Gleneagles Golf Course in McLaren Park. Neither Hsieh nor his business partner, real estate investor Craig Lipton, had ever run a golf course before winning the contract for Gleneagles. But what really raised eyebrows around City Hall were the terms of the deal. Any lease of more than 10 years would have needed approval by the Board of Supervisors, so Hsieh and Lipton were given a nine-year contract.

"That was a very obvious and blatant end run around the contract requirements of the Board of Supervisors," McGoldrick told us. Hsieh, he went on to say, "is one of the mayor’s good buddies, and he got himself a nice contract out there."

Rec and Park spokesperson Rose Dennis defended the lease agreement with Hsieh, telling us, "At the end of the day, he legally got the concession. It wasn’t like it was put down to a nine[-year contract] to screw anybody. That would suggest a level of sophistication that Rec and Park just doesn’t have."

Reached for comment, Hsieh bristled at the suggestion that he landed the contract because of his ties to the mayor, writing in an e-mail that the mere suggestion was "a scurrilous attack motivated by politics." Hsieh did not answer our repeated requests for information about wage levels at the Gleneagles course and the number of groundskeepers employed there. McGoldrick and sources in the industry assert that one of the main ways private managers would make money from the other courses would be to reduce labor costs.

Sup. Sean Elsbernd, one of the privatization plan’s strongest backers, conceded that some past golf contracts have been "questionable," specifically in the case of Hsieh’s deal. But he said the supervisors would oversee the leasing process this time to avoid cronyism and the kind of spending excesses allegedly committed by Kemper Sports. They would also mandate that new managers continue to employ union employees.

Unlike the city, Elsbernd argued, private businesses could invest large sums of money in rehabilitating the courses, especially Lincoln. "When it gets that kind of [cash] infusion," Elsbernd said, the course "is going to see a turnaround in revenue so that you can actually justify charging higher fees."

That is exactly the kind of scenario privatization foes fear: more exclusive golf courses on public land that raise greens fees beyond ordinary people’s means. "These courses are untapped gold mines," said golf instructor, former pro, and activist Justin Hetsler, who has formed a nonprofit group, Golf San Francisco, to lobby against the mayor’s plan. "But every penny spent at the courses should go back into them, not into someone’s pocket as profit." As for capital improvements, Hetsler, who also works as an accountant, argued, "The courses’ future revenue streams can secure credit for improvements. That does not require privatization."

For McGoldrick, this debate is about far more than golf courses. "I don’t even play golf," he told us. The push to outsource control of the links, he said, reflects a larger philosophical battle about what to do with publicly owned resources. "The mayor is a pro-privatization kind of guy. That’s his MO…. We’re seeing this happen all over the place, not just San Francisco. But for me, it’s just painful to watch city assets [be] given away. It really kicks me in the gut." *

The Nation blasts SF Weekly’s parent

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By Tim Redmond

Long, detailed article in the Nation this week by John Wiener on how sharply the LA Weekly has declined since Village Voice Media, the parent company of SF Weekly, took over.

It’s exactly what a lot of us predicted: No more endorsements. No more progressive politics. No more reporting or commentary on the war in Iraq. Sad.

Exclusive to SFBG.com

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The ongoing layoffs at the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News are a human drama as well as a financial one, particularly given the relationship between the parent companies of those two publications: the Chron’s Hearst Corp. and Merc owner MediaNews Group.

An anticipated 160 journalists and their editors are being cut from the Chron and the Merc, which means, of course, less news for you. The names of which editors were slashed by the Chron surfaced first on the local blog Ghost Word while the rest made it to the Web in an internal Bronstein memo leaked to industry watchers, a painful irony considering what news execs say is killing journalism jobs.

Those who have been let go paint an interesting picture of what happened and what’s to come. “When Frank Vega, the new publisher, got here a couple of years ago, he said only three things can happen: We can fix it. We can sell it. Or we can shut it down. They haven’t fixed it yet, so those other two things are what they have to be considering,” John Curley, a deputy managing editor let go from the Chronicle recently after more than two decades with the paper, told the Guardian.

An annotated photo of Curley’s desk at the Chron appeared on Flickr.com last week and elicited two successive waves of heartfelt e-mails and calls after the popular industry blog Romenesko linked it.
Early in his career, Curley worked in New Jersey under David Burgin, who was famously fired and rehired several times by MediaNews honcho Dean Singleton at a number of the company’s papers before briefly working at the San Francisco Examiner, once owned by Hearst before it took over the Chronicle. Curley also worked for Jim Bellows, an influential editor in American journalism, at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
“Even though this is officially termed a ‘reduction in force,’ I am surprised and dismayed that the organization thinks it can have a future without me,” Curley wrote below the photo on his Flickr profile. “To be honest, I thought I’d get the chance to help lead the paper where it needed to go to compete successfully in the digital age. But instead, off I go.”

Insiders told us managers at the Chronicle reiterate over and over that the paper will never be the New York Times. To be fair, Bronstein likes to change up his low expectations from time to time. Last year, he told media hound Michael Stoll in a piece for the SF Weekly that the daily can’t be another Los Angeles Times either.

Sunday editor Wendy Miller, an industry veteran of more than two decades who spent her last seven years at the Chron before being let go just recently, told us, “There’s no answer to that except, ‘Of course we can’t be the New York Times. But we could be the very best regional paper we could be and as good at doing in-depth regional stories as the national papers are at doing what they do. There’s not a lot of imagination in Chronicle management. They’re not a very flexible group.”

Chron executive editor Phil Bronstein told Editor & Publisher that the paper will focus more on local news, but he said it will also have to do fewer stories now. And staffers told us he’s admitted during recent meetings that he’s not quite sure what to do in order to save the paper.

The Chron has lately continued its strong coverage of police misconduct in San Francisco but chose to relegate a superb story about one problem officer to the back of the June 7 edition in the local section. The riveting tale of a scandalous trust-fund lawyer by long-time crime reporter Jaxon Van Durbeken was placed far from the June 10 Sunday edition’s front page as well.

Miller told us she was displeased with what the daily was choosing to promote on its Sunday front-page and wished it would more often showcase thorough local reporting done by beat reporters.

The Chron’s financial desperation is well-known by now, confirmed months ago by Hearst attorneys in federal court when local businessman Clint Reilly was suing the company along with MediaNews to stop – or at least limit – a $300 million investment scheme the two would-be competitors planned that has since enabled MediaNews to dominate most of the Bay Area’s newspapers outside of the Chron.

Hearst lost approximately $1 million a week last year, and all told, they’ve more or less dumped $1 billion into the paper, including its purchase price, since buying it in 2000. Sources say the losses are now closer to $2 million a week.

The company first announced in May that it was eliminating 100 newsroom employees out of its 400 total. We’re told that some guild cuts were officially enacted June 8 with more expected soon afterward, but no one’s entirely sure who’s accepted buyouts so far and much uglier terminations could take place soon. At the same time, nine editors were sent packing.

