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Goodbye to All That
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Business New Haven
4/19/1999
By: BNH
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An enterprise that began a quarter-century before with such lofty idealism ended with the dull ka-ching of the cash register when the owners of the Advocate newspapers pocketed an eight-figure check and handed over the keys to the once-hated Hartford Courant.
For the Courant, the deal offered entrée to a readership and advertising base spanning the I-91/I-95 corridor, including affluent Fairfield and Westchester counties. For erstwhile Advocate owners Christine Austin and Geoffrey Robinson, it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to cash in and to say, across the years, goodbye to all that.
Oh, the irony. Many papers like the Advocate were founded in the late 1960s and early '70s by young adults who felt the “mainstream” press - especially daily papers - didn't speak to their generation. Papers like the Advocate caught the attention of children of the '60s by covering things important to them - music, radical politics, drugs, sex - that the “establishment” press ignored or shunned.
It wasn't just sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, although that was certainly part of the appeal. Weeklies of the Advocate's ilk became the repositories for the dreams of a generation determined to change a society grown flaccid under the grey-flannel mores of their parents' generation, and torn asunder by a war a world away.
As those who framed the First Amendment understood, speech is action. And the words of the youthful “alternative” press helped to frame a new agenda for the swelling ranks of the Baby Boom kids as they grew into adulthood demanding a place at the table: Green is good. Nukes are bad. Power to the people.
But there was something else, too: a chance to change the voice, and the mission, of local journalism. To the daily-newspaper establishment grown cozy with powerful politicians and dependent on corporate ad dollars, the independent “alternative” papers, beholden to no one, provided a nagging and constant reminder that journalists are supposed to be watchdogs, not lapdogs.
Looking back over three decades, two conclusions emerge.
First, the “counter” culture has become the culture. Rolling Stones concerts are for rich people. No one thinks nukes are good. Even Republicans are “green.”
If the “alternative” press wanted to place what were once youth issues at the center of the national table, then it succeeded.
But the culture the '60s kids sought to change eventually changed them, too, as careers and mortgages became more urgent concerns to baby-boomers than saving the earth or comforting the afflicted.
So papers like the Advocate came to a critical crossroads: Should they continue to be the voice of college students and 20-somethings - which their owners and editors no longer were - or should they follow “the pig through the python” by accompanying their baby-boom readers from the cradle to the grave?
Quel choix. Some would say the papers never really decided, and have spent the last decade trying to have it both ways: to publish mortgage rates while trying to keep abreast of teenagers' music.
What is the mission of papers like the Advocate in 1999? Same as the mission of all private enterprise: to make a profit.
As predictable as the New Haven Register shilling shamelessly for a Long Wharf mall that promises millions in department-store advertising, was that papers like the Advocate, too, would become surgically attached to the life-giving teat of major advertisers.
They were different kinds of advertisers, sure. The point was that if you wanted to learn more about the personal and legal travails of a Toad's Place owner, or the depredations of “sex king” Gabriel Gladstone (to use the Register's ridiculous handle for the septuagenarian alleged pimp, who used Advocate ads to advance his felonious enterprise), you'd have to look elsewhere for the story.
If the “alternative” press sought to create a true new journalism unbeholden to power and dollars, then it failed.
Growing up really messes with your priorities.
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