I am the editor and owner of New York Press, a weekly newspaper distributed free in Manhattan. That automatically makes my paper a member of the "alternative" media community in the United States, but NYPress is, in truth, a very stark alternative to the world of the "alternatives." We have a rock critic who's a disciple of Ralph Reed, surely the only one in the country. Our regular columnists include Christopher Caldwell, a senior writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and William Tucker, the nation's foremost opponent of rent control. And "MUGGER," the column I write, has discussed the flat tax, Newt Gingrich's brilliant '94 revolution (and subsequent wimp-out), Bill Weld's battle with Jesse Helms, the mastery of Howard Stern's politically incorrect (and usually correct) radio tirades, and the utter disarray and hypocrisy of the Manhattan media, where it matters more whom you have drinks with at night and what school you went to than what quality of work you do. In contrast to our chief competitor, the sclerotic Village Voice, as well as the vast majority of papers that constitute a weak and ineffectual trade organization called the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, NYPress dares to praise conservatives and Republicans while attacking Democrats and leftists -- and still turns a healthy profit.
How does such a publication come to exist? A bit of autobiography might help. At the age of 21, while a senior at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, I launched a free, "alternative" newspaper (the term "underground" had been mercifully retired a few years earlier). It was called, simply, City Paper. City Paper was a low-budget effort: A partner and I pooled $ 10,000, paid ourselves and friends nothing, and -- even during the 36-hour stretches of work that characterized our production schedule -- generally had a ball putting out a newspaper.
The amateurish tabloid gradually morphed into a legitimate business (as we found out a few years later when an IRS agent came to our door with a bill for $ 100,000 in back taxes). We needed to issue salaries to our few workers and meet the deadlines that our printer in Carroll County imposed. There were other problems that had to be addressed. Something I remember vividly from those days 20 years ago is that, because of its red logo, City Paper was thrown out of a number of the stores that had agreed to allow us to use them as distribution points; in Baltimore, in 1977, many proprietors assumed our product was a Communist sheet.
Over the next 10 years City Paper flourished, growing to almost 100 pages a week with a circulation of 90,000, and in 1987 my partner and I were able to sell it to the Scranton Times for almost $ 4 million. This was a considerable sum back then, and a fortunate time for us to unload the paper (you'll remember that media properties were trading hands like crazy), since it was just a month before the '87 Wall Street crash. (In 1981, my partner Alan Hirsch and I also started Washington's City Paper, but we sold 80 percent of it to the Chicago Reader the following year.)
In the wake of City Paper's sale, I moved to New York to start a paper in lower Manhattan to compete with the Village Voice. It had long been my conviction that the Voice, swollen with advertising and arrogance, had priced itself out of its market. I believed the Voice's high advertising rates, along with the lack of competition it enjoyed, meant that a quality free weekly could slide beneath it and build a prosperous business. I had grown up on Long Island and closely followed the Voice for years. In this, I had a perspective that perhaps other alternative-newspaper owners didn't; to them, the Voice was fearsome and the market locked up.
It was essential, I thought, to publish a newspaper that didn't toe any line. Of course, like other alternative weeklies all over the country, we would deliver a comprehensive listing of events around the city and the requisite pages of sex ads in the back of the paper. (Something that particularly gets my goat is the "news" coverage in other alternatives, which often calls for boycotts against companies that "exploit" women, while they, too, publish these lucrative ads.) But editorially, NYPress would provide an alternative to the Voice's lockstep "progressivism," which then and now appeared caught in a time warp. A writer's work was judged by his or her attire (read tattoos and nose-rings) and adherence to certain codes of speech (which means sprinkling phrases like "people of color," "empowerment," and " caregiver" into copy, and working a reference to Descartes into a review of the new Nine Inch Nails recording). There would be no political litmus test for copy at NYPress.
