Early history The impetus for the creation of
Phoenix New Times (
New Times) was provided by
opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War and specifically President
Richard Nixon's decision in the spring of 1970 to expand the war and launch an
invasion of Cambodia. The spark came from the
shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen. College campuses across the country erupted into demonstrations and strikes, including
Arizona State University in Tempe. The cartoon angered Michael Lacey, the
Binghamton, New York-born son of a sailor turned New York City construction worker. Although his father was not college educated, Lacey later recalled, he had insisted that his son read the daily
New York Journal-American every day, a habit that bred a lifelong interest in journalism. Lacey had attended Catholic schools in Newark before moving west to attend Arizona State University (ASU). He had already dropped out of school when he and a pair of students, Frank Fiore and Karen Lofgren, felt compelled to report accurately on the campus anti-war protests, which they believed were either being ignored or misrepresented by the ultra-conservative local media led by the
Republic. They planned to publish their own paper, which after missing its own first deadline, made its debut on June 9, 1970, as
The Arizona Times. was internally organized as a collective, mirroring the thinking of a large number of its underground predecessors. This resulted in long bouts of introspection, analysis and debate. In 1972 the company launched a Tucson edition. It never gained traction for a variety of reasons, including cultural differences between the two Arizona cities, a lack of advertising interest, and an editorial emphasis on Phoenix politics and issues. The Tucson edition was shuttered in 1975, but not before launching the writing career of
Ron Shelton, a former minor-league ballplayer who would go on to write and direct the baseball classic movie
Bull Durham. In 1974, Larkin was named publisher and president of the company, a move that presaged his future role as CEO of the largest group of alternative newsweeklies in America. By 1975 many of the paper's staffers had begun to leave the company. Low pay and the collective nature of the organization had taken its toll. Lacey left in 1974, followed by Larkin in 1975. On March 19, 1977, the former leaders staged what came to be known as "the coup." After Adams was voted out by supportive shareholders, they loaded up all of
New Times meager office equipment and supplies from the Tempe offices and transported them to a new location at the Westward Ho Hotel in downtown Phoenix. Jana Bommersbach: Bommersbach, a star reporter for the
Arizona Republic, was hired in August 1978. In addition to her duties as managing editor of
New Times, she wrote a weekly column in the paper skewering many of the Phoenix area's sacred cows. In 1989 she was named editor of the paper, succeeding Lacey, who became executive editor for the growing group of NTI newspapers. In 1982 the Arizona Press Club awarded her the Virg Hill Newsperson of the Year Award. She later wrote the defining book on infamous Arizona trunk murderess Winnie Ruth Judd—
The Trunk Murderess. Dewey Webb: Webb joined the paper in late 1978 from the
Phoenix Gazette and quickly became renowned for his coverage of the quirky and obscure corners of life and culture in Phoenix. His writing and headline creation skills earned him numerous awards over his twenty-plus years at the paper. Scott Spear: Spear, the former owner of a chain of record stores, joined
New Times in 1980 with a mandate to organize the business side of the paper and manage the rapidly growing free-circulation strategy. He later pioneered the NTI voice-personals business and created a freestanding phone company to support it. In later years he was responsible for identifying and pursuing acquisition opportunities and was primarily responsible for the creation of a fully operational national trade
Association for Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN). Christine Brennan: Brennan joined
New Times as a paste-up and production person in 1980. After moving into an editing job, she went on to oversee coverage in news and arts and help shape the paper's growing reputation as a purveyor of sophisticated cultural criticism. In 1989 she was named managing editor at
Westword and in 1993 was named executive managing editor of New Times Media, the number two editorial position in the company, reporting directly to Lacey. Upon the sale of NT/VVM to
Voice Media Group she became the executive editor for that new company.
Deborah Laake: Laake was hired as managing editor and staff writer for the paper in 1982. In 1983 she authored "Worm Boys," a short story published in
New Times for which she won a special award from the
Columbia Journalism School. She is most famous for her book ''Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Secret Diary of Marriage and Beyond''. In 1988 she was named the Arizona Press Club's Journalist of the Year. Laake died in February 2000. Andy Van De Voorde. Hired in 1983 directly out of college at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Van De Voorde began his career as
New Times calendar editor, but quickly moved up in the editorial department. He rose to become music editor and later was named a staff writer. In 1995 he succeeded Brennan as managing editor at
Westword and in 1998 moved into corporate management as NTI's executive associate editor, overseeing writer recruitment and hiring for the company. He has continued in that role at Voice Media Group.
