I’M ALWAYS AMUSED WHEN STRANGERS drop by with business for the Advertiser. They walk cautiously through a gauntlet of fighting and screaming children, knock timidly on the door and ask, incredulously, “Is this the newspaper?” This is it. Just put your story over there on the kitchen table, under the salt shaker and next Wednesday we’ll make the whole world sing.
FOR THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW, THIS NEWSPAPER is a three person operation. You’ve got yours truly, his wife and his seventeen-year-old daughter. I write about a third of the copy each week. My daughter does the typesetting. My wife does the bookkeeping, most of the paste-up and the graphics. We calculate it’s about fifty hours work per week, that’s fifty hours in addition to our full-time jobs. Don’t get me wrong. We’re no whining. I’m pointing out the realities of the operation to explain the limitations of the particular newspaper. We aren’t the New York Times with an army of full-time feature writers who can work for months on one story for a salary of sixty or seventy grand, plus expenses, a year.
THERE ARE TIMES, MANY TIMES IN FACT, when I wish I had a writer and all-around helper. Not only could we do a more comprehensive job of describing life in Mendocino County, but the weekly grind would be that much less onerous. It often seems that about every third person in the County describes himself as a writer or at the very least some kind of intellectual or artist. The fact is there are maybe five persons in the area who can write plain, straight-ahead prose and all five of them already contribute to the Advertiser.
A CREATIVE LIT PERSON SPENDS AS LONG as a week on one paragraph and, mostly, still manages to be boring and dumb. The nature of the weekly newspaper is that you are very lucky if you have time for one re-write. You put out one edition and turn around and start the next. Limitations of time and energy may explain the occasional lapses in what is still known as “good taste.”
IT’S ELEVEN-THIRTY AT NIGHT. THE WIFE and I are still pasting up. I’m behind on the proof reading. My eyes are getting fuzzy. Earlier in the day the typesetting machine had jammed. We had to do some last minute copy on the manual backup typesetter which means everything has to be typed twice. One of the kids had broken a water main which meant an additional pile of household complications. So, I’m sitting there reading a letter-to-the-editor from some nut who belongs in the bin. I say to myself, “That tears it. I’ve had enough for the day. I’m going to rip this bastard, traumatize him. This reply will put him in intensive care.” That’s how bad taste slips into the pages of this newspaper. Normally I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt knowing, of course that the nation and many of the people in it swerved irremediably off the track twenty years ago.
I ENVY THE LARGER PAPERS. IN SANTA ROSA the other day, a town that used to be called “The City of Trees” in my youth, but has since been transformed by a handful of rapacious, tasteless bandits led by developer Hugh Coddingsqualor into a northern version of San Jose, I took a close look at the Press Democrat building, a hideous fort-like monstrosity defiling a downtown street. If the average citizen has a beef with the editor of the Press Democrat there is absolutely no way he will get past the ground floor. Editors of country weeklies are up for grabs. Unhappy readers can and do come right to the door. I think that’s a good thing. You can be insulted and slandered by a large paper but, if you’re very lucky and depending on who you are, the big boys might print a rebuttal to the original slander two weeks later.
THE ONLY REGRET I HAVE AND IT REALLY isn’t even a regret, but a deficiency of the genre, is the inability to tell everyone’s story. Most of our official helping agencies, although publicly-funded, now actually work against the interests of everyday people. The average person cannot afford legal assistance, for example. So he brings his dispute to the newspaper, hoping against hope the newspaper will tell the world of the injustice done to him. Since ninety-nine of a hundred newspapers are simply mouthpieces for the rich and the powerful, there are few places the defenseless are likely to be listened to, let alone written about. The Advertiser will try to help you, but you’ve got to hold up your end. It helps lots if you keep notes of your beef in sequential order. If you are alleging criminal wrongdoing, you should do the footwork and retrieve the evidence yourself from public agencies. They are legally bound to let you see their files. We will help you put things in coherent order, hopefully, but that’s about all we can do. We don’t have the time to travel around substantiating claims.
MANY PEOPLE HAVE SAID THEY MISS THE Eyesore of the Week pictures. We ran out of them in Anderson Valley although several are under construction. One, a winery, even looks bad as holes in the ground. And , of course, the French imperialists intend to erect a 45-thousand-square-foot monster across from Husch Vineyards. Insiders say it will resemble the Greenpeace ship the “socialist” government of France recently destroyed in New Zealand. In the meantime, interested photographers are welcome to send in their favorite County eyesore for publication her. Ukiah has an endless supply as does Ukiah-By-The-Sea otherwise known as Fort Bragg. Willits of course, especially its southern ramparts, is looking more and more like State Street every day. Keep up the blight, Willits! Use black and white film only. The persons destroying the natural beauty of America should be recognized for the predators they are.
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