The Chron’s managing editor Robert Rosenthal announced he was leaving before the axe fell on the newsroom proclaiming that he couldn’t stomach the bloodshed.

The coincidence couldn’t be more profound. He spent much of his career at the respected Philadelphia Inquire before joining the Chron after growing dissatisfied with the Inquirer’s decision in 2001 to downsize more than 100 people under former owner Knight-Ridder, which also once owned the Merc.

“What I believe is that the real innovators are the journalists,” Rosenthal told us. “In the industry, the people who are not the innovators are on the business side. They’ve looked at this as a very traditional challenge and now they’re getting caught up in a whirlpool of change.”

At the Merc, expected cuts for the paper were first disclosed by John Bowman, who quit recently as editor of the San Mateo County Times, also owned by MediaNews Group. Bowman had grown angry over what the cuts had done to his own paper, and opened up like a geyser to GradetheNews.org telling them that shortcuts on copy editors were causing egregious errors even in headlines.

State workplace safety cops are investigating the San Mateo paper’s offices where Bowman contends the building is without air and rats are a concern. Spokesperson Dean Fryer of the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health wouldn’t discuss the case while it remains open. But federal records show MediaNews was fined $800 last fall for an asbestos-related complaint at the company’s nearby Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

The Merc and the Times are run by a consortium of companies called the California Newspapers Partnership with MediaNews at the helm and include the Contra Costa Times and the Oakland Tribune. Online ad revenue actually went up last quarter for MediaNews along with its general profit margin while the cost of newsprint is going down, all good signs for Singleton’s wallet.

But print ad income and circulation, which continue to butter the company’s bread, remain on a downward march, according to earnings statements, and Singleton still must service the hundreds of millions in debt he accrued in recent years storming the nation in a frenzied haste to buy up both daily and weekly papers big and small.

In fact, the business press in recent stories about the company’s performance failed to point out that the Denver-based company is doing yet more big deals with Hearst in other cities. The two joined efforts last quarter to purchase the News-Times in Danbury, Conn. for $80 million in an arrangement very similar to what the companies created here, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. A few newsroom job cuts were announced recently at the News-Times.

MediaNews already owned the Connecticut Post, located about 20 miles away, and the deal included another nearby paper in New Milford. Combined, the three make a cluster, just as Singleton likes them, which enable him to thin and share staff and other resources between the publications as he’s been doing in the Bay Area.
Thin, of course, equals cutting more journalists.

And now Matt Smith and the SF Weekly/New Times/Village Voice Media claim the progressives were soft on AIDS. Where in the world do they get this stuff?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I always read Matt Smith, the star columnist of the SF Weekly/New Times/Village Voice Media, with interest. But he often puzzles me. For example, in his column of May 30, he was banging away at his favorite target, those dread progressives, (“Lacking (Progressive) Definition, Lefty factions and a phony convention do not an effective political party make”). And he dropped this puzzling nugget:

“For more than a generation (liberals have been) opposing growth, while snubbing traditional liberal causes such as uplifting gays or African-Americans.

“When San Franciscans, for example, were dying en masse from AIDS during the l980s, progressives’ minds were more preoccupied with opposing ‘Manhattanization,’ the term they coined for new office buildings. Today, when African-Americans in the Bayview District are losing their sons, nephews, friends, and neighbors to drug-related
street violence, progressives’ official political pamphlet is concerned primarily with enacting a moratorium on construction of market-rate apartments.”

The truth, as anyone who was here and had friends and loved ones dying of AIDS knows, the progressives in San Francisco put together a world-renowned system for caring for people with AIDS and pressing for prevention and research funding. The ‘San Francisco Model’ did not come from Washington or Sacramento or Dianne Feinstein. The progressives, led by people like Harry Britt and Cleve Jones and leaders of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club etc., did it themselves. Progressives did, indeed, oppose Manhattanization (and fight for rent control and police oversight and a lot of other good causes) in that era, but AIDS was very much a centerpiece of the progressive agenda.

The East Bay Express: Independent again

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By Tim Redmond

The good news — and it’s very good news — is that the East Bay Express is no longer a member of the Village Voice Media chain that owns the SF Weekly. I’m a day late with this news; it’s taken me a bit to process, because our ad director (and my good friend) Jody Colley has left the Guardian to go work with the new ownership. But most of the reports have been upbeat, emphasizing that Express editor Steve Buell and his partners, Hal Brody, Kelly Vance and Bradley Zeve have done a very unsual thing. They’ve taken a chain paper and made it an independent.

And although none of the principals are talking about the price, I think they got it pretty cheap. In essence, the big, bad VVM couldn’t make it in the East Bay, and was forced to bail.

Of course, it’s going to take a while to disentangle the VVM connections. The Express was very much a cog in the borg machine: The website was designed and run by VVM. The movie reviews came from VVM. The accounting and systems were all handled through VVM. And — perhaps most important — the ad sales were closely linked to the SF Weekly.

In fact, the Weekly’s ad materials these days all cite the circulation not of the SF paper but of the combined Weekly and Express, and for a lot of accounts, buying an ad in the Weekly meant a free one (or heavily discounted one) in the Express. So the two were almost like an old-fashioned joint operating agreement. They even ran the same cover story a few months ago.

I suspect on the sales side, that won’t change immediately. There are contracts and deal and money is involved, so I expect the nonsense will continue for a bit. But in the end, I hope and believe the Express will once again be a community-based and community-serving paper. And I wish them all the luck in the world.

The letter the SF Weekly wouldn’t run

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UPDATE: The Weekly finanlly ran a shortened version of this letter May 23.

This is a letter I sent over to the SF Weekly last week in response to a story on the Reilly lawsuit settlement. Somehow, the Weekly couldn’t manage to get the letter into print, so we’re posting it here on the Bruce Blog:

To the Weekly: (for publication as a letter to the editor in the next edition: since the Weekly and apparently all VVM papers have blocked emails from the Guardian, I am sending this by fax and by hand)

In my Bruce/B3 blog at SFBG.com commenting on the Reilly victory in his Hearst/Singleton antitrust case, I wrote that a reporter had asked me for comment on the settlement of the litigation.

The reporter was Michael Stoll and he told me in an email that he was doing a piece on the settlement for the “SUCKA FREE CITY” page for the SF Weekly/New Times/VVM chain paper. I purposely didn’t identify the reporter or the column (appropriately named) or the paper because I didn’t think the Weekly would run my comments that I had quickly written up and sent to him by email. Then I wrote my Weekly comments in my blog.

Of blowjobs and SF Weekly’s spurious claims to great (arts) journalism

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The SF Weekly’s obsession (jealous much?) with our 5/2 cover story on Vincent Gallo and the Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival is forcing me to put one of my credos – “Don’t make me cut you!” – into practice.