1980s: growth and early expansion With sales now growing at an ever-increasing rate, and a redesign completed that converted the paper into a classic
tabloid format, totaled 40 pages—a big jump for the fledgling paper at that time. Later editions were much larger. Smith's sales and marketing skills kicked in; thousands of premiums were custom-made and delivered to potential advertisers followed by sales calls enticing them to run ads in the special issue, as well as in the weeks before and after its publication. Winners received plaques and winners' certificates they could display in their businesses. Advertising campaigns heralding the upcoming "Best Of" issue were purchased, including local radio, television and billboards. It became common for the entire press run of "Best Of" issues to disappear from more than 1,500 distribution points within 24 hours. By June 1984,
Best of Phoenix was being printed in two sections and totaled 288 pages. The company installed a "Best Of" issue in each publication it acquired from 1983 through 2001, and readers began to identify the phrase "Best Of" with those papers, so much so that in 1996
New Times chief legal counsel Steve Watkinson proposed acquiring a trademark for the name "Best of Phoenix" and the other four papers then owned by NTI. In 1997 the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted these trademarks in Phoenix, Denver, Miami, Dallas, and Houston. Ultimately NTI/VVM registered the "Best Of" trademark for 15 of its publications. The company successfully defended the trademark and fended off attempts by other companies to use the same term. Most notably NTI/VVM won cases in federal court against corporate giants Ticketmaster-Citysearch— then controlled by media mogul
Barry Diller— in 2001 and again in 2012 versus
Yelp. Revenues continued to grow throughout the decade in Phoenix and later in Denver and Miami. Phoenix's growth in particular was exponential: Smith's sales and marketing machine transformed the small Phoenix paper of 1979 (about 32 pages on average) to more than 160 pages every week by the middle of the decade. Sales packages were constructed for, and sold to, advertisers small and large. The largest advertisers were offered extremely low rates in exchange for large volume commitments. Over time, the number of ads in each week's edition, rather than gross revenue, became the primary benchmark for measuring growth and success. In addition to the hundreds of display advertisers appearing in the papers every week, a classified advertising section began to grow. And unlike the free classifieds that were a mainstay of many alternative papers, a large portion of these ads were paid. There was strong reader response thanks to the provocative and humorous nature of many of the ads; combined with the publications' growing circulation, this created a vibrant marketplace that was different than daily newspaper classifieds. One of the long-standing features in the classifieds of
New Times and other alternative papers was the personals section. These often-quirky ads did not allow personal contact information to be included. Readers devoured them and occasionally someone would recognize the writer and attempt to contact them. But there was no direct way for someone to respond to such an ad. That changed in the autumn of 1983, when
New Times introduced a new category in the classified section that immediately followed the personal ads. It was called "Romance," and from a business perspective it was immediately successful. "Romance" ads were paid for by the word. The advertiser could write a brief description about themselves and the traits they were looking for in a prospective partner. The ad would be assigned a mailbox number. Readers could respond by mailing a written reply to
New Times using that mailbox number. The sealed letters would be placed in a pigeonhole (the "mailbox") in the
New Times office. Once a week all the letters in a mailbox would be gathered up and mailed to the original advertiser. A large number of alternative newspapers had similar operations. The seeds for what would later become a gigantic "personals" industry were sown in these pigeonholes. In 1983 the New Times company made its first newspaper acquisition:
Westword, a Denver fortnightly that had been founded by Patricia Calhoun in 1977.
New Times purchased the paper from Calhoun and her partners for about $67,000. Shortly thereafter the paper began publishing on a weekly basis. Low oil prices prompted other energy companies to follow Exxon's lead and the Colorado economy descended into a severe recession. "See through" buildings in what was once a revitalized downtown Denver became the norm. Thirty- and forty-story skyscrapers constructed in the optimistic heat of the boom were finished just as the collapse happened. They would stand unoccupied for years. It took a number of years for NTI to right the Westword ship; ultimately Westword became one of the twin pillars upon which NTI built its national footprint. The other pillar,
Phoenix New Times, continued to grow throughout the 1980s. Recognizing the need for more office space, the company purchased a historical building near downtown Phoenix, the Booker T. Washington Elementary School. Built in 1926, the school had been the center of the African-American community in Phoenix during decades of segregation, first
de jure (Arizona was a
Jim Crow state) and then after 1954,
de facto. NTI re-furbished the historic structure and today it remains the headquarters of the
Phoenix New Times. but the newly acquired credit line, combined with the growing profits at
Phoenix New Times, allowed Lacey and Larkin to invest $1.4 million to jump-start the paper.
