Hack Attack : Death in
Life

by Sid Falco

he boys and girls over at Willamette Week are a wacky crew, just a bunch of kids really, with a lot of enthusiasm. I suppose that a lot of them are just out of college, and are full of ideas about how to run a paper. At their editorial meetings they must have a blast redefining journalism in our time.

How sad, than, that the once alternative paper, week after week, comes across as, to borrow a phrase it hasn't used in a few months, old wine in new bottles.

Make no mistake. Behind its youthful veneer, Willamette Week takes itself very seriously, and assumes that you do, too.

Take the issue of 5 May, 1999. On page 3, WW publisher Richard Meeker made a series of announcements. But he prefaced his remarks with one of the strangest opening paragraphs in the history of editorial journalism.

No, the paragraph wasn't illiterate or grammatically strange. It was a perfectly normal cluster of prose, or at least as normal as WW's bland writing can be. Rather, it was the implications of that paragraph that were rather shocking, and bespoke a level of narcissism that… but let's just read it all together, shall we?:

"Anyone who came by our offices last Thursday might have thought we were moving. Throughout the morning, dozens of WW'ers carted fried computers, splay-footed chairs, stuffed cardboard boxes and dead lamps out the door and into three huge dumpsters. (Not to worry: We weren't going anyplace, and two of the three drop boxes were for recycling.)"

OK let's see. It's not the smugness of the final reference to the recyclers, those Patagonia - North Face garbed, Volvo-driving, 3.2 kids-bearing soccer moms and granola-eating bicyclers who are the presumed constituency of the paper. No, nor is its subtle acclaim for the huge staff consisting of "dozens" of people. Nor is it the fact that instead of hiring movers to dump the stuff, the cash-heavy paper made its staffers do all the heavy lifting and hauling. No, it is the assumption that we all huddle on SW 10th and Taylor, outside the Main Branch of the public library, staring from across the street to catch something, anything to do with WW, any activity at all from the confines of our beloved local paper, perhaps even a Chris Lydgate sighting. Is there a cult of people who worship the Willamette Week that I don't know about? If so, it does not consist of people who actually read it.

In the rest of the editorial, Meeker introduced, among other things, a new section in the paper. Called "Life." It is, according to Meeker,

…designed to add feature material to the current mix of news and culture coverage. Its goal is to warm the paper up by speaking to a facet of our readers' interest we haven't addressed before on a regular basis.

Now, excuse me if I'm some manner of old-time grizzle-faced scotch-guzzling green-shade wearing journalist-type, but don't most newspapers just naturally already have feature material? Why does Willamette Week feel the need to gear up for such a thing, to plan for months, to assemble a team, to do market research? What happened to spontaneity within journalism? What happened to seeing a story out there in the real world and deciding to cover it? But no, that would possibly lead to missing out on those "facets" of "our readers" that are under such strenuous neglect; "facets" that need to be address every week, so that the salient advertisers can be consulted.

ow that Willamette Week has acknowledged publicly that it was deficient in one key element of the newspaper package — features — that it views itself as a cold and forbidding product, and more or less admitted that it is pandering to its readers rather then trying to intrigue them, are the once alternative weekly's masters worried that the new section might degrade the over all content, what with all that pandering to "facets" and advertisers?

No. "With Life, our challenge is to add more feature material without compromising the hard-headed nature of our news reporting or the edginess of our arts and entertainment coverage. " We are all relieved. But don't you just love that passing reference to the "edgy" arts coverage, coverage of such pitch and moment that it writes about the HBO series The Sopranos half a year after everyone else? But that's altogether another Hack Attack column.

After all this build and ego self-inflating, to actually turn to page 37 and confront Life was … well, deflating.

Let's start with the title. Maybe the kids over there at WW are too young to remember the weekly picture magazine turned out by Henry Luce. It was a fairly important journal, especially in the war years (World War II, that is). But if they have any trouble remembering it, may I suggest that they take a quick jaunt over to Rich's, their neighborhood magazine and cigar emporium, and pick up a copy? For, yes, Life is still published, albeit in reduced size and now only monthly.

Actually "Life" the title is not much of a problem, given that you can't see it on the cover page anyway. Ever since WW redesigned itself for about the 20th time in 10 years, you can neither find the names of things, nor figure out where to go next. The paper's owners insist that this the average reader's troubles navigating himself through the paper's pages doesn't happen. Could it be that they do not ever bother to try to read their own paper?