I read, or at least glance at, the Weekly. It’s one of the less rewarding requirements of my current job. So I couldn’t help but notice that its Sucka Free City column has launched two successive attacks on a recent profile I wrote about Gallo. Got that? That’s two different Weekly articles about one alleged “puff piece.” I guess there must be something to what we’re doing for them to be so strangely fixated.

I have better things to do, and better work to put in the paper, but I’ll use this blog to pick these Sucka Free City articles off one by one, talk a little about misogyny and lame Cro-Magnon straight journalist dude posturing – a relevant topic here – and then add some real observation about the state of arts journalism as executed, and I mean executed, by the SF Weekly and their overlords at the New Times, excuse me, Voice Media.

Of blowjobs and SF Weekly’s spurious claims to great (arts) journalism

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The SF Weekly’s obsession (jealous much?) with our 5/2 cover story on Vincent Gallo and the Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival is forcing me to put one of my credos – “Don’t make me cut you!” – into practice.

I read, or at least glance at, the Weekly. It’s one of the less rewarding requirements of my current job. So I couldn’t help but notice that its Sucka Free City column has launched two successive attacks on a recent profile I wrote about Gallo. Got that? That’s two different Weekly articles about one alleged “puff piece.” I guess there must be something to what we’re doing for them to be so strangely fixated.

I have better things to do, and better work to put in the paper, but I’ll use this blog to pick these Sucka Free City articles off one by one, talk a little about misogyny and lame Cro-Magnon straight journalist dude posturing – a relevant topic here – and then add some real observation about the state of arts journalism as executed, and I mean executed, by the SF Weekly and their overlords at the New Times, excuse me, Voice Media.

Amen with a camera

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Divine messages are tricky, particularly for true believers who have no choice but to obey whatever directive the big G passes down. "God told me to!" can lead to heroic or comical or tragic ends; really, it’s a convenient excuse to do just about anything. For Richard Gazowsky, pastor at San Francisco’s Voice of Pentecost Church, the Lord’s message was simple if extravagant: "I want you to be the Rolls Royce of filmmaking."

Given that Voice of Pentecost is situated in an old movie theater and that Gazowsky received his vision in 1994 — soon after the then-40-year-old saw his first movie, The Lion King — this decree was not as surprising as it sounds. But as Michael Jacobs’s documentary Audience of One reveals, the quixotic Gazowsky has hit endless snags in his quest to be the next Mel Gibson (or George Lucas) with his "Ten Commandments meets Star Wars" epic, Gravity: In the Shadow of Joseph. It seems unquestioning faith can only go so far before naïveté, technical inexperience, and long-overdue rent get in the way.

Intrigued by Lessley Anderson’s Jan. 5, 2005, SF Weekly article on the church’s cinematic aspirations, Jacobs (at the time a newly rooted San Franciscan by way of Colorado) headed out to Ocean Avenue to take in a service. Before long, he’d found the topic of his first feature-length documentary.

"I walked into Voice of Pentecost, and it was like stepping onto another planet. I’d never seen anything like it: singing, dancing, falling down, speaking in tongues. I was really floored," Jacobs told me over the phone from New York City, where Audience of One (which premiered at the 2007 South by Southwest film festival and is slated for the 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival) screened as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s "New Directors/New Films" series.

Though Gazowsky’s production company, Christian WYSIWYG Filmworks (yep, it stands for "what you see is what you get"), has about 30 employees, the charismatic preacher was the natural choice for Jacobs’s primary subject. "The pastor [came] out and [updated] his congregation on the trials and tribulations of making this independent Christian blockbuster," Jacobs remembers. "I was immediately fascinated."

Having received his own calling of sorts, Jacobs asked Gazowsky and his congregants to appear in his doc. "I was really candid. I told them I’m Jewish and had no intentions of being a part of their church but that I wanted to observe their creation. I talked to Pastor Gazowsky about my philosophical approach to documentary and how I wanted to make an observational film. I wasn’t gonna use narration or come at it from a liberal or conservative perspective. I wasn’t gonna put it into the context of Christianity. I just wanted to make it as much cinéma vérité as possible."

Voice of Pentecost agreed to give Jacobs fly-on-the-wall access. For the next few months he captured WYSIWYG’s casting calls, stunt rehearsals, set-design meetings, and other bustling preproduction activities for a fast-approaching Italian location shoot. The footage comprises Audience of One‘s decidedly optimistic first half; anticipation runs sky-high among the (nearly all-volunteer) cast and crew despite several hints of challenges ahead. Gravity‘s massive wardrobe, including an abundance of Jediesque hoods, remains many stitches from completion, and the camera and sound equipment — at Gazowsky’s insistence, entirely state-of-the-art — is still being tested.

Soon before WYSIWYG uproots to Italy, one of the few pros involved in the production, cinematographer Jens Klein, tells Gazowsky he’s concerned about Gravity‘s abbreviated prep time. Something always goes wrong on the set, the experienced Klein cautions — and of course, it does.

By then Jacobs was "an inside outsider," his camera-toting presence a familiar sight. He traveled to Italy and documented WYSIWYG’s problem-plagued shoot. "I really did sort of blend into the scene," he says. "That relationship continued to grow and strengthen for about six months. When we came back from Italy, things got a little stranger. The lines got very blurry at times between subject and reality and responsibility and professionalism."

At first the blurry lines stayed off camera, and Jacobs’s cinéma vérité goals remained intact. For example, he helped the exhausted crew move stones before one of Gravity‘s outdoor scenes. "I saw them working so hard, and they weren’t getting anything done. I couldn’t not help them," he recalls. "All of a sudden, I was, like, ‘Wait a minute, what am I doing?’ That’s not my professional responsibility, but I have this personal thing here where I want to help them."

After the Gravity crew returned to the United States, they set up shop on Treasure Island, leasing an enormous film studio from the city of San Francisco. To Jacobs, and by extension the Audience of One viewer, it’s quite clear that the funding Gazowsky expects from a mysterious German source will never materialize. At one point he’s counting on $200 million — a huge amount for a Hollywood film, let alone an independent production created by unproven first-timers. Gazowsky’s faith in the Lord may be strong, but the faith he has in his investors is positively breathtaking.

His faith in Jacobs, however, wavers a bit. Midway through Audience of One, the WYSIWYG gang becomes increasingly paranoid that someone — Hollywood spies, perhaps — will try to steal its creative thunder; as a result, new security measures are introduced and Jacobs’s on-set freedom is restricted.

"It’s not in the film, but we sort of had an argument about it," Jacobs recalls. "I said to [Gazowsky], ‘If my film is about your film, what am I supposed to do?’ I remember leaving that day thinking, ‘The film’s over. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve got all this footage, and the story’s not complete.’ I was feeling pretty low about that."

