The Political Whore

Last week, two of Creative Loafing’s new acquisitions, the venerable Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper, laid off nine editorial employees, including some top investigative reporters. These were moves that were not anticipated when the company bought the papers earlier this year, promising at that time that the purchase wouldn’t lower the standard of journalism practiced at those two publications.

Especially disheartening was the dismissal of John Conroy at Chicago. Conroy is not only an accomplished book author but has led a one-man crusade against police brutality in the Second City. As the New York Times’ David Carr pointed out in a story this morning:

The Chicago Reader, which had published his work for over 20 years, decided it could no longer afford to support his reporting. Citing declining revenue and a need to trim costs, Alison True, the editor of the paper, laid off four of its most experienced reporters, including Mr. Conroy. The Washington City Paper, another newsweekly owned by the same company, announced five newsroom layoffs as well.

In a week of media retrenchment — rumors of further cutbacks in network news, continuing layoffs at regional dailies and a “temporary” pay cut at an Illinois daily that became permanent — nine newsroom layoffs don’t seem significant. But of course, that all depends on whose ox is being gored, and in this instance, I felt a bit of the splatter.

At the end of the 1990s, I was editor of The Washington City Paper, a weekly with a history of excellence built by Jack Shafer (now the press critic for Slate), and owned by a group of college friends turned businessmen who also owned The Chicago Reader. In the time I worked for them, I was impressed by their constancy and their willingness to support good work in the belief that if you produced quality journalism, the business would look after itself.

In the case of The Reader, it seems like that turned out not to be true. The owners in Chicago sold out last summer to an unfortunately named outfit, Creative Loafing from Atlanta, which has mandated cuts across the organization. It is as if Creative Loafing executives bought a shiny new doll and then once they got their hands on it, felt compelled to tear its head off.

Reader media writer Michael Miner called Conroy “the canary in the coal mine” for the journalistic health of his publication and printed a longer, less corporate-sounding (than his quote in the NYT) explanation for the changes from Eason:

Eason and Creative Loafing have some interesting, and let’s hope brilliant, ideas about the future of the Reader and the CL chain of six newspapers. “It’s ultimately to me a navigation problem,” Eason told me. “How do you keep putting out a newspaper at a quality people expect and how do you migrate this stuff to the Web, which is ultimately the future? We’re in a fight over who can tell you more about the street corner in Chicago. You’ve got a mobile phone and you’re hungry or you want to rent an apartment and you’re consulting your cell phone, and its going to be Google or Yahoo and they’re getting their information from somebody. Those guys” — Yahoo, Google — “they’re not even pretending to be journalists,” said Eason. But “we’re the journalism right behind them, the stories and information that’s still the most comprehensive and best stuff out there. But the challenge is make that turn. I guess I felt that if I was doing fundamental damage to the Reader I wouldn’t have bought the Reader.”

The comments from Reader readers was harsh:

First, it’s bullshit to lay people off right before Christmas. I don’t care if it’s a Jewish or Muslim operation, it’s still crap to lay someone off right before the biggest money-guzzling holiday in America.

and:

Christ, this is depressing. So, Chicago will get less hard-news and investigative reporting during a critical time in the city’s history? I don’t know about others, but I certainly don’t read the Reader for the entertainment fluff or crappy features about struggling musicians/artists, but rather the meaty city news the dailies don’t often cover.

Is the future really [the faux alt weekly] RedEye?

Fucking shoot me now.

I’m neither going to defend nor criticize the cuts until I get a chance to investigate the matter further, except to express dismay at their timing right before the holidays. I don’t believe, however, this is a CL plot to soak the readers of Chicago and Washington for cash by slashing budgets. My company, as every other company involved in media, has to make a profit to keep the door’s open. And we’re not talking about Wall Street-demanded 25 percent margins.

We’ve been very fortunate at the Tampa Bay edition not to have to go through editorial losses, although one open position in the newsroom isn’t being filled because of the slump in advertising. Cutbacks are a reality in the alt industry and the MSM alike; newspapers are hemorrhaging, and the business model is on life support. Journalists don’t have the resources to do the job they need to do, and that is hurting our democracy.

In Chicago. In Washington. In Tampa Bay. And parts beyond.

One day after what he terms a “chaotic” departure from the Tampa Tribune, where he wrote for 17 years, Michael Fechter was taking it easy, lounging around the house and (at my request) reflecting on his career at the daily.

Fechter was one of the longest-serving hard news journalists left in the paper’s Metro section (along with folks such as Lindsay Peterson and William March). And while he has had his share of high-profile stories, it is the series of pieces he did on Sami Al-Arian that will forever define his career there.

The stories have been so controversial in some quarters (perhaps nowhere more so than in the pages of Creative Loafing) that Fechter’s departure warranted news stories in both morning dailies.

He is going to become editor-in-chief of Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism website. In a news release sent out late last night, Fechter was quoted:

“My decision to join the Investigative Project is based on the simple
fact that no other organization does a better job of researching and
investigating worldwide Islamist terrorist groups. Steve Emerson and his highly professional staff have consistently been ahead of the curve, even alerting the CIA and FBI to terrorism connections. At this critical juncture in our history, I consider their work to be crucial to our national security.”

This morning I got to speak at further length with Fechter, and here is a partial Q&A of our conversation:

Q: How did it come about that you joined Steven Emerson’s company?
A: “I thought it was time to move on, and was trying to figure out what I could do in the world beyond work for the Tampa Tribune, and I want to stay in Tampa for family reasons. I heard about this job and asked if it could be telecommuting.”

Q: Does the fact that you are going to work for Emerson, who is so identified as a critic of Al-Arian’s, taint your work in the eyes of the general public?
A: “It’s funny because it depends on which reader you speak of and how much overlap there may be [in terms of which newspapers they read]. If you read the Tampa Tribune and not you guys [Creative Loafing], you wonder why there is a story in the paper today.”

Q: What stories are you most proud of in your body of work?
A: “I’m proud of the Al-Arian stories and the paper’s commitment to it. In the same sense, its not the only thing I did. It just happened to play out the longest.” [He also cited his work investigating Greater Ministries and raising questions about the leader of the effort to bring the USS Forrestal to Tampa.]

Q: What do you say to the critics of his Al-Arian stories, which they call anti-Muslim and biased?
A: “It’s silly, it’s just plain silly, and your colleague [Creative Loafing's senior group editor John Sugg] is just plain silly in what he says and does. A lot of this debate has been people distorting what I wrote and what I did. We wrote that Sami had connections to people and groups that he lied about for a decade, and one of the entities that he lied to was his employer. [Fechter said the trial proved that was correct.]

“[For those who say my departure calls for a revisitation of the stories I wrote on Al-Arian,] knock yourself out, because it’s a paper trail.”

“[In the matter of his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, and his deportation hearings, Al-Arian] was lying about who [Al-Najjar] was. Did he break the law? I’ll respect the jury verdict, but he lied.”