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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 10/6/2005 1:25:35 PM
Title: New Times is no Clear Channel
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From BOB NORMAN: In his L.A. CityBeat commentary, Mick Farren raises a valid point when he warns against newsweekly corporations, including New Times, becoming too large and market-driven. But, proving that he took one too many of those police clubbings to the head in the 60s, Farren then compares the chain to Clear Channel and infers that it’s a tool of conservatives. Utterly ridiculous. As a columnist for New Times' paper in Broward County, let me try to answer that headline's question: NT is a direct alternative not to capitalism or the establishment or the pigs, as Farren puts it so quaintly, but to the daily corporate newspaper leviathans that dominate the business, public corporations like Gannett, Tribune, and Knight Ridder. In other words, it's chiefly a journalistic alternative, not a political one. NT papers bird-dog local officials with a vengeance – and do excellent and unique investigative reporting that jolts the establishment and roasts those pigs in the process. Each one also gives reporters a few weeks, rather than a few hours, to do stories. Look, if you tried to pass off the silly Clear Channel comparison on any informed citizen in a New Times town, you’d be laughed out of the room. Here's what's really funny, though: What Farren, Brugmann, and others in the oh-so-regimented “underground” press want is a cookie-cutter chain – one that conforms to an old socialist/revolutionary ethos that everyone with at least half a brain finds BORING AS HELL today. That said, I raged against the Iraq War in several voiceless columns prior to the invasion and the newspaper has punched both George and Jeb around on a regular basis. In reality, the politics of New Times does come from a truly radical place. Its writers.

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