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gets suddenly real
Mission: Antidote to Times as all the things it isn't
By Heidi Vogt
It is very easy to take Richard Riordan seriously when he's dishing dirt on the Los Angeles Times.
It has not been so easy to take the former Los Angeles mayor seriously when he talks about the newspaper he intends to launch to take on the Times.
Riordan jokes a lot. He's referred to his new paper variously as the Los Angeles Tribune, a jabbing reference to Times parent the Tribune Company, and The Big Dick.
We can now take Riordan seriously.
The paper has a name, the Los Angeles Examiner, a look and feel, and even a start date: June 5.
And as of last week a 52-page prototype was circulating to advertisers and media. The prototype has articles by comedian Billy Crystal, social scientist James Q. Wilson, former New Times Los Angeles columnist Jill Stewart, media critic Cathy Seipp, former Los Angeles Times political writer Bill Boyarsky and political pundit Susan Estrich.
This thing is for real.
The 80-page Examiner will be a politically charged weekly with news features and opinion columns, as well as a week-in-review section to rehash all the news coverage from other LA media. There will be sections on business, books, theater, events, dining, music, travel and sports.
The paper also plans to reserve a big chunk of space for dishing out some severe Hollywood gossip. The LA Times is criticized for its fluffy coverage of celebs.
The Examiner's initial print run will be 150,000, with a mix of free and paid distribution. The eventual goal is to have 80 percent free, 20 percent paid, says publisher Jane Kahn.
Free distribution will be through sidewalk boxes and comp subscriptions to Los Angeles big shots. This will be complemented by newsstand sales and paid subscriptions.
“We see our target audience as being sophisticated, smart, affluent and politically well-connected and/or interested in all the issues that affect this community,” says Kahn. Kahn says the Examiner is aimed at the businessman who would have picked up the now-defunct weekly New Times for its political coverage, less so the urban hipster teen who picked up New Times to find out about the newest clubs.
Riordan has described the Examiner as a much-needed alternative to the LA Times, swinging to the right politically to offer an opposing view to the “flaky liberal” Times. Riordan is reportedly financing the Examiner’s $5 million startup primarily with his own money.
But the Examiner seems to be billing itself less as the anti-Times or the anti-New Times than as the anti-newspaper, a paper unlike any to come before.
The Examiner’s editor, Ken Layne, is not a newspaperman but a writer who’s made a name for himself as online blogger. Layne, along with colleague Matt Welch, hosts the laexaminer.com web site – a forum, unaffiliated with the newspaper, for critiquing and criticizing LA media.
While some Layne devotees question his ability to be an outsider now that he’s going print, he’s using laexaminer.com to pick apart the paper-to-be as well as the media coverage of its launch.
In response to a question about how columnist Jill Stewart will gel with the paper’s style, Layne posts, "Nobody is safe from Jill Stewart. Not me, not you, not RJR [Richard Riordan], and certainly not the LA school people. That's why we love Jill Stewart."
Layne also responds online to an article focusing on the paper’s affluent target audience by saying, “Expect lots of snarky reporting & comments from our media brethren over the ‘aimed at affluent readers’ bit. The fact is, all good publications are aimed at affluent readers.”
With Layne at the helm, the Los Angeles Examiner is likely to be an intensely self-aware publication that spends as much time berating the media as being part of it.
The Los Angeles Examiner is also trying to set itself up as a very different species than your typical urban weekly. The Examiner will not have the listing section that’s often considered the staple of the alternative newsweekly.
The Examiner will also differ from the classic alternative weekly format in its advertising. There will be no adult-oriented ads, a move that Layne says will allow them to distribute paper in the swanky hotels and grocery stores that most alt-weeklies are banned from.
We won’t know whether there’s room for a niche publication catering to the rich and the witty of LA till this summer, but Kahn points out that New York is filled with variations on the newspaper theme. The Examiner is following a path carved out by the well-established New York Observer.
Newspaper analyst John Morton, of Morton Research is optimistic about the Examiner’s chances.
“There’s plenty of room for a weekly that goes after a niche audience,” says Morton. “They’re all alternative weeklies, whether they’re aimed at urban youngsters or the affluent – and as long as they target their audience well, it works.”
February 3,
2003© 2003
Media Life
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