Let’s get this out of the way first: Now-former Creative Loafing boss Ben Eason has fully wrecked two media institutions. In an attempt to balance out the massive amount of money that he spent acquiring the Washington City Paper and the Chicago Reader (full disclosure: I’m still pretty connected to the former), he stripped away so much of their respective newsrooms that they were no longer able to function as the widely respected, feature-reliant alt-weekly stalwarts they had been. Worse, he seemed to think it was all a good idea — or at least that it was the best way forward. So out went the cover stories (mostly) and the staff writers and in came the Best Of… issues and blogs.
With Eason pushed aside, and a firm called Atalaya Capital Management — the folks who Eason owed a bunch of money to — now in charge, the Reader’s Michael Miner recaps the past couple of years in CP/Reader history in a post titled “That Didn’t Work Out So Well, Did it?” For the most part he’s right: The CL purchase was a colossal mistake for Eason and the folks who sold those papers to him — if we believe that profit wasn’t the only motivation for their move. But that doesn’t mean that the CL-era was a total waste for WCP and the Reader. And indeed, at least as far as a quick (if painful) education in Internet publication is concerned, it seems as though maybe Eason offered at least one small positive: By forcing his acquisitions to shift from a dated, print-primary model into their current, web-first approach, he dragged them to place where they could better consider their respective futures.
But Eason’s methods were probably never going to work for either the Reader or the City Paper. When CL welcomed them into its fold, both publications were storied franchises with impressive CVs highlighted by the sort of stuff that alt-weeklies used to be known for: deeply researched cover stories, generally great coverage of a hyper-local nature — features that were made by skilled journalists crafting excellent prose. Sure, Eason’s papers — a minor chain with entries in a handful of Southeastern cities — handled some of the regional issues that define an alt-weekly, but they never achieved the top-of-the-line status that his new Chicago and D.C. outlets had. For their part, CP and the Reader may have once been the favored destinations for their respective city’s citizens’ local-coverage needs, but when CraigsList and other electronic media started to erode their readerships (as they had for every other print publication), they appeared to be in line for a major refitting.
Which is how Eason found himself in the awkward position of trying to remake the two former heavyweights into welter-versions of themselves. He fired staff. He cut budgets. Each of the papers (including some of the original Loafing outlets) absorbed some serious psychological hits (the entire CP production department, for example, was trashed in favor of a more centralized layout effort). So when, on Tuesday, his effort — a tortured one at best — came to a court-ordered end, the only positive that seemed to emerge from this whole thing was that the forced march toward modernization that he’d prodded CP and the Reader into taking was (if for no other reason than a lack of resources) not likely to be reversed. What the new owners have planned is anyone’s guess but — good or bad — any future moves will, of course, echo back to the Eason era. And though the lay-off-surviving, pay-cut skeleton crew that’s been left to run things may be thrilled to see him go, when they look back on what’s happened, they’ll have that small piece of solace; it may not have been the best way, but at least they moved forward.
Even if they’re still forced to crank out those Best Of… issues.