A few weeks later, though, he was reviewing his tapes and had a revelation. Though WYSIWYG’s financial woes and creative differences among the staff had grounded Gravity, all was not lost for Audience of One.

"I realized, ‘Wow, this isn’t a film about filmmaking. This is a film about these people and specifically this one character,’ " Jacobs says. "I came back to them saying, ‘I don’t really care about your film anymore. You guys are the heart of my story, and it’s really more about you.’ I figured it would be a good way to engineer this paranoia into the narrative of my documentary, because that’s what was really happening — that was the vérité. They were trying to push everybody away, particularly me. Why can’t that be a part of the story as opposed to an inhibitor of the story?"

The tone of Audience of One reflects Jacobs’s self-described "celebratory and exploitive" approach to his subjects, about whom he remained "deeply ambiguous." This proved difficult with Gazowsky, who can be charming (he’s an intensely likable guy whose dare-to-be-great moviemaking approach is nothing if not admirable) and off-putting (he’s incapable of addressing WYSIWYG’s practical problems). "What’s so fascinating about him — and so complex and so frustrating — is how quickly he can go back and forth between being completely self-aware and being this visionary dreamer who’s crazy, if you want to call him that."

Gazowsky may have irrational moments in the documentary, but if there’s ever been a zeitgeist moment for faith-based entertainment, it’s now. There’s the obvious example of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), which grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. Fox Faith has distributed at least three films (including 2006’s The Ultimate Gift) in the Bay Area in the last few months. And if you think San Francisco is too godless a city to support such releases, remember this: Voice of Pentecost is here, though its members hardly resemble the Harry Potter–hating evangelicals spotlighted in Jesus Camp, a 2006 Oscar nominee that shares Audience of One‘s secular-filmmaker-documents-Christians theme.

"Because this is San Francisco, these people are extremely creative," Jacobs says, referring to the Voice of Pentecost faithful. "A lot of them have been out in the world and experimented with drugs, and that’s why they’re trying to get back on God’s plan, as they call it. Most evangelicals see things in black-and-white, but in this group there’s a large gray area. I’ve never heard them say really harsh or judgmental things about others. They would much rather get out there and celebrate God and make a film."

With that in mind, Jacobs exercised restraint in the editing room. "That was by far the most challenging part of the film, because of that balance I wanted to create: Are we laughing with them, are we laughing at them? Is this funny because they’re naive or because they’re flawed like any human being? We definitely edited for laughs, but there are no cheap shots. The laughs are based around the folly of filmmaking, not based around laughing at their god. We have fun with the material and the people, but it’s not purely ridicule — it’s as much a celebration and an inspiration at the same time. More importantly, let’s let the audience make their own decision about how they feel."

So what does Gazowsky think of the film? As evenhanded as Jacobs tried to be, Gazowsky’s portrayal is not entirely flattering. From WYSIWYG HQ, Gazowsky — who’s still awaiting funding so he can finish Gravity, among other projects — said he found the film difficult to watch but appreciated its honesty. Seeing it was quite an experience, "because you’re watching the last few years of your life going up on the screen. And, of course, I don’t have control of anything — the way it’s edited is just the way it is. And I’m looking at it, going, ‘Boy, that is a crazy guy. Do I know him? Oh, it’s me!’ It’s hard to look at yourself, I would say."

Though Gazowsky has a healthy sense of humor, he’s 100 percent serious about his filmmaking aspirations. As Audience of One shows, he dreams big — maybe too big. (A firm believer that Hollywood has abandoned good storytelling, he cites Lawrence of Arabia as his favorite movie.)

"I feel Mike [Jacobs] was very sweet, but at the same time he did not fully understand what it is we’re doing. I don’t think anyone really looking on the outside understands it. And here’s the reason: it’s because everybody’s thinking there’s an angle somewhere and never realizes we really love movies," Gazowsky says.

Though WYSIWYG’s love of movies also includes a desire to make people "feel God — and what that means to you and me might be different," Gazowsky hopes he’ll complete a project that pleases not just the holy audience of one who set him on his cinematic path in the first place but also the masses. After all he’s been through — in Audience of One and beyond — he remains steadfast. "We really want to make the biggest film ever done." *

AUDIENCE OF ONE

Screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival

May 3, 6:30 p.m.; May 7, 12:45 p.m.; $10–$12

Kabuki Cinema

1881 Post, SF

(925) 866-9559

www.sffs.org

>

The weakly sunblock

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By Tim Redmond

Yeah, so the SF Weekly is taking a swipe at Kimo Crossman (and, naturally, at us) this week. Will Harper’s item isn’t terribly insightful or funny, and just plays into the Phoenix-based paper’s general distaste for unconventional activists.

But Harper (and a lof ot the others who think it’s fun and easy to whack away at the likes of Crossman and his over-the-top battles for open government) forget where all of this came from. Kimo Crossman got obsessed with government secrecy because he had such a bad experience trying to get public records. He wanted to find out about the Newsom wi-fi deal (which, true to form, the Weekly also loves). And he kept running into brick walls.

I understand. I find the same thing at City Hall, all the time. Under City Attorney Dennis Herrera (and his excellent and principled press aide, Matt Dorsey), it’s gotten a lot better, but overall, most city departments still make it far too difficult for the average citizen to get basic information about what’s going on.

If anyone is to blame for Crossman’s somewhat unwieldy campaign, it’s Mayor Newsom, who insisted that Google and Earthlink had the right to keep their wi-fi proposals mostly secret.

There has always been an easy solution to people like Crossman: Just give them the damn records. Nothing bad will happen. Really.

PS: Someday soon, when metadata is regularly released as part of public-records requests, Will Harper or someone else at the Weekly will use that info to write a really good story about City Hall. You suppose they’ll thank that crazy Kimo Crossman?

New Times/Village Voice Media: the problem with a “SunBelt-baked chain” in San Francisco and the East Bay

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I have often referred to the New Times/Village Voice Media chain as Desert Libertarianism-on-the-rocks, with large stalks of neocon politics. Adam Reilly, writing in the current Boston Phoenix alternative, has a better line:

“It’s no surprise that the ex-New Times brass who now lead VVM, including CEO Jim Larkin and, as executive editor, the famously irascible MIke Lacey–want the Voice and its fellow papers to conform to their standardized, apolitical, SunBelt-baked vision of what alternative journalism should be. What is striking, though, is how quickly and decisively defenders of the old left-leaning, decentralized VVM ethos has been routed. The battle just began–and its already over.”

Reilly has done some good reporting and good analyzing and come up with the best piece so far on the dreadful impact that the l7-paper chain is having on journalism and the cities where it has papers.

