Tom Walsh is leaving the editorship of Private Eye Weekly to become a news executive of a kindred newspaper, one of the nation's half-dozen most successful alternative weeklies, the New Times of Miami, Fla., early next month.
Walsh will be departing just after about 500 of his colleagues from 103 papers nationwide gather in Salt Lake City May 28-31 for the annual convention of the Association of Alternative Newspapers.That group limits membership to papers that are true organs of opinion and reportage as opposed to, say, advertising or entertainment sheets (though entertainment comment and listings also are still staples in Private Eye Weekly). Private Eye was admitted in 1989, the 40th member.
The fact that there is such an organization and that it has a huge convention and that some of its papers are rich enough to raid for talent like Walsh tells a lot about the rapid rise of the alternative press in the past two decades.
- NOT SO MANY YEARS AGO all that leaped to mind when the alternative press was mentioned was New York's Village Voice, the grandfather of them all, which became so successful it was snapped up by Rupert Murdoch and is still going strong.
But many other alternative papers are now fat with ads and staff and have circulations veering into six figures (the largest 180,000). The Miami paper runs about 120 pages a week, has 95 employees and a circulation of about 100,000, and is in a group ownership that includes five others. Last month one of the three alternative newspapers in Philadelphia, The City Paper, which started 15 years ago on a $15,000 shoestring, sold to a group of suburban weeklies for $4 million. It distributes 95,000 copies. Wisely, the new owners are making no changes in its appealingly raffish content.
- NOT SURPRISINGLY in a medium that has taken off so fast, the alternative newspeople often get together to discuss common themes and problems. About 650 of them met in New York in March for a Media and Democracy Congress to plump for tough reportage and what they called "democratization" of the media.
The Salt Lake conference chairman is John Saltas, Private Eye Weekly's publisher, who lassoed the convention for us when he was at last year's meetings in Nashville.
There is a necessary practical side to putting out any publication, the need to make money, so the Salt Lake convention will take up topics like circulation and marketing. The newspeople also will of course talk about what the press does wrong and right and how it covers such topics as government and the local scene. Walsh will lead a short hike into City Creek Canyon after a session on covering environmental issues.
- WALSH STARTED his career at the Phoenix New Times, a sister of the Miami paper, 20 years ago straight out of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State. Later he worked as a reporter in Tucson and for KUTV and KSL-TV. He is one of the few reporters locally who has won awards in both print and broadcasting.
Walsh joined the weekly four years ago as managing editor just as it was being upgraded from a biweekly. When he came on board Private Eye already was getting devoted readers and had an impact, but it now has considerable wallop. It was still published in a tiny office in Midvale but has become successful enough to maintain a downtown location at street level at 60 W. 400 South and a growing community presence, to use in-your-face four-color covers and to bump up its pages to 48 pages, plus frequent inserts, from 36, just three years ago.
- ITS CIRCULATION (mostly free) is also up by 20,000 in the same period, remarkable considering that daily newspaper circulation across the country has been static for years. It distributes 50,000 copies Thursdays at 1,000 pick-up points such as restaurants and public buildings, up 300 in the same period, breaking out of its Salt Lake bastion and now pretty much blanketing the state.
Saltas founded the paper 12 years ago on the model of the Chicago Reader after returning to Salt Lake City from Chicago. He was both editor and publisher until two years ago. He took all the business risks and created Private Eye's muckraking personality. Hiring Walsh as managing editor allowed him to focus on developing the business side while Walsh essentially took over the editorial. Saltas generously credits Walsh with "putting a face on the Private Eye attitude." He also speaks admiringly of Walsh's toughness - "he doesn't kowtow to anyone" - a necessary trait in a press that skewers pomposity and is pointedly irreverent and sassy.
Walsh has written some Private Eye investigative pieces and does the outspoken "Hits and Misses" editorial bites on page three of each issue. Chiefly, however, he works with writers. He wants and gets columnists who are impatient with line straddlers or even "balance." "It is even more important that they care deeply even than that they think deeply."
- THE PAPER HAS ONLY three full-time editorial employees. It relies, as small publications in our town have done since Utah Holiday's heyday in the '70s and '80s, on that stable of free-lance contributors who have something to say and are eager enough to say it and to get byline exposure that they work for peanuts. Among them are Lynn Packer and Katharine Biele, two of the best terrier-type reporters around.
Columnists like Ron Yengich and Mary Dickson somehow find time to write along with demanding full-time jobs. Dickson, the film critic, is director of advertising and promotion and a sometimes producer for KUED; and Yengich, the well-read perpetual gadfly, is of course even better known as a defense lawyer.
Initially distributed largely in private clubs, Private Eye picked up steam when the clubs were allowed to advertise in 1988. It still has a lot of private club advertising, nightlife news and an entertainment calendar. Its classified ad section has grown along with the romance ads that were a staple long before the Tribune started carrying them.
Private Eye is at its best when it focuses on stories the mainstream press hasn't developed or that emphasize a strong point of view often at variance with community sentiment. Occasionally it strays from its goal of punchy local reporting. It gave its cover and a lot of space inside to a stale piece from an organization called Project Censored on "the top 10 censored or underreported [national] stories of 1995" in the May 9 issue. A list of the most underreported Utah stories might have been more useful.
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Communing columnists
Still another gaggle of newspaper writers, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, will meet here, at Snowbird, on July 19 and 20. The Deseret News' Dennis Lythgoe is conference chairman, and a number of other Salt Lake columnists and writers, among them the News' Elaine Jarvik, Susan Whitney, Jerry Johnston and Dave Gagon, will be among the speakers. Some of the nation's best-known columnists, including Art Hoppe of the San Francisco Chronicle (who will receive a lifetime achievement award) will be here. The group is coming because Lythgoe suggested Utah as a great location for a summer meeting, and the president agreed.
What do columnists, to whom nothing is alien, want to talk about when they get together? Shop talk, mostly: money, deadlines, freedom, editors and syndication.