by James B. Kelleher
James B. Kelleher is a business writer at The Orange County Register and a contributing writer for the San Diego Weekly Reader.

Surely, the biggest media story in the country last year was the uncovering of the secret profit-sharing deal between the Los Angeles Times and the Staples Center. The scandal got legs when it appeared in The New York Times and then The Wall Street Journal.

But who broke it? The Los Angeles Business Journal, it's true, first reported that a special issue of the Los Angeles Times's Sunday magazine was the result of an "unusual marketing partnership." But the fact that newspaper and story subject were sharing income from that special issue was first exposed by "The Finger," a column in the alternative weekly New Times Los Angeles, written by its editor, Rick Barrs. The Times, Barrs wrote, agreed to "split profits from the Staples Center issue with, uh, the Staples Center."

Yet, in his mammoth excavation of the scandal at the end of December, the Times's own David Shaw wrote that many Times journalists discounted The Finger's exposé because Barrs's column is "so often mistaken and malicious."

Perhaps they did. But he got this story right and, in the process, demonstrated two truisms about media criticism in the alternative press.

Number 1: Some of the sharpest reporting about the mainstream press these days is coming out of the nation's thriving alternative weeklies. Taken as a whole, the alternatives may do as much to keep mainstream dailies honest as cjr, Brill's Content, and AJR combined.

Number 2: The alternative critics rarely get the respect they deserve, in part because of the slash-and-burn approach so many of them favor.

"Who cares if The Finger yells and calls names?" says Jack Shafer, the deputy editor at Slate and the former editor and press critic at the weekly Washington City Paper. "This is in the finest tradition of American newspapering. American newspapering really shouldn't be a Montessori school. If you've got the facts and you've got the arguments, I don't care if you're hysterical."

From The Finger in L.A. to the original model, The Village Voice in New York, media watchdogs at the country's freewheeling alternatives can be short on collegiality and long on venom. But, as Jim Romenesko, who scours the alternatives for his MediaNews site out of the Poynter Institute, says, "The alternatives are heavy on attitude and often smart-assed. They won't hesitate to use blind quotes from disgruntled employees. But they're entertaining and frequently effective. Their strength is watching what's going on close to home and spreading the word."

Of course, sometimes the antics go too far. This summer, the SF Weekly, the Bay Area title of the New Times chain, decided to tweak the San Francisco Examiner by creating a plausible-sounding housing advocacy group and staging a fake rally, which the daily dutifully covered. The incident gave SF Weekly editor John Mecklin and managing editor Laurel Wellman an opportunity to hammer the Examiner. But is fabricating a story really a good idea?

At the other end of the scale, perhaps, is Frank Lewis's thoughtful cover piece in Philadelphia's City Paper on problems at The Philadelphia Inquirer, a story Romenesko calls "one of the best pieces of 1999." Excess aside, the alternatives have helped break or advance many important press stories.

Of the 119 papers that are members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, "probably half" have full-time media writers, says Patricia Calhoun, the president of AAN and the editor of Westword, the New Times paper in Denver. "No matter how limited your resources are, the chances are good that you'll be able to find a smart free-lancer in your town who can pay attention to what's going on in the media," Calhoun says.

One reason these columns are so popular is that many dailies themselves have neither ombudsmen to cover themselves and their own blind spots and foibles, nor TV critics to watchdog local TV news. And certainly local TV does almost no press criticism. The alternatives rush to fill a vacuum.

"To the extent that alternative newsweeklies have a strong news function, that's one of them," says David Carr, the editor and press critic at the Washington City Paper. "If I see an alternative paper that isn't tracking local media, I view that franchise as somehow crippled or stupid."

Most of the alternatives seek to do more than just critically review their local dailies or print the gripes of staffers. The best of them point out overlooked angles and obvious distortions in the dailies. The good ones put more emphasis on reporting and show an openness to printing stories that note when the dailies do things right.

Although the media critics, like their freewheeling publications, resist easy categorization, two general approaches to the beat predominate.

The first is the balanced, ruminative, reasoned approach favored by Michael Miner at the Chicago Reader and Dan Kennedy at The Boston Phoenix -- papers and writers that have achieved a comfortable level of respect in their communities during their years in the job. It's a respect that Kennedy earned, in part, with his handling of the Mike Barnicle affair a few years back. In the case of Miner, who has been on the beat at the Reader for twenty years, the admiration may be an outgrowth of his palpable love for what he does.

"I think journalism is pretty wonderful and that the Chicago papers, despite what's wrong with them, are pretty good," says Miner, who worked at the Chicago Sun-Times before moving over to the Reader. "I have the feeling that I'm never as angry as I should be. I don't bring any kind of an agenda or theory of journalism to what I write beyond the idea that journalism is just a great bazaar of conflicting interests and values."

The second approach, perfected in the columns of the eleven-paper New Times chain, is a bomb-throwing, hyperventilating style that has reached its apotheosis in the column in Phoenix New Times called "The Flash," which describes itself as "the self-appointed hall monitor of The Arizona Republic." The Flash has adopted a terrifying scorched-earth policy toward the daily, skewering it every day on the weekly's Web pages, followed by regular floggings in the print version.

Jeremy Voas, the editor of Phoenix New Times, concedes that The Flash's voice is "decidedly cynical. Actually, it's downright haughty," he says. "But how else should one view an institution such as The Arizona Republic, whose idea of investigative reporting is to issue FOI requests to see all FOI requests filed by New Times reporters?"

The daily autopsies are ambitious, and not universally popular. Even Mike Lacey, president of the paper's parent, admits he's "not an enormous fan" of The Flash. He says he prefers less opinion and more reporting in his reading.

For all their differences, the media critics at the alternatives are strikingly similar in some surprising ways. They are mostly white and male. And they betray the print reporter's reflexive bias against television, heavily skewing their coverage toward the local dailies. "To cover local news I would have to watch it," explains Carr, of the Washington City Paper, "and there are certain sacrifices I'm not willing to make. You want low-hanging fruit? With local TV, most of that stuff is already sitting on the ground rotting. Kicking it around is no source of joy for me. I guess I don't really believe those guys are really in the same business."

But there are exceptions. One of the smarter pieces of 1999 came from the L.A. Weekly, where writer Steven Mikulan wrote a 7,000-word dissection of the seven Los Angeles area English-language news programs ("L.A.'s Low Definition TV Journalism," L.A. Weekly, December 24-30).

Rich Connelly, the New Times press critic in Houston who writes the "News Hostage" column, has also kept his eye trained on local TV. He was the first to report about Cynthia Hunt, the Houston TV reporter who sent fawning letters to suspected serial killer Angel Maturino Resendiz, along with photos of herself, in a bid to get an exclusive interview.

Connelly also keeps a keen eye on the Houston Chronicle, which has operated without competition since April 1995, when the Post closed, transforming Houston into the nation's biggest one-paper town.

"In most American cities, the daily newspaper is a monopoly," says Slate's Jack Shafer. "It has ceased to be just a daily newspaper and become an institution. The press critics at the alternative dailies do what no one else will do. They write biting, skeptical, honest stories that demystify that institution -- that show the interests, biases, and human foibles behind it."

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