But let me add a key point: the NT/VVM formula, successful as it might be without competition in the deserts and the foothills, simply doesn’t work in cities where they have real competition with community based newspapers, such as in San Francisco with the Guardian and in the East Bay with the Guardian, Berkeley Daily Planet, the Berkeley Monthly, and the Daily Cal. And in Seattle with the Stranger. And in Cleveland with the Free Times.

For example, the SF Weekly/VVM and East Bay Express/VVM papers lose millions each year. In Cleveland, the NT/VVM paper has lost millions over the past few years. And, given the strength and competition of the Guardian and others, there is little prospect the NT/VVM can turn their papers around. And so the tantalizing question is: what are they going to do?

STOP THE PRESSES: The Village Voice/New Times has fired its editor after six months, according to a Saturday March 3 report in the New York Times. This would be the fourth editor in little more than a year since the New Times took over the Voice in the fall of 2005.
The firing only underscores my point: the formula that worked in Phoenix doesn’t work and won’t work in sophisticated/liberal/competition rich cities like New York. B3

See also Gawker’s coverage of this.

Culture war at the Village Voice

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By Tim Redmond

Good article in the Boston Phoenix on the fallout from the New Times-Village Voice merger. The basic point that writer Adam Reilly makes:

The core of the old New Times chain was Southwestern and Southern. And those regions of the country have a different political culture — more socially conservative, more reflexively anti-government — than coastal markets like Los Angeles and New York, or progressive Midwestern enclaves like the Twin Cities. “Phoenix, Denver, Miami — there’s something about the culture of those cities that’s similar,” says Robson. “There’s a frontier mentality that New Times’ libertarian nihilism matches up with.”

None of the old VVM papers fits this description, but New York fits it the least.

Considering that New Times (Now Village Voice Media) owns the SF Weekly and East Bay Express, the article is well worth a read.

SF Weekly’s bizarre source

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By Tim Redmond

Whoa.
I just read Ron Russell’s big story in the SF Weekly about former Police Chief Earl Sanders, and I’m a bit dumfounded.
The gist of the story is that Sanders – the city’s first black police chief and the author of a a new book on the Zebra killings – trumped up his record as a civil-rights leader in the department and glossed over some real problems in his tenure as a homicide cop. That may be true; I haven’t read the book, although I know that Sanders was involved in a frame-up that sent two innocent young men to prison. (I know that because A.C. Thompson, who now writes for the Weekly, wrote about it for the Guardian – a fact conveniently left out of Russell’s story.)
But what left me reeling was Russell’s use of a source named Louis Calabro.
In the story, Calabro is portrayed as an entirely credible former cop whose comments about Sanders are worth legitimate consideration. He’s quoted numerous times. High up in the piece, he’s described as the emcee of a memorial for victims of the notorious Zebra killings and as “one of Earl Sanders’ staunchest critics [who] heads the European American Issues Forum, a group whose proclaimed mission is to promote the rights of persons of “European American” heritage.”
Actually, there’s a bit more to the story.
It’s not hard to learn about Calabro’s organization and his background. You can Google him and it comes up pretty quickly. This is a guy whose website eaif.org, has headlines like“Why the World Hates Jews Part 1” and “Why Do So Many People Hate Jews? He tried to trademark the term “white pride country wide” (the government demurred).
He has gone off on a tear, over and over again, against groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which provide anti-hate-speech materials to schools.
Calabro came by the Guardian office once to complain that I wouldn’t run his letters, and he tried to convince us that the real story about World War Two was the internment of German-Americans.
Calabro insists that his group is not racist and that it doesn’t condone negative comments about any racial group. And while the white-nationalist people at Stormfront post his stuff, some of the denizens there don’t particularly like him. In fact, he (properly) calls the hard-core white power people out for being racists.
Still, this is not a man who has any credibility whatsoever when it comes to criticizing the conduct of an African American cop in a complex racially charged murder case.
When I asked Russell about it, he emailed me and said: “Of course I know who he is. The story makes it abundantly clear where Mr. Calabro is coming from. I fail to see why you think quoting him was inappropriate.”
Well: I don’t think I’ve ever seen another credible media outlet refer to Calabro as anything other than someone whose opinions on race are well outside the mainstream of acceptability in a multicultural society.
Oops. I suspect that over at the Weekly, they’re having what we call the Big Cringe.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I complain a lot too. I understand: The buses don’t run on time. Everything costs too much, particularly a place to live, if you can even find one. Traffic is terrible, and there’s no place to park. Developers keep destroying good stuff and putting up ugly stuff.

And then there are moments like last Sunday afternoon, when my kids and I spent a couple hours communing with the pair of great horned owls that decided to take up residence in a tree on Bernal Hill.

The owls showed up a couple weeks ago. They sleep during the day, on branches maybe 25 feet off the ground, opening their yellow eyes every once in a while to cast a nonchalant glance at the humans and their dogs gawking up from below. They don’t seem to mind the fact that they’re constantly the center of attention, that it sometimes feels like a zoo exhibit up on the hill — except these aren’t captive creatures. They actually live here.

Great horned owls don’t tend to hang out in urban areas; I’ve never seen one before in San Francisco. But our new neighbors seem well at home on the hill, where there are plenty of mice, rats, and other small mammals to hunt. They’ve become quite the attraction; even Vivian, who isn’t exactly a nature girl, was excited to walk up and see them.

Michael, of course, was way into owls long before these guys showed up. He knew that they eat their prey whole but can’t digest fur, feathers, bones, teeth, or claws, and that once a day they burp that stuff up in a tight wad called a pellet. Naturally, we had to go looking.

So we climbed around the base of the tree for about half an hour, searching for owl pellets. They don’t look a whole lot different from dog turds, which are also common to this particular habitat, but I’d brought a couple sharp wooden barbecue spears to poke around with. After a few unpleasant errors, I snagged one; we took it home, picked it apart with tweezers, and managed to extract what appeared to be almost an entire mouse skeleton, which is now in a carefully labeled specimen jar on a shelf in the kids’ room.

After a quarter of a century in San Francisco, the city continues to amaze me.

I mention this in part because I happened to be looking for something else on the SF Weekly Web site the other day and came upon a peculiar and typically nasty piece columnist Matt Smith had written in the guise of advice to out-of-town reporters descending on the city to find out about the place whence comes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

I’m sure he was trying to be funny, but in the end all I got was bile and vitriol. One typical comment:

"People move here, meet a group of fighting-mad friends, then join one of the city’s myriad wars: dog-owners vs. parents, renters vs. owners, bus-riders vs. drivers, bohemians vs. geeks, everybody against newcomers.

"A few years ago, I denounced the city as a petty battle zone."

That’s one way to look at it. Me, I love the fact that people in the city care enough to fight for its future.

Not to go after our corporate-chain rivals (who? me?), but I have to wonder sometimes: do the folks at the SF Weekly even like San Francisco? *

Matt Smith hates San Francisco

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By Tim Redmond

That’s the only conclusion I could reach after reading this piece of garbage that was until recently sitting high on the front page of the SF Weekly website.

