May 10, 2007
END OF AN ERROR
The Terry Schiavo of newspapers finally is nearing its last days.
Soon, by the end of the month, the last vestige of what used to be known as The Anchorage Times will be no more.
For 15 years, the Anchorage Daily News has printed a small section on its opinion page produced by a handful of people from the former crosstown competition. That section, called the Voice of the Times, is about to go bye-bye.
The Voice column was part of the agreement struck between Erwin Potts, chief executive officer of ADN-owner McClatchy Newspapers, and Times owner Bill Allen in June 1992. Allen, who always claimed publicly that he bought the paper in 1989 to preserve the local, conservative opinions established by the Atwood family on the Times editorial page to contrast to that of the liberal ADN pages, bargained to keep the Voice column alive for a decade after the sale. The agreement was extended in 2002 for another five years. That contract ends this month.
That it happens the same month that Allen pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges is both coincidental and not. As the head of VECO, the oilfield services company that made hundreds of millions in its contracts to clean the beaches of Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Allen has always been a lightning rod for Alaska's anti-oil residents. As VECO's CEO and part-owner, he's stood on the tip of that rod with his monetary support of conservative political groups, lobbyists and candidates.
It was that support that ultimately brought him down, and, most would argue, the Voice of the Times along with it (although it is doubtful, given the outcry the last time the contract was renewed, that the agreement would have been extended again).
Allen on Monday pleaded guilty to federal charges that he provided more than $400,000 in payments to five lawmakers, in exchange for the lawmakers supporting and lobbying their colleagues on bills that VECO wanted passed. As with any public villification these days, the predictable dogpile on Allen is nearing stratospheric proportions.
To me, this is tragic on so many levels.
First, it cements what all of his opponents always said about Allen; that he was dirty, that he was an oil puppet. So be it. Mess with the bull, you get the horns.
But by extension, it unfortunately tarnishes everything Allen touched, including The Times.
As a former Times staffer, that angers me to no end.
When I and others who were hired after Allen took over (because so many quit in protest), we transformed the paper, along with those who remained, from a run-down afternoon heap to a viable morning paper. We didn't set anyone on fire, but we gave the ADN a run every morning that it otherwise wouldn't have had. We got up every morning and ran to the front door to see if we had kicked them in the teeth or if they had smacked us around. They were arrogant and enjoyed the smell of their own righteous aroma. We were there to put out a newspaper.
I remember going out to cover an event in midtown and getting there early. The ADN reporter, whose name I'll never forget but won't mention here, got there late. When an event organizer asked if anyone from the Times was there, the ADN reporter shouts, "I'm here. Who the fuck cares about the Times?" Standing next to him, I replied, "I do. Who the fuck are you?" He apologized, sat down and shut up for the rest of the press conference.
For further proof of the effect of no competition, take a look at what the news side became after the Times left. Guaranteed that it would have no competition in a growing market, the ADN withered to the point of minimum staffing and maximum profit, and used the Associated Press office in town like a de facto bureau. It covered what it wanted and left the scraps to others. Friends in Anchorage would bemoan to me in the years after how little the ADN reflected the community and bitch about how impenetrable the operation was from a local standpoint.
Now, I don't know Bill Allen. I didn't work at the Times as some sort of political statement.
All I know is that the best decision I ever made was to go to Alaska at age 25 and work at The Times. It's a decision that continues to pay off to this day. Not many reporters got to cover everything from the Iditarod to the Exxon spill. I was in the courtroom when Joe Hazelwood was acquitted. I stood on the beaches and held an eagle carcass put there by the oil that his boat spilled.
I never got to know him beyond seeing him in the hallway, but Allen was always decent to me as an employer. When an anniversary section I helped write for about the Valdez's devastation on the culture, environment and way of life in the Sound won an SPJ award, I was endlessly proud. Especially because it beat out an ADN entry about the same thing. To me, it proved our editorial autonomy. It said we could produce something that reflected so negatively - and deservedly so - on the oil industry in that state. We'd blunder plenty in the news pages. Heavy handed management decisions by different regimes would create plenty of editorial black eyes and give fuel to the critics who said we were shills.
After the paper closed, Allen paid thousands in severence and shipping for me and my wife to move back to Florida with everything we brought north to Anchorage, so we could start over in a place thousands of miles away that had lots of newspaper options. He didn't have to do that.
He didn't have to put his millions where his mouth was to buy a paper. He did. For that, he'll have that bit of respect from me. But his plea agreement kills just about all we worked for.
The staff I joined in 1989 did good work. The sports writers and editors were among the best I ever worked with. Business writers went on to greater prominence. Metro reporters and editors moved up in the business, as did the photographers and graphic artists.
Many of us still keep in touch. Some I e-mail with monthly or daily. All of us know we'll never have another professional experience like that, covering the biggest state in the union in the most extreme conditions under the greatest stress. There was a bunker mentality that bonded us for life.
But by doing what he did, Allen stained our legacy collectively this week.
The Voice of the Times? The idea looks great on paper. Every day, you get to poke the former competitor in the eye in their own pages. You get to show how ludicrous their squawking can be. You do the job that they should be doing - giving a microphone to people they don't agree with. By contract, you enforce a key rule of journalism: balance.
In reality, the column became a dinosaur of self-parody that should have never existed in the first place. It wasn't anything close to balance. I'll go to my grave proclaiming the benefit of competitive ideas in the newspaper market. It's being bourne out online now in the form of millions of blogs of every opinion stripe. Don't like the newspaper's opinion? Publish your own.
But the marketplace spoke in Anchorage in 1992. Readers voted with their quarters. The VOT was a sham that only reflected a tiny shred of what it was supposed to in theory.
It's long overdue that this dinosaur become extinct. Now, thanks to Allen, it's the voice of the crimes.