So imagine my surprise when early on in NYPress's history, during the '88 primary campaign, my paper was booted out of the downtown establishments where we left it for free consumption, not for left-wing propaganda, but because MUGGER had called Jesse Jackson an opportunistic demagogue. Only in New York, as I've found out time and again in the nearly 10 years that NYPress has published.
As a result, and despite the "alternative" tag, NYPress is largely considered a "Republican" newspaper run by rich white boys with fat trust funds who are simply "playing around" in the newspaper world (though I grew up in a middle-class suburban tract house and had to work three jobs to make ends meet during college). This creates odd dichotomies. For example, because we're considered an "alternative" by our readers in the grungy and outdated East Village, it's a "Republican" crime against the underprivileged if MUGGER or one of our food reviewers actually takes a meal at the horrendously expensive Daniel or Lespinasse. That's not what the people eat, maaan. Where, our critics demand, are the critiques of joints where you can get rice and beans and a potent margarita for less than $ 5? We're held to a higher standard in this regard than the New York Times: Does anyone complain when restaurant critic Ruth Reichl spends hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for each review that appears in Wednesday's paper? Of course not: that's the Times, not the "people's paper" that NYPress is supposed to be.
Don't get the wrong idea: NYPress is not National Review on newsprint. Our roster of regular writers includes: a professional dominatrix; the still iconoclastic Alexander Cockburn; a neurotic family man who details his truly bizarre obsessive-compulsive afflictions; a columnist specializing in patents and inventions; a 24-year-old woman who is explicitly frank about her sexual adventures in Manhattan; John Strausbaugh, whose book column ignores or sneers at anything put out by the major publishing houses; and a rambling deadbeat called "Slackjaw," who's rapidly going blind and won't refuse any pint of beer that's offered.
One sign that our readership is passionate about the paper they both read and often abhor is the volume of letters to the editor we receive. In a typical week, we publish at least 20 of them, at least 75 percent critical, a small sampling of which follows.
Oct. 8: "I've got it! MUGGER is secretly a radical leftist who recognized that the only way to animate the flagging left is to pose as a Limbaughesque martini-swilling buffoon. Right on, Comrade MUGGs! You have succeeded where Abbie failed."
Oct. 1: "Re: NYPress's Best of Manhattan introduction, 9/24. Don't worry, the tone of your paper's not Republican; it's fascist."
June 11: "Re: 6/4 issue and all preceding. Hey, you precocious Pressers! F you and your white-apologist, bulls rag. The Post has a million times the integrity you all do. Your writers are posturing a es posing as intellectuals."
May 7: "Oh you wacky right-wing boys at the Press and your neo-con and just plain stupid-con politics. When you're not whining about the Voice, you're talking about the evil liberal media, or bashing Bill and Hillary and praising Newt as the second coming. What, do you get your politics from Rush Limbaugh or something?"
In addition, MUGGER consistently wins the Readers' Poll entry "Best Reason to Skip NYPress" in our annual "Best of Manhattan" issue.
In a Wall Street Journal article this past summer, Richard Norton Smith, biographer of Chicago Tribune proprietor Robert R. McCormick, wrote, " McCormick recognized that a paper unwilling to offend its readers is unlikely to engage them, much less win their loyalty. So he hurled editorial thunderbolts. . . ." That's what we try to do at NYPress, and as it happens, the paper is profitable. Circulation is now an ABC-audited 110,000 weekly, advertisers have grown at a steady clip -- especially since the Voice followed our lead and went free in '96 (hoping to drive us out of business) -- and our staff is paid far more than a living wage. Please excuse the self-aggrandizement that laces this essay; in Manhattan, we're in something of a vacuum and considered "weird" and "subversive" simply because several of our writers choose to endorse conservative politics. In my view, it's 1997, not the late 1970s, and NYPress is actually far more representative of the city than any of our competitors.
That fuzzy feeling aside, it still doesn't offer much comfort when MUGGER is sent a tin-foil package of feces in the mail.
You can e-mail comments to NYPress's Russ Smith at MUG1988@aol.com.