It’s fine for journalists to be cynical. It’s fine to challenge the conventional wisdom. But all I got from this piece — and frankly, all I get a lot of the time from Matt Smith — is how much San Francisco sucks, how lame all of us who love this city are, how stupid local politics is, and how nobody who is a part of the fabric of this town is anything but a witless moron who can’t possibly live up to Mr. Smith’s standards.

Matt: Why do you live here?

Burning Man vs. Straw Man

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By Steven T. Jones
I was glad to see both the Chronicle and SF Weekly this week give some ink to the story I wrote last week on the lawsuits among the three founders of Burning Man. Or at least I would be happy if the Weekly’s Matt Smith was such a sneering, bitter, deceptive tool. I’ve never understood the disdain Smith has for San Francisco or why he’d want to live somewhere he so abhors. And I’ve never been terribly impressed with his skills or integrity as a journalist. But it was still surprising to see him reduce Burning Man to a cult worshipping Larry Harvey (half the people who go have never heard of Harvey, and most of the other half still goes in spite of him rather than out of some vague sense of reverence), although it was certainly convenient to the ridiculously illogical straw man argument that he makes (although I’m still baffled with his conclusion of trying to equate Cachophony Society culture jamming with opening the Burning Man name and icons up to corporate exploitation). And just to destroy any last shred of credibility and respectability that Smith might have retained, he had to equate Black Rock City with Nazi Germany, lying about the event’s supposed columned boulevards to make this ludicrous point. Puh-leeze.

More carnage at SF Weekly’s sister papers

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By Tim Redmond

Damn, I’d sworn off going after New Times/Village Voice Media, the parent company of SF Weekly, for at least a few days, but shit keeps happening.

Will Swaim, the editor of the OC Weekly, which was one of the papers absorbed when New Times took over the Village Voice, has resigned, citing “philosophical differences” with management. That was inevitable, but it sucks: Swaim is a good guy, a good editor and ran a good paper.

And the editor at the Minneapolis City Paper (ditto, formerly a Village Voice paper) resigned under pressure and was quickly replaced. Why? Here’s what the Star-Tribune says:

“I’m not sure anyone was surprised that it happened, only that it took so long,” said David Brauer, a media analyst for Minnesota Public Radio who once wrote for City Pages. “Village Voice/New Times is known for being aggressively apolitical or libertarian. Steve, although he had a pox on both Democrats and Republicans, was mostly a lefty radical guy.”

So the dismantling of the progressive papers that used to be part of the Village Voice franchise continues.

And now Mike Lacey goes to Seattle. A former Seattle Weekly political columnist charges that the Weekly’s pre-election cover story was “faux outrageousness”: a fictional cover story detailing a nonexistent business enterprise of the mayor

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Repeating: whenever the Voice/New Times buys a paper, there is usually some sort of signature bloodbath when Editor Lacey and Publisher Larkin begin to impose the cookie cutter New Times template. Thus, when the New Times bought the old SF Weekly years ago, Larkin and Larkin swarmed in, denounced the staff, and cleaned out the office as if they were cleaning out a waterfront saloon.

After buying the Voice chain, they neutered the Voice, did a neutering job on the Seattle Weekly, and are in the process of neutering the LA Weekly. The Lacey rule: the more liberal and activist the paper, the worse the bloodletting. Geov Parrish, former political columnist of the Seattle Weekly, reports on the Seattle situation in a letter that was posted on the LAObserved website. He notes that, among other things, “another wave of SF feces is in the process of hitting the fan here with (last week’s pre-election) entirely fictional cover story (not identified as a parody) by the new managing editor, purportedly detailing a (nonexistent) business enterprise of the mayor.”
Scroll down for the letter and the story. B3, still savoring the ascension of San Francisco
Values and Guardian editorial positions
Some advice from Seattle – About the changes in store at the LA Weekly…

Greg Nickels’ Quiet Storm

Dan Savage comes through in the clutch. The gay sex columnist endorses in his pre-election column in the Voice and other New Times papers, but the Voice and New Times papers do not endorse. Hurray for Dan Savage!!!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Hurray for Dan Savage, the gay sex columnist for the l7 Village Voice/New Times papers in major markets with major battleground races for the election.

Savage performed heroically under fire and managed to get some key election endorsements into the second to last paragraph of his syndicated sex column in the crucial issue before one of the most important elections in modern history, a plebescite on Bush, the war, and the occupation. (New Times papers historically don’t do endorsments and don’t allow their writers to endorse.) He ran a letter in his column from a Wisconsin male who wrote, “Wisconsin needs your help!. On Tuesday, Nov. 7 we’re voting on an amendment banning gay marriage. As a married heterosexual male I’m supposed to feel threatened by gays getting married, but I’m smart enough to realize it doesn’t affect me at all. I also realize that I got to marry whomever I wanted, and everyone should have that right. Urge your readers in Wisconsin to vote NO on the marriage amendment. Thanks!”

Savage gave the writer the ultimate Savage compliment: “You put it better than I could, JIW. I would add: The amendment in Wisconsin bans gay marriage and civil unions. Vote no.”

Then Savage continued his endorsement: “And to my readers in Colorado, Idaho,
South Carolina, Tennessee, Virignia, Arizona, and South Dakota: Please vote against the gay marriage bans in your states, too. And in South Dakota, please vote to overturn your state’s idiotic abortion ban. And to my readers in Canada: Be glad you don’t have to put up with any of this shit.”

In the presidential race two years ago, Savage snuck his Kerry for President endorsement in the last line of his pre-election column. This time, he slipped his endorsements into the second to last paragraphs, with a neatly disguised ending to his column with a diverting letter from a woman who claimed she couldn’t have an orgasm until age l8. She then took some pot with a “cooperative boy friend and–bam! –six orgasms in five minutes.” And he signed off, “Thanks for sharing.” And sent his readers off to a Savage website to learn more about pot and sex. Well done, Dan. A masterful job.

Meanwhile, Savage’s endorsements were the only real endorsements to be run in the pre-election issue of the Voice, probably one of the first times in Voice history, if not the first, that this bastion of New York liberalism has been Voiceless and neutered and has not endorsed candidates or run serious political coverage in an election. (Why? I put the questions by email to Voice/New Times CEO and chief executive officer Jim Larkin, Executive Editor Michael Lacey, and David Blum, the new Voice editor in chief, but got no reply by blogtime.)

