All The Print That Fitted

I was down on an almost human-free Ocean Beach in San Francisco with only a little dog, a big salmon sandwich from the closest small cafe, and a small stack of newspapers, including three weeks of AVAs. The one surfer guy out in the water came trudging up the sand in from the minimal waves, carrying a kneeboard — a relatively cultish niche of surfing, but I’d once had one too — and his swim fins. He was passing close by and just as I was about to compliment on his choice of gear he smiled and said “Right on, old school!” I smiled back and said, “Yeah man, nice board.” He laughed back “Thanks, but I meant the actual newspapers!”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him these were among the final editions in print of one legendary cult paper, the Anderson Valley Advertiser. He likely wouldn’t have cared and even more likely had never heard of it anyway. And that was his, and many others’, real loss.

When is a “newspaper” no longer really that, as in no longer existing on paper? That ship has sailed, or at least, is heading towards the digital horizon. Countless papers have folded, “like great grey birds, lifting off into the sky, never to be seen again” as Lewis Latham, longtime editor of Harper’s magazine (itself long surviving on the largess of a wealthy sponsor), accurately predicted in a letter to me long ago when I haughtily wrote asking why they accepted tobacco advertising. It’s been a long time coming. 

Craigslist started the tipping into extinction by offering free advertising, killing a central source of revenue. The broader online world has carried off the rest, along with attention spans. Where once newspaper empires were among the most rich and powerful — Hearst and Chandler being the biggest West Coast examples — now billionaires, some of them wealthy from digital businesses themselves — buy and “rescue” financially failing famed newspapers, at least until they get tired of the losses and of continually having to trim costs and staff and distribution until there’s little left. The print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle appears anorexic and rumored to be in its final times. The San Francisco Examiner, also dating back to the 1800s, has gone thru multiple owners and is a flimsy few pages on seemingly random days, if you can find it (albeit with some good reporting left). And on and on. Pulitzer and other prizes are great but don’t seem to help the bottom line at all.

What does this mean for the world? There’s much alarm and debate. Politically it can mean there are much fewer real watchdogs on public and private skullduggery, although online that does continue. Quality-wise it can mean a race to the bottom, as online sources operate on haste to get a “scoop” with no fact-checking, language or typo editing, and all the other functions the large staffs of actual papers used to perform as part of their basic mission. As for feedback, rather than or at least in addition to even minimally thoughtful letters to the editor, online “trolls,” using fake names out of cowardice, now have a long a cesspool of angry snide idiocy on newspaper sites — although some have finally corrected that by removing online comments altogether, especially as nonhuman “bots” and disguised lobbyists and PR flacks spread disinformation. 

I believe that online-only reading also can contribute to, in addition to severely reduced attention spans, a shallowness of knowledge and understanding. How many really read much past grabby headlines? Note how each “advance” in platforms and social media, from email to texting to Twitter, er, X to TikTok etc, seems to involve shorter and shorter writing (not always a bad thing, of course, but…). When the world is destroyed the final human communication might well be “LOL.” 

We’re seeing now what a generation of online life is doing to the mental health of young “digital natives,” and it ain’t pretty. In any event it’s a safe bet we wouldn’t have nearly as much absolute massive nonsense, some of it truly dangerous, on countless fronts, from vaccination to MAGA gibberish and on and on, without internet “debate.” In the past, such obviously false realms were confined to the fringes where they belong. Even Richard Nixon thought the rabid anti-communist John Birch Society to be lunatics; now we have their modern versions in the form of QAnon, RFK Jr., and yes, MAGA, infiltrating what otherwise might otherwise be rational, intelligent, even polite circles. 

As for the AVA, long produced by a very small cadre and staff wrestling with an unruly large cadre of regular and irregular writers, it is both beloved and hated for its focus on local — well, Northern California, but especially Mendocino County and San Francisco Bay Area — politics, culture, crime, economics, scandal, arts, nature, history, and, well, just about anything. Farm and school and sports and weather reports, and detailed scrutiny of county and town politics. Toss in some truly baffling and funny random cartoons and such and it’s a winning blend. There’s very little puffery on any topic, though. The editors and writers don’t pull punches. Living up to the paper’s cover slogans “Newspapers should have no friends” and “Be as radical as reality” has resulted in punches being thrown and jail stays at the extreme, but a fair bit of argument and disdain as a more regular feature.