1990s: boom times and rapid expansion In 1989 NTI adopted a new revenue-generating tool that would increase profitability many times over, and help fuel rapid expansion in the 1990s.
Pay-per-call applications dated back to as early as 1971. Typically a caller would dial an advertised phone number with a 900 or 976 prefix. The caller would be billed a fixed amount per minute by the phone company. The phone company kept a portion of the revenue with the balance going to the sponsor of the call. There were many pay-per-call services: sports scores, weather forecasts, even dating lines. A new twist was added to this mix in the latter part of the 1980s. It was known as Audiotext, a relatively simple concept that combined a pay-per-call application with sophisticated answering machine technology ("IVR"). A person would call a 900 number and enter the voice mailbox number of the service or person for whom they wished to leave a message. Much like a voice-mail system in typical office environments, the person who owned the mailbox could listen to the recorded message at a later time and respond appropriately. In 1989
The Boston Phoenix, a large alternative newspaper in Boston, introduced a variation of this system to the alternative press at the group's annual trade convention. It was an instant hit. Personal ads were a mainstay of almost all the papers. Now, readers could respond to print ads by calling a 900 number, punching in the appropriate voice mailbox number included in the print ad, and leaving a message for the advertiser. The advertiser could then listen to the responses and answer those that interested him or her. In this way, electronic matchmaking was born years before most people had heard of the Internet.
The Phoenix proposed to handle all aspects of the operation, with the individual papers responsible only for running the advertisements in print each week.
The Phoenix and the newspaper would then split the net revenues after the phone company took its cut. NTI saw even greater opportunity. It purchased its own Audiotext machines and contracted directly with the phone companies, eliminating the middleman and eventually even forming its own telephone company to bypass most of the charges. The results were stunning. Within two years, the NTI papers were generating Audiotext revenue of more than $2 million per year, almost all of which translated directly into profit. Within four years that number would rise to more than $4 million annually. From 1990 through 2001 when Internet services became dominant in the electronic dating market, Audiotext generated more than $35 million in revenues for NTI. At one point it accounted for 11 percent of the company's total revenue. Larkin also made one more key hire: Jed Brunst joined the company in September 1991 with the title of chief financial officer. Brunst had previously worked for
Coopers and Lybrand and later Allied Signal, along with gaining some experience in investment banking. His directive was to professionalize the financial operations of the company, and prepare it to rapidly expand its footprint via acquisitions. With expertise in banking relationships and financial transactions now in place, NTI's expansion plan proceeded at a rapid pace throughout the 1990s. In late 1991 NTI purchased the
Dallas Observer, its most expensive acquisition to date, estimated at about $3 million. Almost at the same time, the smaller of the two daily papers in Dallas, the
Dallas Times-Herald, was acquired by the Belo-owned
The Dallas Morning News. Other notable alumni of the
Observer included
Skip Bayless, who became a nationally known sports broadcaster at
ESPN and later at
Fox Sports, and
Laura Miller, who followed her stint as an
Observer columnist with election to the Dallas City Council and then to mayor of Dallas. In early 1993 NTI purchased the 80,000-circulation
Houston Press from real estate developer Niel Morgan and his partner Chris Hearne. Much as in Dallas and Miami, a prime recipient of the orphaned advertising dollars the
Chronicle could not consolidate due to its rising prices was the
Press. In 1995 NTI acquired national advertising firm the Ruxton Group from the
Chicago Reader.
The Reader had formed Ruxton in the early 1980s to sell national advertising for a small number of the largest alternative newsweeklies. These included
Phoenix New Times and
Westword. Following the purchase of Ruxton, NTI set out to rapidly expand the national advertising footprint of its member papers. It also aggressively pursued other alternative papers to package this market for national advertisers who coveted the desirable demographic the alternatives attracted. By 2002 Ruxton represented 52 major alternative publications. Unlike the other markets that NTI had entered, the alternative newsweekly business in the Bay Area was extremely competitive. Leading the pack was
The San Francisco Bay Guardian, a 30-year-old, politically powerful weekly owned and operated by
Bruce Brugmann.