Instead, the Voice this week ran a gripping “report from the trenches of ‘Saturday Night Live’–dress rehearsals, wrap parties, last-minute sketch changes, a l a.m. phone call from Lorne Michaels (and yes, Andy Samberg!”) with a front page illustration of a smiling comedian doing the Bronx shrug. I kid you not. Check the link below and the Voice website and see what has happened to the mighty Voice in the short nine months since Larkin, Lacey,and the Arizona Gang got ahold of it. Meanwhile a quick check showed that none of the other l6 Voice/New Times papers ran any endorsements in their pre-election issues, with the possible exception of the OC Weekly in Orange County. An editor sent me an email saying they were doing endorsements but I could not find them at blogtime.

Well, Nathan Blumberg, my first journalism professor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in l953, used to say that a paper that didn’t run endorsements didn’t have any balls. He used the word testicles, because this was Nebraska in l953, but the class all got the point. So: does this mean that Dan Savage has balls, and Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey don’t have balls? Let us let the readers decide.

P.S.1 It’s hard for the staff members of a Village Voice/New Times paper to say much inhouse or publicly about the management style and editorial policies of Larkin and Lacey. For example, note what happened to poor David Schneiderman, the former Village Voice top guy since l978, who they sacked unceremoniously last week. VOICE BOSS GAGGED,” chided the New York Post head. The Post noted Larkin’s subtle style when it quoted an insider as saying about Schneiderman: “The new guys held him in complete disregard. It got so bad that one source said that while Schneiderman was in New Orleans recently delivering a presentation on the company’s web progress, Larkin made a point of taking out a newspaper and reading it while Schneiderman spoke.” Schneiderman will go down in journalism history as the guy who sold the Voice to New Times, and pocketed $500,000 for his work on the deal, but even he probably didn’t deserve the Larkin/Lacey treatment.

P.S 2: Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, the SF Weekly/
Village Voice/New Times ran a front page page illustration of two gay comic figures I can’t quite characterize, but sported the head, “DRAWN TOGETHER, Graphic Homosexual comics and the young women who love them.”
Smith came the closest to a political endorsement when he meandered around with the two major candidates in District 6, Sup. Chris Daly and challenger Rob Black, and wrote a self-immolating piece titled, “Vulgar posing, How our columnist was seduced into watching the World’s Largest Female Bodybuilder beat up on Rob Black.” After missing, mangling, mushing, and making fun of the issues, Smith came up with two summary questions but no clear endorsement: “Isn’t Daly the vulgar jerk who threatened the democratic process? What about the gentility-in-public-life rap Black’s been giving SOMA condo dwellers? Black is gone. I don’t feel like chasing after him with my facile questions.” Well, Smith concludes, “Alone, in SF Weekly’s offices, beer on my breath, an awful sort-porn video on the VCR, I realize I’ve beens seduced by the poses of two political hacks.”

News flash to Smith: There are real major issues in this district. For example, Calvin Welsh lays out a big one in a Guardian op ed this week, “Don’t for a minute believe that he (Daly) is in the fight of his political life because he’s rude, because he doesn’t care about lw and order, or because he prefers dirty streets upon which to raise his son. These petty and silly charges mask a far more serious objection: the way his opponents see it, Daly has been too slow in adopting the massive wave of market rate housing slated for this district and is far too protective of lower income residents in District 6.” He concludes: “There’s a working majority of the Board of Supervisors willing to fight for current neighborhoods and residents and a future that includes them. The battle in District 6 shows that the fight is not without risk. Do the rest of us realize it? Smith, Larkin, Lacey, Voice/New Times folks, do you realize it?

P.S.3: At blogtime, Jonny Diamond, the editor in chief of L magazine in New York, replied to my query about Voice endorsements with this quote: “Yes, the Savage stuff is in, but it’s the only thing remotely related to the election in the entire issue. This is the cover story (and he gave me the link). Remarkable stuff from the country’s formerly foremost alt-weekly on the eve of the most important midterm elections in a long, long time. I’d say this is the final, no-doubt-about-it end of the Voice. As for our own coverage, we’re working on something for Friday.”

So, to get election endorsements and coverage in New York, forget the Voice and
go to the website of the L magazine, a zippy New York arts and entertainment biweekly under the direction of the Steadman brothers.

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we may have heard the final word on the eve of the election from the Larkin/Lacey/VillageVoice/NewTimes/SF Weekly crew in San Francisco and New York. Maybe Larkin will stop reading the paper long enough to send me comments or explain to the readers of his l7 papers why they don’;t endorse or do serious election coverage. I’ll let you know. If anybody spots a political endorsement in a Voice/New Times paper, flash me the word. B3, hoping good news is on the way on the way Nov. 7th

VOICE BOSS GAGGED: SCHNEIDERMAN IS OUSTED BY NEW OUT-OF-TOWN OWNERS:
By KEITH J. KELLY

October 27, 2006 — DAVID Schneiderman is out as president of Village Voice Media nine months after Phoenix-based New Times took over the alternative weekly newspaper chain.

Following the takeover of the Voice by New Times CEO James Larkin and Editorial Director Michael Lacey, Schneiderman stayed on as president of the combined company, which took on the Village Voice Media name. He split his time between the company’s headquarters and Seattle, where his wife Dana Faust, a New York Times ad executive handling the Pacific northwest, is based.

However, few expected him to stay for long as he was clearly a man without a power base. He was given the job of exploring Web opportunities for the company, an area in which he had scant expertise. Even after he immersed himself in the new role, it didn’t impress the new cowboys from Phoenix.

“The new guys held him in complete disregard,” said one insider. It got so bad that one source said that while Schneiderman was in New Orleans recently delivering a presentation on the company’s Web progress, Larkin made a point of taking out a newspaper and reading it while Schneiderman spoke.

Reached yesterday, Larkin said of Schneiderman, “He resigned.”

Asked if there would be a replacement, Larkin said, “We are going to restructure.” He declined further comment, saying, “We don’t comment on personnel matters,” he said.

When reached by Media Ink, Schneiderman, said, “I’ve been approached by people in the venture capital and private equity world. I just felt the time to move on was now.”

He insisted that his deal as Voice president was “open ended” and that he could have stayed longer.

But making frequent trips between New York, Phoenix and Seattle “was wearing on me.”

“Waking up in my own bed for awhile is important to me,” he said.

The Boston Phoenix was reporting yesterday that its editor Bill Jensen had resigned to accept a job running Web operations for Village Voice Media, its parent company.

vvcover.jpg

sfweeklycover.jpg

So why did the SF Weekly’s Matt Smith endorse a PG@E attorney for supervisor?

1

Matt Smith, a columnist for the SF Weekly/Village Voice/New Times, parachuted into the Sunset to check out the field of supervisorial candidates and ended up last week all but endorsing Doug Chan as the PG@E candidate for supervisor.