It’s also no doubt helped limit circulation somewhat. When, through the years, I’ve mentioned I write for the AVA the reactions very widely, from blank looks to withering “I don’t read that thing” scowls, with appreciation and eyebrow-raised smiles more common in Mendo and Humboldt Counties themselves. In San Francisco I only knew of four places to buy it, two bookshops on Haight Street, on Clement, and the fabled City Lights Books in North Beach. That trickled to just two, and will all be over now, although the Bound Together Anarchist Book Shop on Haight currently has a fair stack of the last month or two of issues for the fanatics.

I don’t recall exactly when I began writing for the AVA. In the late 1980s, my pal and UCSF colleague and AVA contributor Fred Gardner interviewed me a couple times for AVA pieces he was doing, about working with psychedelically overdosed Grateful Dead fans backstage at their concerts, and on the “spinners,” the brown-clad communal/cult dancers who would come down to those shows from the Anderson Valley to dance like dervishes. I already wrote for the Chronicle, medical and public health journals, and a music magazine, and I think he suggested I write for the AVA too, and I submitted something and soon it appeared in print and I was hooked, although I don’t recall what my earliest contributions were. The editors once told me I was accepted mainly as they didn’t have to edit my work. Whatever works. In any event it’s all Fred’s fault.

On the AVA site, my articles start in 2009. There are currently a total of — gulp — 171 articles archived there. It seems I’ve written on, among other topics, fishing, music (reggae, African, jazz, country, Dylan, the Doors, even the… Dead), beatniks, death, Hemingway, cars, school, surfing, vaccines, bacteria, epidemics, weed, dogs, baseball, depression, pizza, youthful romance, Ozzie and Harriet, bicycling, ecology, old AV families, abortion, the Lost Coast, communes, booze, paranoia, poetry, travel, Burning Man, hippies, school, politics, even horrors such as Charlie Manson, Vlad Putin, and Donald Trump.

There's really no discernible “beat” or theme to all that verbiage, and how many other publications would allow such broad idiosyncratic rambling? And all for a mostly silent readership other than a few cranky old guys online who seemingly live to type petty criticism of everything and everyone, plus a symbolic wage that no doubt amounts to something approaching minimum wage? I can’t speak for other AVA writers but I’d wager we all do it as we’re proud to be part of the AVA. At some point after it seemed they might keep printing my words I asked “Hey, what does it take to get on the masthead around here?” And voila, there I was, listed with the other esteemed scribes. It’s like an honorary doctorate or something. I’ve also been privileged to camp at various Boonville AVA compounds through the years while working at the annual world music festival, meeting various locals who drifted through, thus causing my (female) fellow guests to wonder and worry if they’d been lured into some sort or rural horror movie set. But all was well.

The AVA will roll on, thanks to the stalwart editors and support staff. You can find them, or most of them, listed on the masthead too. The AVA’s content has already been all or mostly all online for some years now. In fact there is more online, such as the very impressively extensive and eclectic daily blog “Mendocino County Today,” for subscribers, which roves far beyond Mendo and often elicits a lively online comment section that, true to form for such things, has some great, intelligent, reasonable, funny and polite participants but is unfortunately also overpopulated by a small band of almost-daily contributors, some of them classic fake-name anonymous “trolls.” Collectively the latter remind me of walking into a bar populated with a few old-timers who both hate and love each other, know everything about everything, and specialize in petty argument. As a couple other subscribers have sighed from time to time, it can be really embarrassing stuff. The editors are extremely tolerant and use a light hand in excluding the most egregious stuff, and so it goes. It’s a small price to pay for such a great paper, er, website, er, news and editorial source. I resist the temptation to weigh in there as much as I can, finding better ways to waste my time, as they do no real damage to anyone but themselves.

Many AVA readers will miss the “paper paper,” but then, “the only constant is change.” It’s really quite impressive, even amazing, that the little team kept producing a paper print version as long as they have. We, all of us, readers and contributors, owe them big thanks and praises. The AVA will remain one of the best “publications“ anywhere, as long as those who produce it want it to. 

The AVA is dead — Long live the AVA!