The Guardians main market area was the city of San Francisco but it also circulated in other areas around the Bay including Oakland, Emeryville and Marin County. There were also alternative weeklies in the East Bay, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Napa Valley, Palo Alto and Marin County. The two daily papers, the morning
San Francisco Chronicle and the evening
San Francisco Examiner, One year after acquiring
SF Weekly, NTI entered the Los Angeles market. As in San Francisco, there was much competition, with two competing daily papers and multiple alternative newsweeklies including the market-dominant
LA Weekly. In an effort to outflank the
Weekly, NTI purchased two other alts, the
Los Angeles View and the
Los Angeles Reader, and combined them into one weekly publication named
New Times Los Angeles. It was closed on January 7, 2000 due to its failure to make a profit. Circulation at that time was 60,000. In 1997 NTI did something it had not done since Larkin and Lacey launched
New Times in Phoenix: start a paper from scratch, this time in South Florida. The company felt that the counties of Broward and Palm Beach, despite being directly adjacent to Miami-Dade County, were demographically and culturally different and could support a different alt-weekly with different content and advertisers. The result was
New Times Broward-Palm Beach (
NTBPB); the assumption proved correct.
NTBPB became profitable and remained so through most of the first decade of the 2000s. In 1998, NTI ventured into the Midwest. In the summer,
Cleveland Scene was acquired from its founder Richard Kabat. The paper had been founded in 1970 as a music publication focused on rock 'n' roll. NTI expanded coverage into areas that matched the journalistic model of its other publications: in-depth reporting and investigations, event listings, food and restaurant reviews, and a fully flushed out classified section. New staff was hired, including editor Pete Kotz, whose approach fit the brawling, working-class ethos of the town. In 1999 NTI put the last piece of its Midwest strategy in place by purchasing
The Pitch in Kansas City, Missouri. Founded in 1980 by former record store owner Hal Brody, the paper, like
Cleveland Scene, began life as a music publication. Over time, Brody expanded its coverage to news, food and arts, and it achieved a dominant position as Kansas City's premier alternative newsweekly. At the time of its purchase, circulation was 100,000 and the paper operated at a profit. In 2000 NTI consolidated its holdings in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area by purchasing the
Fort Worth Weekly. Longtime NTI executive Lee Newquist was named publisher of the paper, which had a circulation of 40,000. Within a year, Newquist struck a deal with Larkin to purchase the paper, a sale that was consummated in mid-2001. Newquist remains owner and publisher of the paper today. By the end of 2000, the
Weekly had sales of more than $10 million and had achieved profitability. That success soon faded as the bursting of the dotcom bubble, sent the
Weekly and its competitors into a financial tailspin. Papers began to fail and often were sold. In the case of the
Weekly and the
Guardian, litigation over who was at fault for the losses
ensued.
21st century: 2001 to present The late 1990s saw a huge growth spurt for the NTI publications as it did for most of the alternative newsweeklies in the country and print media in general. The end of the recession of the early 1990s, coupled with the dawning of the Internet era in the middle of the decade, initially brought a bountiful harvest of new revenues. Dotcom advertisers, flush with venture capital money, were spending liberally in the media. A portion of that went to alternative weeklies including the growing NTI chain. Ads ran in print and online as newspapers, including all the NTI publications, began launching websites and selling advertising on the sites. NTI launched its first website in 1995 and within a year had sites up for all of its publications. The bubble, however, burst in 2000. Expense cuts were made to meet the changing business environment. Publications that were not profitable were carefully scrutinized and a number were sold or shuttered between 2002 and
2011. On Monday, September 10, 2001, the day before the 9/11 terror attacks plunged the American economy into an even more vicious tailspin, NTI announced the first layoffs in its history. In 2002, in an effort to stanch the bleeding at its paper in Los Angeles, NTI entered into an agreement with Village Voice Media (VVM), a competing chain that published a number of alternative newspapers including
The Village Voice,
LA Weekly and the
Cleveland Free Times. VVM would sell the
Free Times to NTI, and NTI would sell
New Times LA to VVM. This resulted in the weaker, money-losing paper in each of the two markets being closed by their new owners, a reflection of the two companies' belief that the L.A. and Cleveland markets could simply no longer sustain two competing alt-weeklies. After critics cried foul, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation. The investigation resulted in a settlement that required the companies to sell off the assets and titles of the
Free Times and
NTLA to new potential competitors. New owners were found for the
Free Times and the assets of
New Times LA, but both publications ultimately failed.