What Smith’s investigation didn’t turn up was the disturbing fact that Chan is an attorney whose law firm, Chan, Doi, and Leal, has received more than $460,913 in fees from PG@E in the past five years, according to documents on file with the California Public Utilities Commission. (See my earlier blog and our editorial for more details).
Chan is also the beneficiary of a tidal wave of sleazy independent expenditure mailings to Sunset residents, probably from the same PG@E/downtown gang creating the tidal wave of IE sleaze on behalf of Rob Black in the Chris Daly race. (See our stories). The PG@E gang want Chan and Black in City Hall. I asked Smith by email if this were a continuation of the PG@E-smitten campaign that then editor John Mecklin and then reporter Peter Bryne conducted on behalf of PG@E and against the two public power campaigns in 200l and 2002. He parried the question. Chan and the Weekly both ended up in the Guardian’s Hall of Shame after the PG@E victories.

The point: maybe, if this is how the New Times would go about endorsements, it isn’t such a good idea to raise the issue. Their politics appear to be desert libertarianism on the rocks, with stalks of neocon policy. What would the Village Voice/New Times position be on the war and Bush et al? Well, back to Dan Savage, the Voice/New Times sex columnist who has been known to slip an endorsement into his column. (See my previous blog).

P.S. Full disclosure: I live out in the West Portal district a few blocks from the Sunset District. And I am getting tired of supervisors like Sean Elsbernd and Fiona Ma and supervisorial candiates like Doug Chan who come on as “neighborhood” candidates but once in office quickly become anti-neighborhood, pro-PG@E, pro-Downtown supervisors and callup votes for the mayor, PG@E, and downtown. My alternative choices for the Sunset:
Jaynry Mak and David Ferguson, who understand the perils of PG@E and the virtues of public power. B3

Will Dan Savage and Savage Love save the Village Voice/New Times chain? Will the chain allow any of its 17papers to endorse candidates in this critical election?

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Maybe it’s up to Dan Savage, the editor of The Stranger in Seattle who writes a sex column called Savage Love with a left political slant for the Village Voice/New Times chain of l7 papers.

Let me explain. The New Times editor MIke Lacey and publisher Jim Larkin have historically refused to allow any of their papers, including the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, to do editorials, endorse candidates, or take real positions on such critical issues as the war and occupation of Iraq, the Bush vs. Kerry presidential race, or even local races for mayor, governor, and the U.S. House and Senate. Why? It has always baffled me and it baffles the staffs of their l7 papers. And now, this year for the first time, the staffs and readers of the six old Voice papers that were purchased by the New Times last fall (the Voice, the Minneapolis City Pages, the Nashville Scene, the Seattle Weekly, the LA Weekly, and the OC Weekly) will find that they can no longer run the endorsements and strong political coverage they ran so proudly in their papers for years.

What was the New Times position on Bush’s reelection? New Times ducked the issue and, as far as I can tell, the only endorsement published in any New Times paper came from Savage’s column just before election day. Dan, bless his heart, came out for Kerry in the last line of his column and has been pushing for impeachment. He even went out to Pennsylvania a few weeks ago to make trouble for Sen. Rick Santorum. He was successful.

There are major races in almost every one of the Village Voice/New Times cities, from New York to the state of Washington to Tennessee to Florida to Ohio to almost every city and region where the Voice/New Times has a paper. The mission of a real alternative paper is to be alternative to and competitive with the local monopoly daily. Instead, the Voice/New Times papers, by not endorsing, cede valuable political terrain and influence to their local daily competitors with their standard establishment endorsements, usually conservative and establishment to the core, in local and national races (see the Chronicle and Examiner endorsements.) And so the question remains: will Lacey and Larkin, operating out of their headquarters in Phoenix, allow any of their papers, in this terribly critical election, to finally break the taboo and take an editorial stand and do some editorial endorsements?

I bet they won’t. I bet they continue their policy of making no explanation to their staffs and readers. And so once again it will be up to Dan Savage, the zesty gay sex columnist, to save the day and come out with some anti-Bush endorsements in his pre-election column in the l7 Voice and New Times papers. Will he do it? Will Lacey and Larkin allow the Savage endorsements to run in their papers? Let us stay alert. Meanwhile, the Bruce blog will keep you posted.

P.S. What has been the Lacey/Larkin/New Times position on the war and occupation? Let me recap an example from an earlier Bruce blog. Back in 2003, as the Guardian was pounding away on Bush and the invasion with front page stories and strong editorials, Lacey/Larkin/SFWeekly/EastBayExpress/NewTimes gave me a Best of Award for “Best Local Psychic.”

Their Best Of item read: “Move over, Madam Zolta, at least when it comes to predicting the outcome of wars, Bruce-watchers will recall with glee his most recent howler, an April 2 Bay Guardian cover storyheadlined ‘The New Vietnam.’ The article was accompanied by an all caps heading and a photo of a panic-stricken U.S. serviceman in Iraq, cowering behind a huge fireball. The clear message: Look out, folks; this new war’s gonna be as deep a sinkhole as the old one. Comparing a modern U.S. war to Vietnam–how edgy! How brilliant! How original! And how did the prediction pan out? Let’s see now: More than 50,000 U.S. soldiers got killed in Vietnam vs. about l00 in Iraq. Vietnam lasted more than l0 years; Iraq lasted less than a month (effectively ending about two weeks after the story ran.) Vietnam destroyed a U.S. president, while Iraq tuned one into an action hero. Well, you get the picture. Trying to draw analogies between Vietnam and Iraq is as ridiculous as Brugmann’s other pet causes. Scores of reputable publications aroiund the nation opposed the Iraq war, but did so in a thoughtful, intelligent manner. Leave it to the SFBG,our favorite political pamphlet, to help delegitimate yet another liberal cause. Bush, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft send their sincerest thanks, Bruce.”

I am not jesting. This is what they wrote. I proudly display this Best of in my office. And this was yet another example of New Times journalism: hit, run, and hide. The article was not by-lined and I tried, again and again, by phone calls and by guerrilla emails to Lacey and his SF Weekly editors, to get someone to stand up and say who conceived, wrote, and edited the item. Nobody would fess up. But I was told reliably that the writer was the cartoonist Dan Siegler and the editor was then editor John Mecklin, who was reported to be Lacey’s top editor and hand-picked by Lacey to take on the Guardian in San Francisco. I then confronted them with emails, askijng for confirmation or comment. I got none then and, as the war worsened, I updated my request now and then. I never got a reply.

We had lots of fun with their Best Of award. We did a counter Best of, a full page ad, titled “Best Premature Ejaculation,” a special award to the editors of the SF Weekly/New Times. We ended with this note: “Sorry, folks: We wish the war in Iraq were as neat and tidy as you, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft would like to think it is. But you, um, spoke to soon.”

We added a postscript: “Gee, what’s the New Times position on the war anyway. We can’t seem to figure it out.” Three years later, l2 days before the election that is a plebescite on the war and Bush the Perpetrator, the question is more timel than ever: what is the Lacey and Larkin position on the war?

Will they tell us? Or is it up to Dan Savage? B3