The Political Whore

… and they’re mixed. I’m talking about Creative Loafing’s purchase of two major alt-weeklies, the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper:

• Louis Hau writes in Forbes that this was an “ambitious move” for CL, an eight-figure deal that makes Tampa Bay more of an unlikely media capital.
• E&P has details on the new investor in CL and a new board member as a result. Michael Hinman at the TBBJ has details on the deal, too.
• From the Chicago Tribune: “I think Ben Eason has a better idea of how to fix our company than we do,” [former owner Bob] Roth said. “I think the company needs a more energetic management.”
• Chicago Reader’s web editor staffer finds lots of nice things to say about our journalism in Atlanta.
• Chicago Reader’s media critic writes: “I’m told Creative Loafing, which began in 1972 as an Atlanta paper founded by Eason’s parents, doesn’t meddle particularly in the local operations of its papers, which publish the kind of serious journalism the Reader is known for–though not as much of it. How the Reader will change, and how much it will change, are questions that preoccupy everyone concerned at the moment.”
• Comments on that post were mixed but with a large dose of negativism:
  “get ready chicago reader: you are no longer a newspaper but instead officially a “news product”;
  “from looking at the CL home page it appears as if they brand themselves as a ’shelter from the mainstream.’ must everything be branded? Must all edges be smoothed?”;
  “Well, as a former employee (and therefore blessedly immune from the all-seeing eye of the new Southern master), let me just say that this fucking blows. I grew up in the shadow of Creative Loafing just down state highway 78 in Georgia and it was always considered an inferior product by the intelligentsa, but then in Atlanta the bar was never set very high. Eason seems to be under the mistaken, though admittedly hilarious impression, that what plays in Hotlanta and Raleigh and Tampa will play in precisely the same way here. What wanton hubris.”
• In Washington, similarly mixed thoughts from readers and staffers:
  “wow. city paper is dead.”
  “Do you really think that the City Paper is dead if the new owners are keeping the current management team? Now, if Amy and Erik [the paper's publisher and editor] were to be replaced by some dude from Atlanta, then maybe…”
• Crain’s Chicago Business covers the sale, adding such details as the consolidation of production and printing for the papers with CL’s existing facilities.
• It is interesting to note that Crain’s got a fact right that many commenters in Chicago and Washington got wrong; Creative Loafing is headquartered in Tampa (actually about 40 feet from my desk as I write this) and not in Atlanta. Our president Ben Eason lives smack in the middle of Tampa, even if most of our editorial staff lives in the hipper, more bohemian St. Petersburg. Many of the naysayers on the Chicago and Washington blogs used our Atlanta connection (we were founded there; our largest paper is published there) to portray us as some kind of hayseed dumb-ass money-grubbers.

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