Weekly/21″/mike1st/mark2nd
By SUSAN DEEMER
Orange County Business Journal
On the cover of its second annual sex issue earlier this year, the OC Weekly featured a shirtless man with pierced nipples, blindfolded, wearing a harness and slave necklace. A pink ball was stuffed in his mouth.
A few readers wrote in to complain that the paper had finally gone too far, but the criticisms like most of the barbs aimed at the free-distribution, alternative weekly rolled off of editor Will Swaim’s back.
“It struck me as a beautiful and provocative image and my instincts were correct. It was one of our most successful issues,” Swaim said.
Three years after its debut, OC Weekly is firmly entrenched as part of the local journalistic landscape, doling out a steady stream of music reviews, personal ads and hard-edged community reporting.
Depending on who’s doing the assessing, the OC Weekly represents a high level of local muckraking, or a low level of sloppy, sarcastic, self-indulgent writing usually reserved for college newspapers. What hardly anyone questions anymore is whether Orange County is big enough, or diverse enough, to support such a paper, which follows in the tradition of its sister alternative publications, New York’s Village Voice and LA Weekly.
“What OC Weekly has proved is that there is room to reach an audience that isn’t describing themselves as conservative and voting Republican,” said Craig Reem, editor of OC Metro, a more sedate freebie that exists side-by-side with the OC Weekly on racks throughout Orange County.
Around 60,000 copies of OC Weekly are printed each week, with plans to add another 15,000 in the coming year. The first issues averaged about 72 pages; now they’re up to about 96, and the advertising revenue $1,877 for a one-time, full-page ad adds up to about $4 million a year.
The staff has grown to 33 full-time employees, including 15 in editorial and 10 in advertising.
“It’s a good time to have this kind of publication,” said David Schneiderman, 51, president of the OC Weekly’s parent, New York-based Stern Publishing. He says the paper fills a gap left by daily newspapers that don’t understand what young readers want.
“It’s that magic group that everybody wants to appeal to,” he said, citing internal surveys that show the OC Weekly’s readership is largely single (74 percent), male (61 percent), 25 to 34 years old (39 percent), and with an average household income of $57,490.
The OC Weekly is only a small piece of a large private empire Leonard Stern’s Harrison, N.J.-based Hartz Group, a $600 million-plus (estimated annual revenue) corporation for which publishing is only one of three business lines.
Its main businesses are pet products and New Jersey real estate. Hartz subsidiaries include Stern Publishing, which puts out the LA Weekly and OC Weekly, as well as the Village Voice, the Long Island Voice, the Seattle Weekly, Cleveland Free Times and Minneapolis City Pages. The combined circulation of these seven newspapers is about 890,000.
OC Weekly is overseen from Los Angeles by LA Weekly Publisher Michael Sigman, who carries the same title with the OC Weekly. Circulation for both papers also is handled out of Los Angeles. Sigman, who was on board at the LA Weekly when Stern bought it in 1992, said the paper had its eyes on Orange County even before the acquisition.
“We really saw the potential of it,” Sigman said. “Our advertisers said, ‘You have got to have an Orange County paper. LA Weekly is not covering our territory.’ But at the time, we were owned locally by people in Los Angeles and there were not the resources to do it right.”
Sigman said the OC Weekly turned profitable in its first year, and hasn’t looked back. The built-in advertising support from the LA Weekly sustained the paper early on. At first, about three-fourths of the advertisements in the OC Weekly were passed along from the LA Weekly; today, that’s down to about a third, Sigman said.
Most ads are for movies, record stores and concerts, plus some for cigarettes, massages, tattoo parlors, entertainers, exotic dancers, adult video shops and lingerie. Then there are the trademark steamy classifieds and personals.
OC Weekly’s stories can be similarly eyebrow-raising for their aggressive tone and use of profanity. Politicians, business people and daily journalists are frequent targets. Musicians and artists often are hammered.
“They don’t pretend to be a credible news source,” said Orange County Register Editor Tonnie Katz. “We’ve had some run-ins with them. They have really kicked us in the head.”
Others take a kinder view.
“I read it regularly and try not to miss it. I think it’s doing some street-level journalism that some of the mainstream media have forgotten how to do,” said Ken Grubbs, former Register editorial director. But Grubbs said the OC Weekly can sometimes “get a couple of things wrong.”
The OC Weekly staff defends its editorial approach. “We are so much more careful about checking our facts than any mainstream newspaper,” Managing Editor Matt Coker said. “I say, ‘Call us up and point out the errors and we will go over them.’ ”