LA Weekly and
Cleveland Scene continue to publish today. In a January 23, 2003, letter to the editor of
The Wall Street Journal, Lacey responded to a commentary it published regarding the L.A.-Cleveland agreement. In addition to returning the Los Angeles market to the NTI fold via the
LA Weekly, the deal also added the iconic
Village Voice to the company's roster, along with
Seattle Weekly,
City Pages in Minneapolis, the
Nashville Scene and the
OC Weekly in Orange County, California. In a provocative interview with
New York magazine published shortly after the deal was announced, Lacey made it clear he expected the
Voice to take on New Times' fighting spirit. "As a journalist, if you don't get up in the morning and say, 'fuck you' to someone, why even do it?" he asked. "Look, a lot of people think I'm a prick. But at least I'm a prick you can understand. I don't sneak up on you. You can see me coming from a long way away. Like the Russian winter." The site included all the categories found in newspaper classified sections, including those that were unique to, and part of, the First Amendment-driven traditions of most alternative weeklies. These included
personals (including adult oriented personal ads), adult services, musicians and "
New Age" services. On September 4, 2010, in response to pressure from a variety of governmental agencies and NGO's, Craigslist removed the adult services category from its U.S. sites.
Backpage.com soon became the highest profile website to include this category, although a significant number of other sites (including Craigslist) continued to include adult services ads, though not directly labeled as such,
Backpage was then targeted by the same forces that had pursued Craigslist, as it was known that Backpage was facilitating sex trafficking. NTI/VVM refused to buckle to this pressure. In taking this position, VVM felt that the
First Amendment rights implications, coupled with the protections given to interactive computer services in section 230 of the
Communications Decency Act of 1996, were paramount. Over the next five years, Backpage won every legal challenge to its right to continue the adult services category on the Backpage site. Backpage also continued to increase its efforts to root out any illegal activity, particularly focusing on the identification of ads that might feature underage victims of human trafficking. The battle over Backpage was not the only legal headache for NTI/VVM. In October 2004,
SF Weekly was sued by its longtime rival, Bruce Brugmann's
San Francisco Bay Guardian, for allegedly engaging in a predatory-pricing scheme designed to drive the
Guardian out of business. The suit was filed in California state court under a Depression-era statute known as the Unfair Practices Act, which makes it illegal to sell a product below cost if it can be proven that the sale was made with the intent to injure a competitor or "destroy competition." Brugmann, who over the years had made no secret of his wish that Lacey and Larkin would pack their bags and leave town, claimed that the
Weekly was undercutting him on price and subsidizing the effort with cash infusions from Phoenix. It took four years for the suit to come before a jury, in part because of extensive pre-trial motions arguing such points as whether a law that had been written to prevent Safeway from undercutting mom 'n' pop grocery stores on price could realistically be applied to modern-day newspaper advertisements, especially when many of those ads now appeared on the Internet. When the case went to trial in 2008, the two publications savaged each other, both from the witness stand and in withering daily news reports written by NTI/VVM's Andy Van De Voorde for the
Weekly and his nemesis at the
Guardian, Brugmann lieutenant Tim Redmond.
Weekly attorneys argued that both the
Weekly and the
Guardian had declining revenues, not because of an illegal pricing conspiracy, but because of negative trends that were buffeting the entire American newspaper industry, including the rise of free classified advertising websites such as Craigslist and the general flow of readers to the web. However, the jury ultimately found in favor of the
Guardian and awarded it $6.4 million in damages, an amount that ballooned to $15.6 million after partial trebling. After a lengthy and contentious appeals process, higher courts upheld the judgment, which was later settled for an undisclosed amount. As fate would have it, the case also provided a fitting bookend to Lacey's and Larkin's long careers with the company. After county attorney Andrew Thomas dropped the charges against them, Lacey and Larkin sued Arpaio, Thomas and special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik for violation of their First Amendment Rights and abuse of power. In 2012 the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals ruled there had been no probable cause for the arrests and that the subpoenas were invalid because, despite his claim to the contrary, Wilenchik had never actually consulted a grand jury. Arpaio had frequently been accused by
New Times and others of racial profiling and unfairly targeting Latinos for detention and arrest. The U.S.Department of Justice investigated the charges, and later filed a civil rights lawsuit against Arpaio and Maricopa County. That lawsuit was settled in July 2015, but the settlement did not bring an end to Arpaio's legal troubles. In August 2016, a federal judge in Phoenix asked the U.S. Attorney's Office to file criminal contempt charges against the sheriff for failing to follow the judge's orders in a separate racial-profiling case. Not long before their court victory over Arpaio, Lacey's and Larkin's four-decade adventure in alternative journalism came to an end. In 2012, the VVM owners sold the remaining papers and their affiliated web properties to Tobias and a group of other longtime company executives. Executives for the spinoff holding company, Denver-based Voice Media Group ("VMG"), raised "some money from private investors" in order to separate the newspapers.
Newspaper properties timeline ==Journalism of New Times and Village Voice Media==