No matter. Were they to actually look in to that first issue of "Life," they would see a chaotic and ugly cover page, bearing sloppily laid out poorly printed images of two contemporary-looking women and — a toothbrush.

Huh? What the heck is a toothbrush doing there? Well, we quickly learn that Life is in reality a weekly lifestyle supplement. The toothbrush article was a buying guide to the "best" high-end toothbrushes in the city. The other stories consisted of the introduction to a fashion column, and a buying guide to the best high-end maternity clothes in the city. All the stories are written in a breathless, first person mode. The first person was formerly anathema at the once alternative weekly, but the intimacy of buying, say, a toothbrush apparently necessitated the personal approach. One consequence is that all the stories sound as if they were written by the same person.

Now, if you are like me, and make no mistake, you are, when confronting this new department you think to yourself two words (or is it one word?): Our Town. Yes, the newspaper whose owners gave its new arts editor the mandate of mimicking Seattle's rock newspaper The Stranger have instead descended to the level of the long time Portland shopper.

ubsequent issues only confirmed the dire prognosis that Willamette Week aspired to the level of Our Town. Other articles told us how to buy a suit, eat vegetarian, buy juicers, find the perfect bra, buy pasta sauce, learn how to barbecue, buy men's cologne, find milkshakes, pick a magazine run by a clothes designer, play bridge, polish your nails, eat breakfast and snacks, and buy shoes. After two or three years of this crap, the paper could very easily gather it all together and turn it into a book, WW's Slacker Guide to Life: The Shit Your Parents & Schools Didn't Teach You But Which You Need to Know To Be Able To Get Out of Bed in the Morning. Oh, we forgot. WW isn't in the book biz anymore.

Now, the paper's fans and operators would probably maintain that it is beating Maggi White and Our Town at its own game, because its stories are "better written," and truly "serve the reader." Well, is it really all that tough a challenge, to make a paper better than Maggi's? And is Life really all that better? Take a foray to the current Life and judge for yourself. In any case, what's wrong with Life is a problem that permeates the paper. Remember this year's summer guide (9 June)? It's list of 99 things to do for the next three months including such earthshaking and clever ideas as eating your lunch outside and go dancing at night.

But the woes and uncertainty evident in the new WW permeate contemporary journalism. Indeed, there cannot be even the hint of a change in the weather without the local news stations rushing forth to explain to us how to button up our coats and create an emergency pack.

Another component of Life is its weekly wacky interview with a "prominent" person. The first one was conducted with local sex proselytizer Sallie Tisdale, and the interviews have gone downhill since then. These Q&As (for that is the title of the feature) are patterned after the ones that Joel Stein used to do in Time magazine, in which he would ask goofy questions and try to get the subject's goat. Either the Life interviewer isn't as good, doesn't edit his interviews down enough, or Portland "celebrities" aren't all that smart, game, or creative. On the other hand, Time was owned by the same guy who invented Life, and if you can snatch one thing…

But why would WW do such a thing as Life in the first place? Why would the once alternative weekly, still coasting on the integrity of its famous but old exposés, suddenly insert a fluffy, insubstantial, and in a sense, intellectually insulting (you do know how to brush your teeth, don't you?) new department? Well for years it has introduced and then canceled sections dedicated to shoppers. Why does it want shoppers to read the thing? To lure advertisers. And the once alternative weekly long ago gave up the difficult task of trying to appeal to its readers, rather then cater to its advertisers. But it has never been able to find the right formula for pandering to readers/advertisers while still being able to salve its own conscience with the notion that it is "serving" people.

But there is another reason: Women. I would guess (though I do not know) that more women than men read WW. But the paper is owned by two men, two aging married men with kids, burdened with a micromanaging mania for interfering in every aspect of their product. They were probably losing female readers and had to do something, anything, to snare them back, given that they were the lifeblood of the readership, and no young people want to read it (though a lot seem to want to write for it). What better way then to insult their intelligence and present a weekly package of features so puerile as to make Cosmo look like the New York Review of Books. Maybe the women are suppose to pass these articles on to their kids.

For years, Portland has deserved a better weekly paper than Our Town and its predecessors. But now, with the once alternative weekly no longer fulfilling that function, the city is in dire need of a weekly newspaper better than Willamette Week. Will we ever get one?

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